^0 1,°**, -. **< ^o< v v 4? ^ •\-'g'^«« «v A /\ » ^ ,0 / W / . t . . ^ <* > V ,. . « . , **> O N %*^ % v ... \> THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Talks with Parents and Teachers Intensive Child Training AV ATBERLE, A.M., D.D. PROFESSOR OF APPLIED CHRISTIANITY IN TUFTS COLLEGE New York MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 1912 ucsn Copyright, 1912, by MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY New York All rights reserved £CLA312094 TO %im, &boIf, fflitimn anti EuMC FREELY YE HAVE RECEIVED, FREELY GIVE CONTENTS PAGE I INTRODUCTION 1 II LANGUAGE, THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWL- EDGE 23 III MIND FERTILIZATION 51 IV QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 75 V THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 99 VI HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION . . . .119 VII MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 141 VIII BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION . . 165 IX THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND .... 187 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME INTRODUCTION That this is not the work of an "educator" will be perfectly clear at once to all the mem- bers of that fraternity under whose notice this book comes. But that does not necessarily pre- clude the possibility of clearness of vision nor does it invalidate certain obvious facts of expe- rience. Education is one of those things in which everybody has some experience, and has not been reduced to an exact science, if indeed it will ever become a science, in any proper sense at all. Human life and the human mind are constantly undergoing great and funda- mental changes. The point of view which pre- vails at one period is entirely inadequate for another. For example, it is more than fifteen years ago since the present writer urged upon a large assembly the need for increased industrial and technical training in Massachu- setts and the reorganization of the state's pro- 1 2 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME gramme of education with this and other things in view. He had just returned from Germany, where he had seen vast changes taking place and an entire nation being educated into an efficiency which was at once wonderful as an exhibition of what could be done in this respect and striking in its personal and commercial re- sults. He saw a village which he had seen some years before as a quiet and rural com- munity transformed into a vigorous, active, commercial center with the world-view of commerce and industry. He saw young per- sons whom he had known as young country children exhibiting all the natural character- istics of such a class in Germany (a very dif- ferent tiling, by the way, from the similar class in America) , changed into alert persons whose grasp upon themselves was hardly less amazing than the nation's grasp upon its in- dustrial self -consciousness and commercial self- organization. Both these things so impressed him that, knowing the listlessness and waste of American life, especially on its educational side, coincident with the overwhelming Ameri- can passion for education, especially public education, he urged the adoption of German methods or at least the mastery of the German INTRODUCTION 3 idea with a view to securing like results in America. Speaking broadly, the address was received with mild amusement and the public comment which was made upon it was in the nature of ridicule that anybody could ever excel Ameri- can zeal, American adaptability and American genius. One journal suggested that the speaker would better stop his foolish aping of European ideas and become a real American. Since that time, however, the progress of Ger- many in the commercial history of the world has so arrested attention in America that there is now an almost equally stupid and insensate acceptance of certain ideas of German origin as there was once contemptuous rejection of them. The fundamental differences between Germany and America and the equally funda- mental differences between the social organ- ization of the German and the American mind, are being ignored in the haste for industrial education, so that presently we shall be won- dering just why we do not get the results in America that they get in Germany. And then we shall set about finding the true way. It was, however, on the personal side that these phenomena made the deepest impression upon him. He saw individuals rise in the 4 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME scale of efficiency, self -organization and self- expenditure, which was the most striking ef- fect of the whole business. He saw in indi- viduals an expansion of mental horizon which clearly showed that the juvenile mind can work at a pressure, without loss of strength, health or diminution of any power or physi- cal capacity which is practically unknown in America. And he saw these results in per-, sons who could not in the slightest degree be called unusual, in capability, antecedents or opportunity. He saw children not only in Germany, but in Belgium, Holland and other countries in northern Europe do an amount of work and assimilate a fund of knowledge at an early age which makes the achievements of the average school child in America seem foolishness and waste. He resolved to try ex- periments in this direction himself and for many years now has been in the course of his vocation as a preacher and pastor also teaching young people from very young children to students in college in almost all branches re- quired for admission to American colleges. The results have been surprising beyond words. These young people, almost seventy in number, have responded to an intensive treatment in instruction and guidance, in a way which shows that the waste in the aver- INTRODUCTION 5 age American child's life is something simply astounding. It proves to him beyond all doubt, that on the side of personal efficiency, American education is one of the most waste- ful things in the whole American organization of life. It seems to prove that from three to five years of life are lost to American young people, simply because they are not trained for large results in a large way and required to undertake tasks commensurate with their abilities. It seems to show that while there are undoubted differences in children arising from their antecedents, intellectual ancestry and environment, on the whole, these are neg- ligible in the final result if you get a right method and make a large enough demand and arouse the necessary interest and exert the re- quired force to get the result. This is a loss of years of life, the amount of which is be- yond computation. It takes years out of the life of people, makes waste in productiveness, happiness and effectiveness in mature life, which one, who has not thought the matter through, would hardly imagine to be the case. The evidence of the truth of this indictment of our public education can be had on the most casual inquiry. Ask any well-informed parent about his children's progress in school and you will get at once a cry of discontent 6 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME and helpless protest. Such protests, in the shape of letters of inquiry about the subject- matter of this book, are in my possession by the hundreds. They come from all sorts of people, from college professors to the street laborers. They come from persons in all walks of life, from rich men and poor men. But all these people have one element in com- mon. They are interested in the intellectual growth and development of their children and are anxious to send out into the world effec- tive and thoroughly equipped persons. Some- times the interest arises from the remem- brance of privileges which the parents themselves did not enjoy. Sometimes it arises from the consciousness of the neglect of pa- rental duty in the matter of the children's edu- cation. Sometimes it is the sincere and help- less anxiety arising from the plain evidence, daily before the parents, that the young peo- ple are not only not making any real progress but are forming habits which either mean a fearful task to overcome in the future or a hopeless handicap in the race of life. The one thing about them all is, that they see with more or less clearness that the education on which we spend so much money and about which we boast so loudly and about which we are in such deadly earnest as communities and INTRODUCTION 7, so indifferent as individuals, is a fearfully wasteful and costly process. And in noth- ing more costly than in the loss to the mental habits and personal intellectual ideals of the young people themselves. We could possibly endure it if it did no good. But it does not stop there; it is demoralizing the mental habits of the nation. If further testimony is necessary, ask any mature and capable teacher who has watched the progress of the public schools in the last twenty years. The teacher so addressed will tell you in plain terms, that while the teachers are doing the best they can under the circum- stances, the results are steadily more discour- aging, if any high and thorough standard is taken into consideration. He will tell you that the capacity for steady and sustained thought on the part of pupils seems to grow less instead of more. He will tell you that the disposition to avoid anything difficult and calling for effort, especially disagreeable ef- fort, grows stronger and that committees and faculties alike are being forced to yield to this disposition, thus controlling public education. Rare is the community that will sustain any public superintendent or school committee in any move that will raise the standard and make attainment of graduation, that ignis 8 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME fatuus of our educational system, more diffi- cult. The quality of some of the work ac- cepted toward a high school degree, for example, in some of the cities in Massachu- setts, is simply ludicrous. A high school di- ploma may mean that the child receiving it has had some real contact with a strictly intel- lectual process. But for the most part it does not mean anything of the sort. This does not require any proof. Simple inquiry anywhere will reveal it as a fact. Following this line one step higher up, we come to college education. The well-known discontent now being frankly acknowledged by the presidents of all American colleges with the intellectual caliber of their graduates is the logical outcome of a process which be- gins in the lowest grades. That need not be discussed here. But a result in American life arising from it may be considered in a few paragraphs. The decline in respect for scholarship, especially scholarship which has nothing to do with commercial productive- ness, is an effect in American life the full meaning of which many persons do not seem to comprehend very clearly. It means a lower type of civilization, it means a lower ideal of life and it means a substantial sur- render of the permanent agencies of human INTRODUCTION 9 happiness, because it is taking out of the life of the nation the one thing which makes more for happiness than any other single ele- ment, namely, capable self -organization. One needs only to look about and observe the vast number of persons who, reaching middle life, have no momentum in any direction. They seem to exist from day to day. They have no vital interests, no mental reserves which make it possible for them to live, except by constant dynamic injections of excitement or amusement from without. Nothing shows this more than the amusements which are most flourishing. To ask a group of people to spend an evening together, with only their brain power, their varied intellectual interests, to entertain them and the comparison of their aims and purposes and experiences to furnish pleasure, is to risk an evening of disastrous boredom for almost everybody involved. This also is a common knowledge. Does it not sometimes impress all of us to what idiotic things, as well-bred people and as persons who are supposed to have had some contact with the intellectual treasures of the world, I mean now its exciting and interesting treasures of which there are multitudes, we give ourselves? And have we not often gone home, glad enough to have seen our friends, but thor- 10 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME oughly ashamed of the manner in which we spent our time and wondering just what the reason is we keep on doing these things in this way? Now the fact is, this is simply the working out of the thing which has its roots far back in the earlier stages of education. The only things intensive about American life at the present moment are amusement and money- making. In these, undoubtedly, we are in fearful earnest. A baseball game is a joy- ous and delightsome sight, especially if it is a good game. But almost any baseball game is good enough. But the reflection that thousands of people, during the most charm- ing and delightful season of the year go, day after day, to see other people play and for hours do absolutely nothing themselves, but see other people doing things, is one of the most curious commentaries on contemporary American life. Now children would never do this. They want to play themselves and they do. But after they have gone through the American educational mill — school, college and the rest — they are content to sit and sit and sit, by thousands, for hours and hours and hours and do nothing but see other people play! We call ourselves an energetic people! The claim is pure foolishness in the light of INTRODUCTION 11 the way in which we take our amusements, the thousands simply doing nothing, exercising no faculties of their own of mind or body and adding absolutely nothing (but fat) to their own equipment for the fuller years of life. There is a healthy reaction coming in this mat- ter of which we see signs. But for the most part this is descriptive of American life in this phase. Commercially, the same phenome- non is most conspicuous. The mad race for money, without capacity to enjoy it properly, when secured, is still our outstanding charac- teristic. But even here, it must be confessed that the efficiency which our commerce displays is hardly the efficiency which commands admi- ration. It still has too much the aspect which makes moral scrutiny a source of uneasiness and has taken as its most recent note the wide- spread demand for the criminal prosecution of our captains of industry. But this is a subject by itself. Now the influence of all this upon the per- sonal life and character is perfectly plain. This not being a moral treatise, that phase of the matter will not be discussed here. Enough to say that the final result is a lower type of civilization, lessened respect for the fine and permanent things of life, an idealism that is bounded by the stock exchange or the 12 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME musical comedy, a culture that in spite of no- table exceptions and great advances, rests upon private initiative almost exclusively and this often collaborated with the criminal inter- ests just alluded to. The place where all this is to be combated is in the sphere of child training. It is in the creation of mental hab- its, mental outlook and mental interests, which will automatically make this type of de- velopment impossible. It is in a programme of intensive development for young children which will make them immune from the tend- encies which not only destroy their best capacities, but which make it possible for them to go through the world never knowing what they have missed and what kind of a world it actually is. There must be a mind fertiliza- tion, which is, at the same time, a sterilization against other things. There must be the arousing of interests which, by their very fire and picturesqueness and enjoyment, will make the rest seem tame and listless. There must be such a linkage of real and substantial knowledge and the process of gaining it, with delight and pleasure, as will make the sense- less and idiotic things offered to rational be- ings for amusement seem an insult to the mind. There must be such a programme and it must be begun in the home, before the INTRODUCTION 13 school life begins, which will assimilate natu- rally the best things offered in the school and by natural repulsion leave the rest. There must be such a cooperation between the home and the school as will secure the continuous education of parents in the education of their children, that will make for the continuous enrichment of the intellectual life of the house- hold and will at the same time steadily create new interests, as new knowledge and new ex- periences are brought into the fellowship of parents and children. So much for the actual conditions. Now for some concrete examples of what happened. The earliest experiments were made in my own family of four children, now aged, re- spectively, a girl of seventeen, a boy sixteen, a girl twelve and a boy ten. At the time these plans began to go into operation the two younger children were not born and there be- ing but seventeen months between the two eldest, the plan admitted of treating both ex- actly alike. These two were admitted to RadclifFe and Harvard colleges, the girl be- ing fifteen and the boy thirteen and a half. Their examination papers were of average, possibly slightly above average excellence, betraying nothing unusual and especially nothing that indicated "prodigies." They 14 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME had simply arrived several years earlier than is usual. Two years of their college life have passed and their standing in college is, with an occasional exception, in the honor list. Both have pursued the maximum amount of work permitted by the colleges, the boy being al- lowed to take six courses at Harvard, the girl only five at Radcliffe. They are in good health and nothing unusual has happened. No vital relation which ought to come with college life, associations or interests, has been denied them and they have secured all that could be expected out of their college life. In fact, rather more as I should judge. I can see no reason for altering the course with the two younger children, both of whom are in the Cambridge High and Latin School and are beginning third year work. They will take college examinations and probably be admitted at about the same ages as their older brother and sister. There has been no crowd- ing. They are in absolutely perfect health judged by ordinary standards. They are not children of exceptional ability. They have been subjects of exceptional oversight and care, both as to studies and health. If this re- sult had been secured with one child, the usual plea of an "unusual child" might possibly be INTRODUCTION 15 raised. But it is unthinkable that there should be four ''prodigies" in one family! As a matter of fact, all such talk is absurd. The difference is one of method, parental interest and care. Another case from what might be called the opposite social pole is that of a youth whose father was a street laborer with whom I be- came acquainted because he worked in front of my house and I got into the habit of speak- ing with him as I passed out of my gate in the morning. One day he confided to me his anxiety about his boy in the grammar school, who was not doing well. I called at the school, got acquainted with the boy, his habits and his possibilities. He was about to be denied promotion for neglect of his work and bad behavior. I got him interested in me, planned his work for the following summer, gave up a part of my vacation to see that he did it, instructed his parents as to my requirements for study and habits, and the following Sep- tember he took admissions for the high school into which he was admitted, in which he made an excellent record, from which he passed into a law school and is now a successful practicing lawyer. His record in the law school was ex- cellent. He has since developed literary 16 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME habits and will be a useful and effective men> ber of his profession. And he is a gentle- man! Still another case is that of a girl in whom I became interested when she was ten. Her parents, when I indicated what I thought she might do, strongly deprecated any attempt to get her to college and advised me to give the attention to an older sister. They gave absolutely no aid in the matter. But the girl became interested, applied herself, developed remarkable aptitude for making quick infer- ences and utilizing her knowledge, entered high school, made a good record and gradu- ated in the first twenty in her class in college, Her whole career was a struggle and against an absolutely hostile environment, since the do- mestic life of the home was not happy and the girl got no assistance there. She is now a useful and successful teacher. An unusual case was that of a boy who had some rather severe physical infirmities, but whose interest being aroused, set to work to overcome these and other natural handicaps. I got into touch with him when he was twelve. Between that age and seventeen he did more work than most children do between begin- ning school and twenty. He also made a good college record, which might have been INTRODUCTION 17 brilliant if he had not had to earn a part of his living at the same time. This boy also is in the law and is known among his associates as a "student," a man whose opinions are val- ued because of his habits of application and thoroughness. One further case will suffice. It was the case of a girl whom I began to know when she was about twelve. At that time she was supposed to be "impossible" from the stand- point of study. A little careful guidance, stimulation on the side of the interests which knowledge properly applied arouses, made a transformation which was little short of won- derful. The need for earning her livelihood took her prematurely out of school, but she has developed literary skill and knowledge and writes beautifully and earns a suitable in- come with her pen. I have no doubt whatever that this child, had she come under wise guid- ance at an early age, would have made a brilliant and remarkable figure. More recently, I advised a mother with her small child of four to resist the temptation to put him into the school but to give him her own attention. I urged his father to take, as I did, his meal times as periods for discussion, for fertilization, for the interesting of his child in the things of the mind. The result has 18 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME been overwhelming to the parents in the rapid assimilation of a knowledge of history, of some forms of mathematics and a variety of other things usually met by children in the high school period, and that child would at this mo- ment, after two years of such work, find the fifth, or even the sixth, grade stupid and a bore. Imagine a child that has been told the tales of Shakespeare and interested in the plots and counterplots of the great plays, told the thrilling stories of Greek history and able to talk about them on the factual side, being kept in a fifth grade reader ! Now in all these cases there was nothing abstruse, terrifying or otherwise beyond the reach of the average parent. In fact, the whole thing turned upon the fidelity of the parents, quite as much as upon that of the children when the children were young. But in cases some of which are cited above, even with conditions wholly unfavorable, children were enabled to do three and four times the work, in a third or half the time usually con- sumed by school children. To be sure, in all these cases a little work was kept up through- out the long vacation, one of the absurdities of American life. These children did not for twelve long weeks absolutely forget that they had brains, which must work and which must INTRODUCTION 19 be kept active in developing habits of obser- vation, attention and self-control. Now it is impossible to assume that all these children had some unusual qualities not com- mon to most children. In most cases they had good health. Of course you cannot get full work from a sick child. Of course they had to keep regular hours and forego a good deal of what is called the social life of young people. But in this, as in all other things, a choice has to be made. It is a question of what one desires most. Young people cannot go out to parties and dance half the night and have their brains and bodies in condition for capable and effective work the next day. They cannot have their minds filled with a vast variety of "social" nonsense and still keep it fresh for habitation by higher things. When that fact is clearly brought to the at- tention of a young person and the right choice is made, half the battle is won. But that also is another question. The methods or rather the principles, which have governed in all these cases were the same. They are indicated not precisely, but gener- ally, in the following chapters. The first thing to be secured is the conviction on the part of parents and others who have young children in charge, that there is capacity and 20 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME power in the child, which only needs to be de- veloped, and then to take the means by which that development can be secured. Naturally there is no arbitrary method. But the re- marks made in the succeeding chapters will indicate about what happened and where the line of advance starts. There are in these histories elements Which cannot of course be made public but which I wish to assure my readers if they knew they would never have another contented minute with the present slipshod, listless and machine methods by which the thousands of our children are given what is called their "education." The pa- rental attitude, and next to that the teacher's attitude toward the higher things of the mind, is of paramount importance especially in young children. The often contemptuous in- difference with which mature people treat the presence of children in their habits, manners and conversation is to me one of the paralyz- ing wonders of contemporary life. This is especially observable in matters of speech and the use of the mother tongue. But it is hardly less true in other important matters. Of course this is not academic and peda* gogical. As stated, this is not the work of an "educator." It may interest persons whc have an academic interest in this matter, that INTRODUCTION 21 I could, if it had been worth while, have placed abundant footnotes and references for many things, in connection with the ideas which are laid down in the chapters following. Perhaps some time later, I shall write a small book with that purpose specifically in mind. But as this is manifestly a "tendenz-schrift" and has in view the purpose of arousement of interest in the thing discussed, the academic discussion of the problem may well be left out. I propose also later to publish a small book, in which a programme is particularly indicated which may not be without its uses. But for the present I wish merely to secure assent to certain ideas, which I believe generally ac- cepted and the practice of the achievement of which, widely adopted, will save from three to five years of school life for the ordinary child and add immeasurably to the happiness, use- fulness and effective self -direction of many human beings. I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words with their signification in English which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar until some years later I learned no more than the inflections of nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables pro- ceeded at once to translation ; and I faintly remember going through iEsop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember bet- ter, was the second. I learnt no Latin till my eighth year. At that time I had read under my father's tuition a number of Greek prose authors among whom I remember, the whole of Herodotus and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates ; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius ; part of Lucian and Isocrates Ad Demoni- cum and Ad Nicoclem. — John Stuart Mill. Autobiography. II LANGUAGE THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE Language is the tool by which all knowl- edge is acquired. There are persons who can make themselves understood and can convey ideas by signs and motions of various kinds, but the usual medium for conveying ideas is language. The earliest form in which lan- guage begins to assert its influence upon the human mind is in the spoken tongue. It is hardly an accident that we speak of the "mother" tongue. It is in the home that the most durable habits of speech are acquired and generally speaking it is in the home that whatever style develops in mature life has its origin. But it is not merely the fact that language and speech as its oral form is the effective and most powerful tool of knowl- edge; it also affects a great many other things. It is not enough that a word be spoken. It makes a great deal of difference how it is spoken. The proper vocalization of words has an effect upon children which is often, one may say generally, overlooked. 23 24 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Almost everybody is fond of repeating the baby's efforts to talk and "baby talk" lingers in many homes an innocent but costly pleas- ure, for the parents and the children alike. There are many persons of mature age at this moment who will never pronounce certain words properly, since they became accustomed to a false pronunciation in childhood, because somebody thought it was "cute." There are many persons who will never get over certain false associations of ideas, because somebody thought it was very amusing and funny to see the child mixing up things in such a beauti- fully childlike way! Let me call attention to a contrast at this point which may suggest what this particular chapter has to explain. What parent, if he discovered some physical disability in the speech of a young child which meant imper- fect vocalization, like lisping, for example, or stuttering, would not make haste to employ every possible means to secure the early cor- rection of the evil? Or again, suppose some father discovered that his child had a mal- formation of one or both feet, which meant, if unattended to, that the child would never walk straight or stand erect? Can we imagine that this defect would be ignored, glossed over and forgotten simply because for the moment it THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 25 caused no discomfort or involved no pain? Or once again, let us suppose that parents found out that the sight of a child was im- paired and that the prompt attention of some specialist in this department meant the com- plete restoration of sight, by wise observing of the defect and the careful training and guiding of the eyes from misuse and misdi- rection. Is it thinkable, in any rational house- hold, that this matter would be left without attention and without the employment of every possible means to secure the best results for correct sight and sound, healthy eyes? To ask all these questions is to answer them. The great advance in America, of supervision in the public schools and elsewhere of children in these respects shows how strong has become the appreciation of the importance of dealing with these and all defects promptly and at the earliest period possible. Pass now from the region of physical devel- opment into the region of the mental life and contrast the method of procedure. A child makes, through undeveloped organs, some funny mistake in the vocalization of a word. Everybody laughs and the child is promptly encouraged to make the same mistake over again. Not only is the child deceived as to the fact concerning that particular thing, but 26 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME its ears are misled at the same time. In that laugh, left without any further attention, three things happened. The child was de- ceived about the thing itself, interpreting the laugh as approval; the ears of the child were misled, interpreting the sound it heard as a cor- rect one and therefore to be repeated in that connection, and there was integrated into the mind of the child an error which either had to remain there or later be expelled by a spe- cial process. A very large fraction of the entire process of what we call elementary edu- cation is taken up in this business of the ex- pulsion of errors which have been carelessly permitted to become integrated in the minds of children. Let this process now go on for several years. And by and by, you have just what you find in the vast majority of the chil- dren who come to a public school, a mass of thoroughly false ideas and habits about speech, vocalization and language generally and what is even more disastrous the feeling that proper speech, careful vocalization and accuracy in diction are something unusual, peculiar if not wholly undesirable. Note the result in almost any schoolroom, when a child gifted in ac- curate speech, rises, and you will see either amazement that such a thing is possible and wonderment at just what it all means, or hi- THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 27 larious amusement over what seems to them, ignorance of the real truth, mannerism in talk- ing. Nor is this attitude confined to the school. Let a man be careful and precise, even though not bookish, in his habits of speech in any general assembly of men and he is generally put down as a "grind" or some sort of a person who must be in "intellectual pursuits." There seems almost to be a demand for a corrupted use of the language to convince people that you are "practical" and "in it" and otherwise en rapport with the things of the age. In fact, not to use the slang of the time, indi- cates to the vast majority of your fellows that somehow you do not belong to the "crowd." An ordinary conversation in any public place would be unintelligible to a man who had ac- quired English only from books, in another land, because so infused with technical slang of one kind and another which is intelligible only in our country. Coming across the ocean one winter, I became acquainted with a German commercial agent, who had tran- scribed five hundred and sixty such expres- sions and attached definitions and examples of their usage to the same, in order to make him- self agreeable to his business associates on this side of the water! He had found that 28 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the mastery of this corruption of the English tongue was a commercial asset which he could not neglect. Read the newspaper account of a ball game or in fact any one of the popular American sports and you will find yourself at once in a terra incognita unless you happen to be familiar with the particular sport of which you are reading. I see my reader smile as he reads this. But it is no smiling matter for his boy or girl when he strikes his English work in the high school or a college admission paper! Nor is it a smiling matter for him when the report of failure comes from the col- lege office! The point, at this stage, which I wish to make is, that from the earliest moment we seem to make every provision possible for per- fection of the physical structure in which the mind operates and carelessly leave till we are forced to deal with it, the habits and activities of the mind itself. "But what do you want me to do with my baby?" says some irate man who thinks I am going to demand a philo- sophical thesis from the baby in its cradle. This is what I want him to do. If he sees a de- fective eye I want him to get it mended. If he sees a defective word I want that mended, too. If he sees a foot malformed, I want him THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 29 to employ his time and strength and money to see that it is corrected. If he sees a false habit of speech developing" and a false note being integrated into the mentality of his child, I want him to correct that too. When one of my own children was small I noticed a certain tendency to make bad work of a cer- tain combination of consonants. Thereafter daily, for several weeks, as a playful exercise with this baby, I repeated in its ear the proper vocalization of that combination and presently the confusion disappeared. Left alone, that habit would have become fixed. It would have affected the spelling of that particular combination as it appeared in words. It would have confused the eye every time it saw them, because it would have been inhar- monious with the sound which lingered in the ears and which had been made domiciliary in the tongue. That slight defect might have operated for confusion, for distress and for blunder in a hundred different ways of which I do not even know. But simply lisping into the baby's ear daily, as a matter of playful intercourse, the thing was eliminated. Apply that principle to the use of words. Apply it to habits of correct speech and the use and power of approach to the mother tongue in 30 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the ordinary child in the first three or four years of life and it will produce something which will seem like a dream. You observe, of course, that this training begins not with the child but with the person or persons who have the child in charge. In general, it means the parents. But most par- ents never think of this matter at all and I have often been upbraided by indignant per- sons who said I was destroying the childhood of my children, because I did not let them master all sorts of false notions about their mother tongue. Because I did not let their mistakes go uncorrected, because I refused to use slang with them in the formative period of their lives, because I insisted that when they misused a word or used a false order of words, they should instantly correct both, it was said I was making an unnatural life for the chil- dren. They said it was unnatural for chil- dren to do these things. They might as well have insisted that it was unnatural and wrong to correct defective vision or to operate on a clubfoot ! Now what makes all this important is what comes of it. Language as I have said is the tool of knowledge. It is the instrument by which we gain and garner information, by which we coordinate what we know and make THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 31 inferences and express results. But if you blunt the tool, not to say destroy it, before you begin to use it, how are you ever to get knowledge in any proper or real sense? Everything depends upon this tool. The mastery of a proper use of the mother tongue is the first and last requisite of sound and ex- tensive mental development. Language is the key to everything that pertains to human life. Once get a language and you have the key to manners, civilization, habits, customs, history and all the complex and fascinating story of humanity. Because you get all these things by reading about them, and to read you must know the language and you must know it accurately and extensively and be able to follow the masters of it who have embodied their great ideas in literature. That process begins almost at the cradle. It begins by cul- tivating accuracy and skill in the use of the tongue. It begins by striking at and out, every false thing, the moment it appears. Isn't it as important to prevent the malforma- tion of the mind, as the malformation of a foot? Isn't it just as necessary to prevent false use of the thinking as of the seeing power ? x i Emerson has told in his own excellent way what the signifi- cance of language is in matters beyond even those which I 32 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Perhaps I may be permitted, at this point, to digress a little and say a word on the subject of the study of other languages than the mother tongue. One of the things that in- terested me greatly in the Low Countries was the facility with which children spoke four or five languages. I used occasionally to get children to sit down and say the same thing for me in several languages, to see whether they made the shadings incident to varying racial development and interest, and I was often sur- prised to see the skill, with which the thing was done. Now of course in the Low Coun- tries, the intermixture of races makes it ab- solutely necessary for every child to master several languages in order to do business with the contemporary life around it. But what struck me most was that the cross- fertiliza- tion of thought, produced by this inter-lingual development, was even more important than the thing itself. It convinced me that linguis- tic study has in it more power for the devel- opment of mental force and freedom than any have already indicated. He says: "Language is made up of the spoils of all actions, trades, arts, games of men. Every word is a metaphor borrowed from some natural or mechanical, agricultural or nautical process. The poorest speaker is like the Indian dressed in a robe furnished by half a dozen ani- mals. It is like our marble foot-slab made up of countless shells and exuviae of a foreign world." THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 33 other kind of study. It convinced me that the decline of the classics in America, Greek and Latin, on the score that they were not "practical," is a species of foolishness, which some day we shall greatly deplore and regret having permitted the driving out of our high schools and colleges, the requirements along these lines. I am not now arguing that Greek shall be made compulsory. I am argu- ing, that those parents who yield to the fool- ish clamor against the classics, on the ground that they are not practical, do not know what they are doing. I believe that the reaction upon the English tongue and its comprehension, the reaction upon the use of the vernacular itself for the commonest uses of life and, especially, for the enjoyment of literature, is a compen- sation from classical study, which is the most practical thing possible in the way of educa- tion. Of course it is not as easy as typewrit- ing and stenography! But is typewriting education? I believe in some high schools, it counts as much as Greek for a high school diploma! What a valuable document that sheet must be in such cases ! The use of the mother tongue is the most important factor of the whole educational process. It is the means, by which entrance is made into the vast world of books. Once that 34 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME world is entered, the novice knowing" his tool and having the tool properly edged and sharp- ened, he is brought at once into contact, possi- ble in no other way, with the vast stores of knowledge. And observe, when you have trained a child in good English and prevented it from learning a great mass of bad English, when you have spent its earliest years familiar- izing it with a correct and extensive vocabu- lary, you have given it access to a great many things from which the other process automat- ically excludes it. Now there are great treasures in the libraries, which even young children would enjoy if they only had the tool by which they could use them. But their "club" minds having been neglected, having been encouraged because it was "cute" and "pretty" and ministered to the vanity and indolence of the parents, to do nothing about it, to misuse, misunderstand or absolutely to know nothing- at all of many common things, they are automatically excluded from this world. That means the delimitation of their activities, almost from the start. Sometimes it means a permanent exclusion from some of the choicest delights of life. For taste, like everything else develops early, and taste in lit- erature and knowledge and things intellectual requires very careful and exacting attention THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 35 in the early stages. Who does not recall the hatred for some branches which was bred in him by the stupid blundering person who was their titular representative? I had myself ex- actly this experience with mathematics, till I struck a fascinating creature, who made geometry seem like poetry and who talked about algebra as though he were describing foreign travel! If anybody doubts this as a possibility let him read one of Gladstone's budget speeches, especially that particular one, in which he links Greek history and classical knowledge and the whole romance of Greek literature with a tax on raisins! The same thing can be done with almost any branch of knowledge, if there is the skill, the zest and the industry and the love of it to do it. It can be generated in almost any child for almost any subject. Now this is in no wise a technical or involved matter at all. It requires on the part of parents and teachers and the custodians of young life generally, interest and care, in watching the process of the formation of the habits of speech and the use of words. It requires that the persons named shall them- selves keep correct habits, in the presence of their children. It demands that when an error appears, it shall promptly be supplanted by 36 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the corresponding correct usage. In practice this will be found to be really a very enjoy^ able process. There is hardly any pleasure comparable to the pleasure of seeing the mind of a child grow. And there is a special pleasure, in seeing it grow beautifully and develop satisfactorily in every respect, and perhaps the most outstanding and interesting manifestation of such sound growth and de- velopment is the evidence that ideas are coming into existence naturally and accurately. One who does these things, will have the same sen- sations, only much more delightful, in hear- ing his child speak a difficult word properly, that he has when it walks across the room the first time without assistance. Every tumble while the child is learning to walk, hurries somebody to the assistance of the little one. What if every inaccurate speech, every tumble of the mind, every false accent and every ab- surdity which now only provokes amusement or laughter, were promptly made the subject of correction and strengthening! Why is not one process as reasonable as the other? Is it absolutely necessary to let children, in the in- terest of "childhood," blunder along in the use of the mother tongue without guidance and with nothing to strengthen the taste or train the ear in the right things? Is that what THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 37 makes "childhood" interesting? If people would only reflect that the neglect of these things is the source of the fearful depression of children in later school years, when they flounder around in their work largely because they have not the linguistic resources to under- stand what their instructors are talking about, there would soon be given almost as much at- tention to the training of the mind as the cor- rection of a clubfoot. Neglect of the programme which I have here described, breeds often permanent defects in the whole mental structure. And these permanent defects, being allied to the habitual expression of ideas and the organization of thought, are among the most costly defects which can afflict any human being, because the real life of mankind is in its mental con- ceptions. Persons having a large experience of life, are unanimous in the belief that most persons who make a failure of life do so be- cause they are not able to think clearly or consecutively about anything. They often exhibit unusual cleverness and unusual ca- pacity in certain directions, but seem to be un- able to coordinate this exceptional talent or capacity with the other faculties in such a way as to make it effective for use. I know no instrument that so tends to clarify thought 38 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME as a keen linguistic sense. By its very nature it creates shadings and attitudes and percep- tions which operate for the sharpening of the mind to distinctions; and what is clearness of thought but the ability to make accurate dis- tinctions readily and habitually? This can readily be observed in its formative processes in very young children. In things physical, where differences of structure are obvious, the differentiations are quickly and usually clearly made. But when it comes to the same process, as regards words and language, it is passed by unnoticed and there is integrated into the child's mind a false distinction which by its presence complicates and obscures every other distinction to which it is related. And this process goes on with increasing, accelerating force till what is false is mistaken for what is true and the capacity for acquiring nice shad- ings of thought is lost almost before the think- ing power has begun to get into motion. Many educated men have told me, indeed one of the most erudite college professors in this country told me recently that failure to give him this attention had made it impossible for him to write a paragraph without a dictionary at his side. It was not, he said, that he did not know how to spell nor that he did not use cer- tain words and certain classes of words prop- THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 39 erly as a rule, but that he found himself in a region of uncertainty about them, which never left him quite easy until he had veri- fied them. The loss to him in time and labor, he remarked, was something which, reckoned through a long series of years, was simply colossal. Have not many of us had exactly this experience? Now these permanent de- fects are bred in childhood. The tongue, the eye and the ear, instead of all being promptly set to work together by the constant correc- tion, through good usage and the elimination of errors, get out of the habit of working together and often the eye deceives the ear and not infrequently the tongue deceives the other two. What linguistic development does in early youth, is to bring about this coordi- nation and working together; they make a wonderful combination for thought and for the acquisition of knowledge. Our schools, grammar and high, are full of teachers who themselves exhibit these defects before their pupils and perpetuate errors of which they themselves were the victims in early life. Not long ago a learned man lecturing to a class in one of our Massachusetts colleges presented to his class the pitiful and ludicrous spectacle, while writing a sentence on the blackboard, of turning around and asking in a perplexed 40 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME way, whether the word over which he was hes- itating was spelled with one "1" or two! In other words, he was exhibiting the phenomena of the elementary class room in his own per- son, as the child. Such exhibitions create a contempt for erudition which no amount of learning can dissipate. Verbal analysis is another thing which may be begun in the linguistic training of children at a very early period. Many of my readers, probably most of them, are familiar with Kingsley's "Water Babies." Very likely many who read that fascinating and charming child's book to their children, when they come to the chapter which deals with the professor's ailment, with Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles and the doctors' diagnosis of his case, skip over those long words, medical, surgical and otherwise, which make that chapter such a linguistic delight. But I found that the read- ing of those chapters carefully and with strict and precise enunciation, bred in my own chil- dren a great delight and amusement in the effort to repeat them. And I attribute to that book and that particular chapter a great deal of influence in my own household in the development of a resource of vocabulary which has been almost priceless in their educa- tion. For, be it remembered, every four- or THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 41 five-syllabled word generally has a history. That history is itself a "story" for children par excellence if properly told and interestingly set forth. And, be it also remembered, that polysyllabic words are usually composed of simple words and may be taken apart, just ex- actly as a child takes off the arms and legs of a doll and digs out the stuffing to see what it is made of. Why should a child that can say "cat," "a" and "log" not say "catalogue"? 1 To be sure, in this case, the syllables have no relation to the word in their meaning as simple ideas. But you have a three-syllabled word and I can see no reason in the world why a three-syllabled word with simple components should not be taught to a child. And as "stories" for children, the history of many long words is as fascinating as anything possi- bly can be. And all the while you are train- ing the ear for linguistic changes, you are taking language apart and showing how it is put together. You are really teaching verbal i Since writing the above the statement of Professor Guy M. Whipple, Assistant Professor of Science and Art of Education at Cornell University, has been brought to my notice, that after careful study he found out that his three-year-old boy had a vocabulary of 1,771 words, "catalogue" being one of them. This child also had such polysyllables at his command as thermometer, cunningest, chiffonier, "typewritering," cater- pillar, Cashmere, Bouquet, and many others. He had received no formal instruction. 42 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME analysis, which is itself a very scientific process and one of the best for the development of the mind and the cultivation of ready and clear speech. Anybody can do this who has access to a dictionary. And many parents will add to their own store of information by doing this and will gain pleasure for them- selves and their children which will make a bond of union on the mental side, which is quite as interesting and quite as desirable for the uses of life as the physical bond. This is really nothing more than what is habitually done in other things. We often tear a flower apart and show its structure to children that they may see how it grows and where its life resides. We often take insects and have children watch them to see how they work and how they are able to perform what they do. Why not take words apart in the same way? Why not make language inter- esting in exactly the same way? I can hear some man say to me at once, "But I am not a philologist." Nobody asks you to be a philol- ogist. It is only needful to take a dictionary and utilize what you have and break it up into digestible fragments for the child. The sim- ple fact is, that in the things of the mind, we never think of doing these things. Let a child's dress become unbuttoned or a ruffle be- THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 43 come frayed or a shoe lace untied and some- body notices it and there is immediate instruc- tion or correction in the matter. But when the mental process gets unlaced or the thought gets frayed into confusion, nearly all parents are too tired or too indolent to straighten out the matter, with the results which I have al- ready noted. I have heard many children ask their parents what certain long words meant because they struck the ear musically or cu- riously. But I have rarely seen the parent that would stop instantly and tell all that could be told, and that the parents in question them- selves could tell, about that word, thus utiliz- ing the interest which was there ready to be stimulated and enriched by further knowl- edge. But I have often seen a mother break into a sentence and give a child's hair ribbons the proper twist so that they might look right! I have seen more than one conversation broken into, by parents calling attention to some verbal absurdity which their child was perpe- trating, for the purpose of creating amuse- ment for the adults present! Expensive amusement, I think it is. And I have often thought of it when I have seen young people vainly trying to overcome the bad habits thus given a permanent place in their mental outfit. Now, as it happens, the English tongue is 44 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME allied to many other languages. And there is hardly a city in America where the opportuni- ties for observation in the comparison of lan- guages is not afforded on street cars and in public places. Children if they are trained to it and directed in it, make most admirable use of their opportunities in this respect to their vast enjoyment. The resemblances between English and German, for example, are numer- ous. In any city where there is a considerable German population, there creeps into casual intercourse a great mass of words which in their superficial resemblance to English words make opportunities for word "stories" and open the way for the imparting of a great deal of collateral information, in the way of fer- tilization, of which I shall speak in a later chapter. Nor is this theory absolutely new. The late Professor Austin Phelps of Andover Seminary, facile princeps in the use of Eng- lish, in his lectures on "English Style in Pub- lic Discourse" advises young preachers to cultivate the use and knowledge of unfamiliar words. His argument is that a new word ar- rests attention in the congregation. All the people who are listening especially, if the word is in itself an interesting word, note it and probably some of them will look it up. Twenty years' experience in the pulpit has THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 45 proved to me that as a fertilizer of thought in my congregation, nothing has been so effective as to state things in what might be called un- usual words. It arrested attention. It pro- voked thought. It started mental operations. By and by, it made people conscious that they were not only being religiously exhorted but mentally enlarged. I had for many years a dozen teachers who came to my congregation long distances on Sunday mornings from other communities because they found this process so useful to them. There is absolutely no reason why with the necessary changes incidental to childhood, the same rule cannot be followed in any household. And when it is followed, there grows in the child mind a resource for mental development, which is the most powerful instrument of knowledge. The earlier this process begins, the sooner the treasure-house of knowledge is opened to chil- dren. And when once that treasure-house is opened by means of a large, clearly apprehended and widely differentiated vocabulary, there is no limit to the possibilities. I once had a young Irish lad in my congregation whose natural wit and verbal fluency attracted me, especially as it was exercised so exclusively along lines which were worse than useless. 46 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME I got him interested in me and got him to reading certain books and talking with me about them. His verbal sense was quickly- aroused and after half-a-dozen years he got so in the habit of using my own vocabulary that a missionary classmate of mine who came to Boston from a foreign land, after years of absence, and did not know exactly where the church of which I was then pastor was located, dropped into our young people's meeting be- fore the evening service intending at its close to make inquiries, but said afterward that he did not need to make the inquiry because pres- ently in the remarks of a young boy he recog- nized some peculiarities of my own vocabulary. It was the young Irishman. To-day that youth is performing the same service for a Sunday school of over five hundred pupils. He is a marked man in the form and utterance of his public speech. I have seen this process repeated over and over again. All thinking is in terms of language and until there is a sound linguistic basis you can have no real thinking. It is, therefore, the paramount problem of education to create first and foremost in the minds of young children as rich and full and varied a knowledge of words as possible. It is not necessary that they shall fully "understand" all that these THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 47 words mean or all that can be made of them. It is enough that what they do know is accu- rate and is not allied to something that is false and that requires to be unlearned. The sup- position that this initial contact with the mother tongue must be always in the simplest and most elementary forms is, in my judg- ment and according to my experience, wrong. Composite sounds and the most varied syl- labic construction can be taught with very little effort, and if allied to the most simple musical knowledge and made rhythmic, there is almost no limit to what can be done. I have taught a child to repeat an entire Hebrew psalm, with absolutely not a single error in pronunciation, without the child "understand- ing" anything about it other than it was the Hebrew way of saying what the child knew in English and had learned as a part of its Bible study. I have taught a child to repeat fifty lines of Virgil in exactly the same way. Of course somebody will say, "What was the use?" The use was, apart from the fact that it created traditions and mind stuff, that it taught careful vocalization and trained the ear to note the varied succession of sounds and es- tablished the ability to grapple with any word, however long or however unfamiliar. Mod- ern languages, German and French, should be 48 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME taught in this way first of all. What is this but the process reduced to a programme which we employ casually and in a slovenly manner when we simply let children learn their mother tongue by hearing it talked? This is simply organizing the materials out of which the linguistic consciousness shall be made. It is the erection of barriers against misuse and de- fective usage. It is the building of the solid substructure of knowledge by the formation of standards which once made have a deter- minative influence in the whole subsequent contact with the things for which language is employed. It means that certain things are automatically excluded and made impossible in the educational development of the child mind. It means that all along the pathway of its growth it will find materials planted in the early years, which will be lights for the illumi- nation of dark places and guides for the path- way out of obscurity and mental confusion. Many things not "understood" by a child are nevertheless, I have found out, stored away in the mind and at the appropriate moment re- appear, to give the pleasure and delight of the renewal of an old acquaintance. The child that has built up for it a sound and consider- able and varied vocabulary before it is six years of age, will have, other things being THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 49 equal, three years the start of any child not so trained. It will have access to more books, more forms of knowledge, will have intellect- ual interests and intellectual enjoyments which the average child of nine not only does not know but in many cases probably never will know. I count this linguistic training as the most important factor in the whole scheme of intensive development for children. I cannot see that the child loses one thing that it would otherwise have. I cannot see that any child pleasure, any child enjoyment, any rational and sound and delightful characteristic of true and happy childhood need in the slightest be interfered with. But on the contrary I have seen childhood develop and its companionship and fellowship with parents, with nature, with the world, with the phenomena of life, vastly increased, and happy childhood made happier because there were left no cruel malforma- tions to cause the heart-breaking distresses of later school years. I have seen such intensive development with no loss of health and with decided gain to every other interest. The tool of that development was a large and compre- hensive acquaintance with and use of the mother tongue. The infant as soon as born was not consigned to the dwelling of a hireling nurse, but was reared and cherished in the bosom of its mother, whose highest praise it was to take care of her household affairs and attend to her children. ... In her presence not one indecent word was uttered; nothing was done against propriety and good manners. The hours of study and serious employment were settled by her direction, and not only so but even the diversions of the children were conducted with modest reserve and sanctity of manners. . . . The consequence of this regular discipline was, that the young mind, whole and sound, and unwarped by irregular pas- sions, received the elements of the liberal arts with hearty avidity. — Tacitus on the Training of Roman Children. Ill MIND FERTILIZATION One of the strangest things about civiliza- tion in all ages, and not less of our own than of those preceding it, is the fact that in almost all things with which men have had to do ex- cept the preparation of children for life, they have recognized the necessity for adequate preparation and proper fertilization. Some years ago, having recently moved into the country, I noted how a certain neighbor of mine, who had been very successful in raising apples, prepared the soil for some young trees he was setting out. He did not simply dig a hole and stick in the trees. He carefully studied the nature of the soil, the requirements of the particular trees he was planting, pro- vided for their growth in their earlier years, and in every manner possible saw to it that his trees should come to the bearing period strong, healthful and thoroughly fitted to make the greatest possible yield. He and his farm are in distinct contrast to all those about him. They rarely yield any profit, his always yields a profit. Their children, as soon as they are 51 52 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME able to work, leave school and join their care- less, untrained parents in making a bare living from the land. His children have, as they have come along, gone to fitting school and college. He ships apples to Europe, lives well, is a reading man and has a lovely home and otherwise makes his New Hampshire place furnish not only living but a life. Re- duced to lowest terms, it comes of the fact that he fertilizes the soil for the trees which furnish the income out of which all his other enjoy- ments and advantages arise. It is one of the anomalies of our own time that this perfectly simple and natural process is so little applied to children. Take almost any community in this land and the curious thing about it is that, not excepting college or educated communities and observing what parents permit their children to imbibe as the subsoil out of which their later lives are to emerge, you will be astounded to notice that all the mental weeds have the first and best chance. You will be surprised to find that there is an almost complete absence of plan in the matter of stocking the child mind with useful, fertile notions and a neglect of the mental soil which, in any other operation, would be pronounced scandalous in the ex- treme. No factory would for an instant con- MIND FERTILIZATION 53 sent to have its raw material treated with both the positive injury and the disgraceful neg- lect to which children's minds are subjected in the most attractive and acquisitive period. No mechanic would think of treating his tools as people suff er their children's main asset for a happy and useful life to be handled. No skilled workman would dream of allowing an immature and ignorant person to handle his delicate instruments in the manner in which parents allow foolish and unlearned and even vicious persons to experiment with the mental life and habits of their own offspring. The result of all this is plain in the thousands of absolutely incapable people all around us, who have no initiative of their own and have to a great degree lost even the power of intel- ligently grasping initiative which is provided for them by others. Trees, plants, must have a prepared soil for their proper growth and development, why not children? Here again, the physical base of life is beginning to get fair recogni- tion, but still in a blundering way. One of the ludicrous instances of this latter statement may be found in the playground movement, now nation-wide and steadily developing. I visited lately a recently opened and beauti- fully equipped playground. Its site was 54 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME lovely and thoroughly attractive. The grounds were bountifully bestowed with appa- ratus which admitted of many varieties of ex- ercise and enjoyment. It had many things which the children of the most opulent might well wish to make their own. But as I watched the children about that ground the one thing that impressed me most, was the utter poverty of the children in the ability to use what they had thus abundantly placed before them. Half-a-dozen forms of play would probably cover all that they did. And the one most needful thing of all was wanting, — a skilled and thoroughly trained person to teach these children how to play. Contrasted with the skilled German play-instructors I have seen, with only a fragment of the appa- ratus to deal with, it seemed like a pathetic waste of material, and I could think of noth- ing other than a noveau riclie country vainly trying to imitate the older country that had less to do with but used it with vastly more in- telligence and effectiveness. But at least the playground recognized the need for a substan- tial physical base, and health was written in large letters on all that the eye could see, and the intention was everywhere evident. But who thinks of preparing the mind in the same ample fashion? How many persons MIND FERTILIZATION 55 systematically think of giving to the growing mind the raw materials of knowledge, the elementary forms of science, and generally of habituating the minds of children to grasp important and useful facts and otherwise pre- pare for some adequate familiarity in mature life with the world in which they are to live and move and have their being? How many, even of educated parents, have a clearly thought-out plan for filling the minds of their children with the things without which success- ful access to mental fullness and enjoyment is well-nigh impossible? In other words who thinks of doing for the child mind what my friend, the farmer, does for every tree he plants ? One reason why so few people think along these lines, is the prevalence of the supersti- tion that the child mind cannot grasp impor- tant and fundamental things as readily as foolish and absurd things. Hence the "sim- plification" of all sorts of things for the child mind and the reduction to something worse than folly of the operations of the young intellect on the theory that whatever ideas are given to it, have to be made semi- idiotic before the young intellect can handle them. All the while, wherever the young mind is left to itself, it gravitates automatic- 56 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME ally to something worth while and funda- mental, wherever choice is possible. Little girls take to dolls almost from the beginning. They play naturally with the profoundest problem of humanity, namely, the rearing and training of childhood. They introduce natu- rally and with exactitude principles, which, when science develops them and organizes them and proves them, are called by various profound scientific names. By and by the absurd processes called education interfere with these natural processes of the child deal- ing with fundamental things and then ensues that fearful period of adolescence, full of hor- rors and distresses which are no more neces- sary than smallpox or typhoid fever. Al- most all the so-called horrors of the adolescent period show conclusively that the natural proc- esses of childhood have become perverted by what we call "education," and the whole mis- erable muddle in which civilization finds itself on the sex question, is almost directly due to this artificial and obfuscating interference together with inability and ignorance in prop- erly fertilizing the child mind on the signifi- cance of knowledge, which it is not only perfectly capable of receiving but which hav- ing, it will automatically apply. Why food for the body and not for the MIND FERTILIZATION 57 mind? Why strictly regulated and properly prepared food for the stomach and not for the mind? Why shall the baby be filled with carefully selected nutriment for its little body and then stuffed with all sorts of rubbish for its little mind? This is one of the funda- mental questions in the rearing of children and perhaps one of the most neglected of all. The simple fact is that the superstitions about things which are vital and important still be- fog the minds of people and prevent them from doing as well by their children as they would do by the plant in the window or the tree in the field. That the mind must have its food prepared will strike many persons as a positively new idea. That that food should itself be subject to constant, careful scrutiny and revision is absolutely beyond the view. But there is the mind, with all its powers awake, observing, taking in and making its own, everything that it possibly can come into contact with and either classifying and dis- tributing in an orderly way its fresh acquisi- tions or muddling them up, to their useless- ness as fertilization, and also destroying the very powers by which they are acquired. Now the object of this chapter is to con- vince and persuade that if you want a full mind and a well-nurtured one, you must fer- 58 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tilize it, so that when ideas present themselves, they will find a soil fitted to receive them. This means that you regulate not only what ideas are received, but when and in what form. That there shall be an intelligent and deliber- ate choice of ideas for the child mind and most of all that what goes into the mind shall have some relation to the higher views of life, and that mental weeds shall not possess the soil to such an extent that half of life has to be con- sumed in rooting out what has been by neglect and blunder permitted to occupy the soil. Among the very first things to consider in this relation is that what are called the higher things of life, the more profound, if you please, are as easily acquired in childhood as any others. I have already referred to the obfuscation of children's minds on the subject of sex. But the same thing is true about many other things. A child can be taught the fundamental principles of geometry, for example, at three as readily as it can be taught to build a block house. It can be taught to observe relations which are fundamental in mathematical calculation as easily at four as it can any of the nonsense which is usually sup- posed to be fit for children at that age. Even the fundamental principles of philology can be thus taught and I have seen children at MIND FERTILIZATION 59 three, four and five analyze words and recog- nize stems and make proper and cogent infer- ences by reason of resemblances in form and use, which, if they appeared in a text-book or a doctor's thesis, would be called scientific knowledge. Of course, somebody had to teach it. Of course, somebody had to call the child's attention to these things. But there was no greater difficulty on the part of the child, that I could discover, in taking in that kind of knowledge than any other. In fact, the process became so interesting that the child soon attempted it on its own account with amusing and interesting results. I recall very well dealing with a very young child once on the subject of "species." This is a scien- tific word and involved considerable explana- tion, but it was worth all it cost both in time and effort when after a rain the little girl see- ing a robin pick up a worm propounded the question, "Papa, fishes eat worms and birds eat worms. Do they belong to the same spe- cies?" To rouse that mental operation was itself to start the sources of knowledge from their hiding places. The worms in question brought forth another interesting specimen of the automatic application of the child mind to questions of knowledge. The small boy aged four being told about worms being "articu- 60 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME lates" and the possibility of the growth of their various segments, was found on the same occasion that the "species" episode oc- curred, cutting up worms into parts, with a view to multiplying the species, having also been told that they kept the soil loose so that the plants could spread their roots more readily in the loosened soil. There you had one of the great scientific generalizations, one of the great geological facts of the distribu- tion of the earth's surface, properly and firmly habited in the child's mind in a fashion which need never be disturbed. In a similar way the silver at the table, the glass, the china, the food and its sources, all become the media for the conveying of exact and interesting knowledge. Now the im- portant thing about all these things was not merely that real and useful information was placed in the mind, but that the mind itself was being fertilized for the subsequent recep- tion of other information and provided with the machinery for its proper classification and retention. In this way, geography and arith- metic and grammar and various sciences were taught, not as such, but as fertilizing material which by their occupancy of the mind, ex- cluded the vile stuff which is usually doled out to the infant intellect, and what is more, MIND FERTILIZATION 61 and perhaps best of all, was that these particu- lar children were made immune from the mis- use of their minds later on in life. There was nothing- supernatural about it. It was simply doing what my friend, the farmer, did for his trees. The mental soil was fertilized by things inherently useful, interesting and suggestive, and a rudimentary organization was set up to properly husband what came into the mind for future use. The fertilization here described was of course of the nature of the surroundings of the children in question. A legal friend of mine who was accustomed to take home with him cases to prepare for trial was greatly as- tounded after some months to hear his young son who often sat in the next room while he was dictating to his stenographer, not merely use but accurately apply many legal terms in his play. He heard his small boy repeat the most complicated legal sentences, those rem- nants of barbarism, the rage and despair of all lovers of truth and justice and the proper use of language. He heard this child utter with ease and skill whole paragraphs of pleadings and was both shocked and humiliated to find that his child, left to himself, grappled with the severities of the language under their most grotesque and damnable forms (no other 62 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME word fits the legal nomenclature) while he habitually talked twaddle and foolishness with his child. A physician classmate of mine has related something- of the same sort about one of his children who learned to connect certain ailments with certain symptoms and diseases and made him often, when he wrote a pre- scription, remembering the comments of his child upon the same diseases, feel absolutely silly. But why need he have been surprised? The child mind will take what is offered. Offer it folderol and idiotic stuff in the shape of brutalized English and misinformation of all kinds and that will be its mental subsoil. Offer it knowledge, clear, accurate and classi- fied, and you will get an orderly mind and one that governs and regulates its own processes presently. Nor will this little mind be a genius ! It will simply be as well fed in mind as it is in body. It will simply have as much attention given to what it thinks as to what it eats. In other words, parents will be think- ing almost as much of the brains of their chil- dren as they now think of their bowels. Is it so revolutionary a principle as some people seem to imagine that you get out of a child's mind what you put into it, no more, no less? Does it involve some hocus-pocus or other magic to believe that if you give a child's mind MIND FERTILIZATION 63 worthy things to think about, that it will, by and by, handle all things worthily? The objection most commonly urged against this process of enriching the minds of children by real knowledge and worth-while material, is that it interferes with the child's healthful growth and development which seems one of the most foolish ideas that ever obsessed the human brain. On this theory we should go back to the oldest of superstitions and fill the minds of children with all kinds of outlandish stuff and prevent any modern ideas from ob- taining an entrance and, in sooth, that seems to be what many people do. Unfortunately, too, the domain in which they operate most ap- pears to be that of religion, where ideas of God and the world and sin and evil and the rest are inculcated — ideas which can hardly emerge in anything but gross errors of all kinds which finally express themselves in the grotesque ideas of morals and behavior which are so com- mon. Possibly if it were carefully worked out, it could readily be shown that the absurd divorce of religion and morality, for example, one of the commonest phenomena of our day, has its rise in this practice. Then again, the play upon the fears and ignorance of children, the use of that ignorance and those fears for the convenience of the parent or teacher and as 64 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME a means of avoiding the labor of giving the correct or needed instruction, also has its large influence. In any case, if to inculcate modern ideas is destructive of health, the deliverance of the world from the miserable bondage in which it now welters, will be long deferred. But the answer to this objection is simply that it is not true. Not a single reason can be adduced to show that giving a child informa- tion about geometry is one whit more calcu- lated to break down health than to give it Mother Goose rhymes. Nor can it be shown that to give it accurate knowledge about botany is one degree worse for its physical well-being than to chatter simply about the "pretty flow- ers." Some kind of information the child is bound to gather. Some kind of ideas is sure to germinate and occupy the soil. If non- sense, then you have a nonsense foundation which will assuredly have to be forked over and dug out as a garden has to be forked to get out the weeds if you are to have productiveness afterward. Side by side with this habit of approach is the equally silly notion that you are denuding childhood of its beauty and innocence. Do weeds make a garden beautiful? Is the proc- ess of pulling up the ugly things which de- form and befuddle the mind one of beauty and MIND FERTILIZATION 65 loveliness or is it one of pain and wretchedness ? Clearly the latter. The soil of the child mind keeps rare and beautiful when it is filled with rare and beautiful things and such things are choice in their demands for soil and culture. The persistent care in the selection of materials and the wise and intelligent arrangement of this material to suit times and seasons will make a certain parallelism between the growth of the mind of the child and the periods of the year and the periods of its own development, which is itself one of the beautiful facts of hu- man growth. When the fertilizing process has been carried on for a few years, one sees just what one sees in a carefully planted orchard or a carefully arranged garden, each thing in its place, each healthfully developing, each bearing in its season after its own kind and each supplementing the other in beautiful cooperation and correlation. I am at this mo- ment thinking of the great natural processes which were taught to little children, not far from the place where this is written, by watch- ing the operations of ants, bees, wasps and birds. Of the biological principles which were here shown and steadily developed so that when the same children who "played" at knowledge with these, found themselves face to face with the "science" of the same things in college, 66 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME they met old friends with delight and made knowledge seven times more of a friend than it was, if possible, before. If anything was done in the matter of the beauty and innocence of childhood, it was extended and given a longer lease of life and a continuity into the severer questions of maturity, which made the natural difficulty of these problems somewhat less be- cause they seemed inwoven with the develop- ment of lif e itself, as indeed they are. The in- comparable folly of postponing the period of knowledge till it has to be approached with perverted tastes and muddled ideas is equaled only by the insanity that this process conserves the beauty of childhood. I have just referred to a certain parallelism between the growth of knowledge and times and seasons. The idea seems a trifle romantic of course. But just reflect for a moment how different the phenomena of winter are from those of spring and what a wide variation there is of principles to be taught in the two seasons. Could a finer arrangement for contrasts and comparison of ideas and knowledge for little children possibly be devised? It almost seems as though the things were arranged for the purpose of training the juvenile mind to ob- servation and comparison and for the noting of very diverse and interesting processes. MIND FERTILIZATION 67 Yet, except in the most superficial way and that chiefly calculated to breed dilettantism, little or no use is made by most people of these seasons to teach the young mind the great laws of nature and the similar laws of the human mind. But they are there to be taught and taught accurately and by a method thoroughly in accord with known science. In fact, it was by these very processes that primitive man be- gan his march toward knowledge and light. Are we not to continue that march or are our children perpetually to go through the savage process of being torn up by the roots, harrowed over by ignorant and brutalized schoolmasters themselves harrowed over by equally obtuse college professors, until they come forth dubbed bachelors of arts, unable to think clearly, discuss any subject with fullness or in- telligence and incapable of meeting the sim- plest ethical problems with firmness or justice? If this seems a severe indictment, let people simply look about them and they will see on every hand the pitiful results of a process which ultimately resolves itself into this: that there were planted in the virgin soil of child- hood, weeds instead of sound, useful, produc- tive things and not only so, but the entire soil itself was left to become sterile and unproduc- tive of anything worth while. 68 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Clearly this is a parental question. It can- not be left until the period called "school age" as though this age came automatically accord- ing to some heavenly arranged arithmetical succession. By the time what is called school age arrives, the damage has usually been done. The habits, while not utterly deranged, have been deformed by ill usage and the very mind stuff itself corrupted by the infusion of all kinds of superstition, puerility and falsehood, so that only the most persistent effort on the part of everybody concerned — parent, teacher and the whole organization of church and state and home — can scarcely bring order out of the chaos which the early sterilization of the mind has produced. It is a never-ending mira- cle to me that the mass of children turn out as well as they do, though perhaps this is because they lack the training and mental organization and power of initiative to do very much that is effectively bad. Dr. Conan Doyle remarks that it is a common sight to see the best head in a court room on the shoulders of the criminal in the dock, which is simply saying that that head very likely has been least under the leash of the processes we have been describing and has had a natural though lawless development and at least has not lost its power of self -pro- pulsion and has not slavishly laid itself under MIND FERTILIZATION 6Q the taskmaster's lash of consistent dullness and stupidity. In this same connection perhaps the natural alliance between genius and irregu- larities of one kind and another, which some psychologists allege, is due to just the fact which I have been discussing, that the genius has kept his power of observation and initia- tive unimpaired and perhaps in early youth es- caped the brutalizing and leveling process which we call education, and so brought forth something which was at least his own and not the stupid, crass product passed on from gen- eration to generation as knowledge. But, we may ask, must genius always be yoked with ir- regularity? Can we not have originality, ini- tiative, freedom and unimpaired power and yet have orderly persons, conscious of social obliga- tion and amenable to the natural intercourse of human beings, living with and for each other? Why must "bright" people always be held to be somewhat "eccentric" or otherwise "pecul- iar" or something else which makes them un- livable? There is no more need for this thing than there is that "bright" people should all have red hair or blue eyes. The more simple explanation is that most people are jammed into somebody's mold of misinformation or no information, fed on falsehoods, nurtured on inanities or stupidities or worse, and then ex- 70 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME pected to develop into useful men and women. The expectation that somehow or other we shall be able to gather figs from thistles continues to be the outstanding characteristic of the human mind. Parents seem to hold this superstition most rigidly, school-teachers are next and col- lege professors are third in the ascending scale of inability to see that the place where things begin, is at the beginning. But just gaze for a moment on the reverse of the picture I have presented. Here is born a child into a home where from the moment of its appearance, yes, long before its appearance, there is preparation made for the little stranger's mind as well as his body. Along with the little bassinet which contains the cov- ering for his body, there is a well defined pro- gramme for his mind. There is an arrange- ment of what his eyes shall look upon, what his ears shall hear and the form and methods by which the earliest ideas shall find their way into Ms mind. He shall be taught the truth. That guarantees his freedom! He shall be given useful and interesting knowledge of real life. That insures reality for him in the outer world. He shall be trained to see with his eyes and hear with his ears and he shall be shown how to coordinate what enters through these two gates to his mind. That will give MIND FERTILIZATION 71 him tools for his mind and thoughts for his tongue. He shall speak, when he speaks at all, accurately and his linguistic machinery shall from the very first help him, not hinder him. He shall learn to note sounds and distinguish sweet sounds from those that are harsh. He shall try his mind as he tries his little arms and legs and shall gain mental strength coordi- nately with his physical growth so that while he walks on his legs, he shall not creep in his mind. He shall have his mind food as care- fully chosen as his bodily food and he shall be kept mentally true and clean as he is cleansed daily and bathed bodily. Is the result hard to imagine? Not at all. This child will be original, will be fearless, will have the power and the interest of experimentation, will show zest for all kinds of knowledge, and will find the gathering of information as great a joy as he can possibly know. Presently somebody will call him a "prodigy," absolutely ignorant of the simple and entirely natural process by which the all-round development of the child has been secured. And possibly another per- son will want his progress "retarded" lest he become "prematurely old" and "lose his youth" and Heaven knows what other folly will be foisted upon him simply because his mind was properly cared for as my old farmer friend 72 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME prepared the soil for his tree. But all the time the natural law of fertilization and enrichment for productiveness has been followed without special interposition of the Deity or miraculous assistance of any kind. The tree was planted in good ground and it brought forth abun- dantly. That was all ! One of the best and ablest men of the city was, moreover, appointed inspector of the youth and he gave command of each company to the most spirited and discreetest of those, called Irens. . . . The Iren reposing himself after supper used to order some of the boys to sing a song; to another he put some question which required a judicious answer, for example: "Who was the best man in the city?" or "What he thought of such an action?" This accus- tomed them from their childhood to judge of the vir- tues, to enter into the affairs of their countrymen. For if one of them was asked, "Who is a good citizen or who is an infamous one?" and hesitated in his an- swer he was considered as a boy of slow parts and of a soul that would not aspire to honor. The answer was likewise to have a reason assigned for it and proof conceived in few words. — Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. IV QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS If it is true, as Isaac Disraeli says, that "the wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages may be preserved by quotation," it is even more true that the knowledge of the past and the observation of the present may be conveyed through the art of interrogation. Anyone who recalls his school experience will readily recognize the force of this statement. In fact, there is no surer method of determining real progress in any direction than the effective use of questions and answers. The Socratic method, which was also the method of all early assemblies and teachers, namely, of telling things by being asked about them or creating the materials of thought by arousing questions in the student's mind and then causing the in- quirer to answer his own questions, remains still the best method of producing sound mental action and steady mental force. Questions have several characteristics which are not commonly appreciated as having very important influence in the child mind. A 75 76 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME question rightly put is an exchange of ideas between two living personalities who are not merely searching for knowledge but are com- paring ideas. This is what constitutes the chief difference between a question in a book and an oral question. No inquiries printed on a page of a book will ever elicit what the same ques- tions will secure when verbally addressed from one mind to another. Manner, intonation, ac- cent, the glance of the eye and a great many other things accompany the oral question, which are absent from the printed page. Then again, the flexibility of language often admits two or even more interpretations of exactly the same words. That admits at once doubt, which is itself the greatest thought-disperser I know anything about. Only create hesitation about the meaning of a printed question and you have taken a most substantial step toward making it impossible for a child to organize his thought on that particular subject. This is the reason why teachers are so often mystified by the differences between the apparent attain- ments of a child in class and his utter failure to make the same impression when confronted by an examination paper. And until examina- tion papers are written in a form which does not admit of ambiguity, and few papers can be written which will not admit of a variety of QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 77 interpretations, this difference will always ap- pear. This is not confined to children and the student body alone. It has taken the Supreme Court of the United States twenty years to find out just what the law relating to huge in- dustrial combinations means. And apparently the final decision has created as much uneasi- ness as to its finality as the original law did. For years the best lawyers in the land struggled to find out just what the exact legal relation of their great enterprises to the statute was. And yet it was drawn by men of vast experi- ence in law-making, men who had been ad- visers to great interests for many years and who, if anybody knew, might have been as- sumed capable of saying what they meant. Yet when the Supreme Court came to review that act, at least one distinguished member of the court which rendered the decision stated that the court had read into the law something which was not there at all! Why should a child be expected automatically to guess just what the teacher had in mind in writing any question unless it is so plain as to answer it- self? The simple truth is, that anyone who knows anything about the reading and mark- ing of examination papers knows that different markers will give totally different valuations 78 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME to exactly the same reply. It is the personal equation which has been taken out of the ques- tion and the question is, in fact, not a question properly at all when considered from the true standpoint of a test of knowledge. It is pos- sible in certain forms of mathematics to give exact questions and for this reason mathemat- ics have the least possible educational value of all studies. But the moment you get into a region where active thought is employed, the personal equation is so important that, as stated, unless the question practically answers itself there is room for an almost endless va- riety of answers. Turn a moment to another profession. All successful medical practice turns upon successful diagnosis. But what are the facts when you have a serious case of sickness? Not infrequently the very best minds will give totally different interpreta- tions of exactly the same data. The elements of experience, personality, habits of mind, moral steadiness and a great many other things enter into the diagnosis together with the med- ical imagination, all of which suggest different courses of procedure. This is within the com- mon knowledge of all people. Why should a child be expected from a printed question to find the exact reply which was in the teacher's mind in framing the question? And if, in the QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 79 stating of the question, there was the addi- tional desire, and it is not infrequently present, to confuse the student or at least to trick him into saying what the question does not call for, by deliberate ambiguity, who is responsible for the absurd and stupid answers with which all examination papers abound? There is hardly a greater indictment possible of much educa- tional procedure than the methods which edu- cators employ to test their students. Now this whole matter goes back much far- ther than most people suppose. The art of questioning is an art. That must be recognized first of all. And as an art it must be culti- vated and because it is an art subject to culti- vation there is nothing particularly mysterious or baffling about it. In a similar way the art of replying is also an art and may be cultivated, and there is nothing mysterious about that. And where the relations of the questioner and the questioned are sound relations, art will develop naturally and will prove one of the most fertile instruments of mental develop- ment. The true manner of discovering whether certain knowledge has been mastered and is a permanent part of the mental furni- ture or not turns very largely upon this item of questions and answers. To frame a ques- tion properly constitutes the fine art of teach- 80 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME ing. And to begin the framing of questions properly with little children is to prepare them for giant strides in intellectual advancement. Who ever thinks of putting questions to little children with exactness and with the purpose of causing exact mental effort on the part of the child? To give one more illustration in this matter, I take from the five text-books on Virgil's "iEneid" before me the following: Here is a line containing a noun in the ablative case. Two of the five text-books in the notes call it a dative, the forms being alike. The other three call it an ablative, but all three differ among themselves as to what kind of an abla- tive it is ! But someone will say that is a for- eign language. True enough. But I have also before me at this moment ten English papers in which a high-school teacher had given what I have no doubt she supposed was an accurate statement of what she wished her students to do. But four of the students did one thing, three did another and three did something still different and none of them did what the teacher declares she called for ! And they constituted more than half of the class. Now obviously somebody was at fault. The case is made even more interesting by the fact that five out of the ten are the best students in QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 81 the class judged by their previous markings. Now it would be unfair in this particular case to hold that she is an exception among the great mass of teachers of high-school English. My own opinion is that she is an exceptionally capable one. But the fact still remains that her ambiguity in stating a question which, as I think, admitted of clear statement, threw half her class, and the better half at that, into absolute confusion. I have seen history papers in which the confusion was even worse con- founded. When, therefore, one sees a news- paper article announcing the fearful and won- derful information which examination papers reveal, it will be well to remember that per- haps the English in which these questions were put, was in some instances, at least, almost as fearful and wonderful as the replies. And the absolute elimination of the personal rela- tion, through which knowledge comes most readily, most accurately and with greatest logical coherence, tends to make the matter more comprehensible. I know any number of persons whose letters so absolutely misrepre- sent them that they would not possibly be rec- ognized by them. In fact I lately made an experiment along this line. I called together one evening five young per- sons from whom I had previously received let- 82 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME ters on the same subject. I asked two very gifted persons, teachers of effectiveness and conversationalists of talent and skill, to meet them and on the basis of an evening's inter- course with these young people write the names of the authors upon their own letters, that is, identify the author as personally known in her written work. The result was absolutely ludi- crous. In only one case was there any sem- blance of agreement and this was afterward confessed as being induced by something that had nothing to do with the matter of the letters. As a matter of fact there was nothing in the letters that in the slightest degree made it pos- sible to link the written document with the living person. Afterward I gave some in- struction to one of these persons, with the re- sult that there began to be some coherence be- tween the person and the document she wrote. The letters were full of blunders of all kinds. The spoken speech was almost faultless in so far as a general conversation reveals such faults. The grammatical absurdities which these young people wrote would have made them impossible for an evening's conversation. Yet they were interesting people and capable people. The simple fact was, that, asked orally about the same things concerning which they wrote brokenly, stupidly and blunderingly, QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 83 they were reflective, measurably exact and in- teresting. And between the two there was a great gulf fixed. From all this I wish simply to establish the extreme importance of the personal equation in the matter of giving and extracting knowl- edge. My point is that this process should be- gin so early that the necessary allowances in a child's mind will be made and such judgment developed and exercised that the almost neces- sary ambiguity, inherent in a language like the English language, will be met by the ability to think around the subject and make some just and correct inferences as to what the question probably means. This involves the cultivation in the home of the art of questioning and of an- swering questions and of interlinking factual knowledge with inferential judgments so as to make available whatever knowledge there is in the child mind. Wise questioning almost always turns upon the nature of the relation of the vocabulary of the questioner to that of the child. How often parents are puzzled by questions which chil- dren ask about their school work merely be- cause it is put in terms which they do not un- derstand. How often have I heard a parent say to a child, "Oh, is that what you meant?" which simply means that the school had one 84 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME vocabulary of the subject and the parent an- other. But hardly less frequently the teacher has one vocabulary and the student another. Now, as stated, a part of this is inevitable. It must be bridged, if bridged at all, by the full- ness of the vocabulary of the child, since the child has no opportunity to place the teacher under examination. The rights, at present, are all on one side and the duties all on the other. The earliest years of life are the ones in which the mind is most eager and in which the inquiries come with least artificiality and with the greatest directness. That is the time to answer with the most abundant information, with the largest relationships and with the widest possible collaboration. For example, there is a war in progress and the names of places and the civilization of the contending nations are discussed at the breakfast table. That is the time to answer the child's question with the greatest possible fullness. It is a time not merely to answer with clearness and precision the thing called for, but to link it with the great variety of collateral things which are at that moment so related to the question asked as to enable the parent to teach simultaneously history, geography, manners, morals, language, philology and much more QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 85 beside. Here again the outcry will be at once, "Oh, but we have not the equipment to do all this." My reply is, that this is non- sense, for even the daily newspapers, the best of them, do this very thing and it involves in its least capable form merely the intelligent gathering of special news articles and the careful reading of them, looking at a map and the intelligent and careful scrutiny of it and a walk to even the most meagerly equipped town library and the examination of the catalogue for a book or two on the sub- ject. All this should come out of a question brought forward under the circumstances in- dicated. The same thing is true concerning inventions or great events and is specially true concerning great personalities. It will be readily seen that later -on ques- tions in this field will instantly bring back the circumstances under which the information was originally gained, it will be allied with a great variety of miscellaneous information se- cured in connection with it and any question in this area by any outside agency will be in- terpreted not only in the light of what it ac- tually asks but in the light of the full infor- mation and the discussion in which it was first acquired. You have in fact given to the child a number of means of finding out, in case of 86 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME doubt or ambiguity, what is probably re- quired. With little children the most trivial things can thus be linked with solid knowledge so that the results are almost beyond belief. Nor must all this be supposed to lead to, or necessarily involve, undue or unpleasant ma- turity on the part of the child. Any infor- mation which comes in a natural way is inter- esting and has the accompaniments which make it possible to be linked with what is al- ready in the child's mind. The fact that a child asks, "What kind of people are the Turks?" makes the natural background for finding out what induced that question and then putting in with strong and sumptuous liberality the background which will make that question, when asked again, luminous with many kinds of replies. To tell what kind of people the Turks are gives the natural opportunity for teaching history, for recall- ing inspiring romance, for dealing with fun- damental questions of morality and religion — the foundation problems of civilization and humanity. Why should it be postponed? I mention this particular example because I saw some years ago the question on a paper, "De- scribe the Turks." It does not require much imagination to picture the absurd confusion of the answers. So absurd a question invited QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 87 the absurd replies which it received. But there was one child that told something of the Turkish Empire in Europe, something about Mohammed and Mohammedanism, something about the status of women in Oriental lands and finally a description of the Mosque of St. Sophia seen at a stereopticon exhibition. But it had absolutely nothing to do with what the teacher who asked the question had in mind. The psychology of this matter of question- ing is most interesting. A child's question is really an exhibit of its method and premier interests. When young children question, you have generally a simple idea and while it is in itself a simple idea, its form almost al- ways reveals the general notions and leading thoughts out of which it has come. When a child asks a perfectly stupid question, one which does not readily indicate out of what mental movements it arose or what soil gen- erated it, there is the very best of reasons for going at once into the business of finding out what is the matter with its fundamental men- tal operations, because children do not usually ask stupid questions. Sheer and absolute ig- norance does not ask stupid questions. Ab- solute innocence asks the directest questions possible without fear and without shame. Stupidity arises from confusion of ideas. 88 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME And if this confusion is met with more con- fusion, you simply pile up trouble for the la- ter years of the student life. Such a situation should be met by intelligent questioning as to whence the original question, how induced, with what interest in mind, and, in fact, the bringing out of the entire mental furniture of the child into the open so that what is rubbish will readily reveal itself. Not to do this is to add to every subsequent handling of the theme elements which cannot possibly do otherwise than destroy clearness in thought or successful handling of knowledge gained. I know no region where greater stupidity pre- vails than in circles where it ought not to ex- ist, namely, academic assemblies, and I have very lately heard the president of a great uni- versity, seeing the discussion of the theme upon which he had spoken, take on a form which indicated either that he had mistaken his subject or the assembly was bent on discussing something else, rise in his place and explain to the hundreds of teachers present what he understood himself as having been invited to discuss and state that the discussion related to something quite different and proceed to talk about the subject de novo. Here you had evidently a question dubiously stated by the programme committee, its import misin- QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 89 terpreted by a university president, an as- sembly of teachers failing to connect with the president's interpretation and finally an effort (not wholly successful as it appeared to me) to connect in the final stages of the discus- sion! And yet it related to a subject in which the whole academic world at this mo- ment is vitally interested. And yet we have the hardihood to mark down children for their failure to understand oftentimes what their teachers and examiners mean in their papers! The fact is, that questions and answers as- sume that the people asking and the people answering live within mental speaking dis- tance of each other. The university president just referred to was thinking of a dif- ferent world from that in which the great assembly of teachers were living. That was perfectly plain. After the first few moments they saw or felt that, and their minds refused to connect it with what they were thinking about most. This is exactly what happens with children when much so-called instruction takes place. The important thing is to get the mental touch which links the question to the interests, the personality of the child, and which admits of the utilization of previous knowledge and inquiry. Nowhere can this situation be secured with such perfection of 90 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME detail, with such satisfactory and suggestive surroundings, as in the home. The natural affections, the habitual association of ideas, all tend to make an adequate and satisfactory framework for both the question and the an- swer. And the comparison of question and answer instantly opens other avenues of infor- mation, and few occasions of such intercourse stop with a single question. What happens is, that one thing leads to another and before that question is disposed of, many other things have been opened for inspection, more and other questions have been raised and the foundation has been laid for a resumption of the instruction at another time. There is an- other rather important distinction between questioning at school and questioning at home, the influence of which is significant in the development of a child's mental life. An- swering at school contemplates as a rule sim- ply accuracy, namely, satisfaction of the supposed desire of the instructor. But ques- tioning in the home takes on the aspect of a search for truth as distinguished from mere accuracy. It is not unknown both in school and college for young people to come to understand that this or that teacher requires certain replies to certain questions. Indeed many such "standard" answers are handed QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 91 down from one class to another, constructions of particular passages in Latin, peculiarities in pronunciation, habits of emphasis and the like. In nearly every large college it is pos- sible to buy from certain persons who have them for sale, the ready-made materials for passing examinations in some courses because the kind of answer demanded is well defined and well known. All that is required is that the "right" answers shall be given. But this is not the case when it comes to the interplay of the parental and the filial mind. Here the subject is up because of its intrinsic interest to one or the other party to the interrogatory. If it begins with the child, the parent by rea- son of interest in the advancement of the child's knowledge and culture, will make the most of the opportunity to give much infor- mation and give it with reference to the total life of the child and especially as a veracious foundation for judgment, for comparison and future light. Mere correctness gives place to a larger ideal of the matter in hand. If it originates with the parent, the child will naturally also presume that the subject itself is invested with importance and interest ut- terly apart from his ability or inability to fur- nish a correct answer. This creates a totally different situation and one in which the ra- 92 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tional search for truth is begun and which, persisted in, creates a habit of intellectual ve- racity which is as important an adjunct to the intellectual life as knowledge itself and per- haps even more important. And it comes into the child's life associated with parental authority and habit, which is best of all. The art of answering questions is one which in cultivation has a decisive influence in train- ing the young mind to seek out the essential from the trivial or unessential elements of any given subject. The most simple inquiry may be answered in such a way as to leave a fine residuum in the mind of a child of deep re- spect for knowledge and pleasure in having elicited so weighty a result from so simple a question. Nothing makes a young mind glow with enthusiasm like the experience of seeing that a simple question has loosed a great stream of information and produced what the inquirer did not dream was involved when he spoke. Tapping a full mind is an exercise which yields great satisfaction both ways. For children it is a perennial source of delight and once experienced they will come back again and again with questions, if only for the pleasure of seeing what their questions will bring forth. Now out of this fullness there is a choice to be made. The wise and QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 93 observant parent will make rapid analysis of what associations have brought out the ques- tion, he will select a few leading or striking things in connection with it and will leave cer- tain determinative marks upon the mind around which the less important details will readily group themselves. This is an easy enough process to the mature mind, but not so easy for the young. But seeing the thing done often and seeing discrimination made, the habit of discrimination speedily arises and the imitative faculty very soon asserts itself in the repetition of the phases, the attitudes of mind and expressions by which the choices are indicated. Thus a certain teacher who was in the habit of introducing almost every statement of fact by the phrase "in my judg- ment," soon found that his students were adopting it and very soon after that were giving evidence rather clearly that they were actually referring matters to the "judg- ment," meaning by this they were exercising the powers of discrimination which they pos- sessed and making replies which indicated se- lection instead of mere repetition. It does not require much thought to see what an enormous advance had been made when the children had learned that. Little children especially are fond of re- 94 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME citals of personal experience and, themselves properly guided, offer beautiful narratives which are the most natural material one could desire for the training of the mind. I have known of a story composed by the children among whom it had its rise, to continue for several years, known among them as "The Story," in which each child in the nursery took its turn before they went to sleep in adding a chapter. To listen to this process was see- ing an example of the growth of pure and powerful narrative English which I have not seen matched anywhere. The story itself was enriched by suggestions by each of the four, by inquiry as to the reasonableness of this or that adventure, by promptings where the im- agination of one or the other was exhausted, by supplying of details, if for anyone there seemed to be a need of assistance in this direc- tion, correction by the older of the inaccura- cies, verbal or logical or practical, on the part of the younger, and so "The Story" went on for something like five years constantly aug- mented by the growing knowledge and expe- rience of all the children. It ceased only when the children grew old enough to occupy separate rooms. I often noticed while this story was going on, the method of asking questions and the replies which were made. I QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 95 noticed the quick demand for reasonableness and coherence. I observed especially how a question induced by want of appreciation of the view-point of an older child by a younger, was accompanied by an explanation and ex- cursus which made the matter clear, and the story did not go on until this was done. In how many school rooms or homes is a subject held up, even when it is made the subject of formal inquiry and discussion, until there is absolute clarity in the point of view between the questioner and the questioned? And yet this is what these children demanded naturally from each other and what they received in response to that demand. I have rarely heard a stupid reply to a clear question among little children. I have often heard both stupid questions and stupid replies among adults. Obviously what has been said calls for a rigorous and intelligent choice of all the mate- rial which comes to the children of the home for the formation and nurture of their intel- lectual life. Such a censorship was long fore- seen and recalls a striking passage in the Republic of Plato: "You know also that the beginning is the chiefest part of any work, especially in a young and tender thing; for that is the time 96 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME at which the character is being formed and most readily receives the desired impression. "Quite true. "And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be framed by casual persons and to receive into their minds notions which are the very opposite of those which are held by them when they are grown up? "We cannot. "Then the first thing will be to have a cen- sorship of the writers of fiction and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with these tales even more fondly than they form the body with their hands, and most of those which are now in use must be dis- carded." Here you have the principle, from a most ancient and honorable source, which should guide to-day even more than could possibly have been conceived as necessary then. If ever there was a call for censorship in the home as to what materials shall go into the mind stuff of its children there is such a call now. And this in the interest of a sound men- tal development is to be performed "even more QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 97 fondly" than we undertake the tasks of the care and development of the physical life. There is one way and one way only of finding out what impressions are being made upon children by what they read and what they hear. That way is by careful, painstaking and intelligent interrogation. It may be laid down as a general principle easily capable of verification that the subjects upon which chil- dren develop false, dangerous and often vi- cious ideas, are those upon which there has been no free inquiry on the part of parents and no free and honest answer on the part of children. My father trained me to avoid each vice by setting a mark on it by examples. Whenever he would ex- hort me to live a thrifty, frugal life contented with what he had saved for me, he would say, "Do you not see how hard it is for the son of Albius to live and how needy Barrus is a signal warning to prevent any- one from wasting his inheritance?" If he would de- ter me from dishonorable love, he would say, "Do not be like Sectanus" ; to save me from an adulterous passion when I might enjoy an unforbidden love, he used to say, "Trebonius' exposure was not credita- ble." Thus he molded my boyhood by these words. — Horace on Parental Teaching through Examples. THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE When one of our great battleships re- cently was making her trial run for accept- ance by the government, I noticed the statement that the coal used on that occasion was all of a specially selected and hand-picked kind, chosen with a view to getting the maxi- mum of heat and sustained steam for the boilers and thus making the greatest speed possible. That incident may well stand as the suggestive illustration for the doctrine which this chapter is to set forth. If you will look about you, you will observe that what the shipbuilders did for their ship, broadly speaking, Nature is doing all the time. She seeks to produce the largest amount that she possibly can. She is jealous of anything that hinders her processes and employs every possible means to get around whatever stands in her way and get productiveness for the forces at work within her. Thus your flying seed finds the only spot in a wall that has a fragment of earth in it and germinates there. Something grows everywhere. No matter 99 100 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME how cold or how warm the climate happens to be, some form of life exists and thrives and modifies itself to suit the conditions and then propagates with all its might. Man is the only animal that is deliberately lazy that I know anything about and his laziness is, partly, a result. Ease of performance and delight in achievement both grow as they are made sim- pler of attainment, and simplicity is generally secured by the elimination of waste. It is highly probable that the most wasteful per- formance now going on among us is in educa- tion or, putting it otherwise, in brain power. I have already spoken of the neglect to furnish the materials for growth in the minds of chil- dren. But it is not enough simply to supply materials, it is also needful that waste material shall be steadily removed from the minds of children and room kept for the acquisition of fresh, new and more productive mental pabu- lum that the growing child shall constantly face something which challenges the maxi- mum of its ability and does not permit the habit of laziness, in whatever form it may dis- guise itself, to grow. Perhaps I can best illustrate this by what I know about elementary educational proc- esses as I have seen them at work in Boston. THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 101 For years it was generally understood that the work in the fifth grade was not an advance upon the fourth grade, but was a sort of re- view and I know from my own observation that many a bright child under direction and observing parental guidance simply skipped that grade as a nuisance and waste of time. Many children, however, spent the year in that grade and in consequence formed habits of listlessness and inattention which years did not enable them to correct. I have observed also that certain forms of arithmetic and grammar and other studies, geography being also one, are taken several times first in a very crude, elementary form, then in a higher form, and finally in what is the last touch, before the grades are left. Now just why any subject should be taught more than once is to me an insoluble puzzle. Children can be taught square root for example once for all time. Why should they puzzle through it once haltingly and insecurely on the theory that they are going to have it more thoroughly later on? Why should they dabble with the metric system a little on one occasion, know- ing that they will have it more thoroughly later on? Why should not the metric system be learned once for all and then let the mind go on to something else? Unused knowledge 102 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME is like unused furniture in storerooms, it may come in handy sometime, but most people know that it generally means that finally the stored things get so dirty or banged up that they are useless and finally sold as junk or given away. But this is exactly what we do with the minds of little children. We permit a mass of things to lumber up the mind and keep them pegging away on stuff which may or may not be useful sometime, and all the while are clogging the brain and preventing the free play of the mind on new and advanced material for the production of thought and the stimulation of efficiency. So much fun has been poked at the useless facts stuffed into children's minds about things which, when known, are of no particular use that that is not necessary here. If you want sustained mental power, you must have the mental powers kept free from hindrances in the shape of harassing wastes which clog the mind and prevent steady and enduring concentration. The damage which comes of waste in the mind is that it prevents concentration, and there is no surer way of destroying the powers of concentration, so called, than by permitting things to linger in the mind which have no business there. It is this habit, which so often causes a phenome- THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 103 non, with which most parents are perfectly familiar. A child, up to a certain point, seems to be developing naturally and satis- factorily; he is interested in his work and seems to be gaining knowledge and self-con- trol and otherwise making real and substan- tial progress. All of a sudden he stops from no cause that can be discerned and gets care- less, listless and ceases to be interested in his work. Inquiry will usually reveal that by easy stages minor and useless things have diverted the mind from its original quest. It will be found that the mind is clogged with a mass of stuff which prevents the student from giving himself to the particular thing which it is his duty to give his mind to, and the re- sult is the "slump" described. Under such circumstances there is absolutely nothing to be done but to build up the interest anew by taking out what is clogging the stream of in- terest, laboriously dredging out what is hin- dering the free and unrestrained current of mental power and attention and making pos- sible the full use of the powers of the mind. There is hardly a better way of showing this kind of thing in action than to watch a pupil or a class "taking over" a year's work or a week's work or even a daily lesson. The reason why it is being taken a second time is 104 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME usually because it was not mastered the first time. But what is the result? The student, instead of being shown what has happened, listlessly goes over the thing which he thinks he has already done and gets no farther and wastes his time another day or week or year as the case may be. In hundreds of cases which have come under my observation I have yet to find a case where anything substantial was gained by making students "take over" work which they supposed had once been per- formed. In such cases it is a time for prompt, decisive action. The thing must be mastered then and there and left. In fact, my own judgment is that it would be better to leave it entirely and supplement in other ways than drum along on the theory that nothing can be done till that thing has been performed. But this is itself a result. Wherever you get this experience it is very likely that the thought has become confused and concentration has become impossible by reason of the fact that waste things are clogging the otherwise free action of the mind. It is here that the necessity for clear and well-defined instruction becomes most appar- ent. Let an idea or a fact or a process come originally before the mind of a child, crisply outlined, decisively presented and effectively THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 105 illustrated and it rarely needs to be told twice! The original conception being clear, all that remains is the application of what is clearly defined in the mind. But you listen to a teacher explaining the construction of an English sentence or a Latin one or a Greek one, and almost the first thing the mature mind is impressed with is the obscurity of the explanation. In fact, the explanation has often been more puzzling to me than the original sentence to be construed. I used to notice in the German schools the great differ- ence in this respect between them and the English schools, the former abounding in striking, determinative and boldly outlined definition, description and assertive explana- tion. The latter seemed to me heavy, in- volved and often so stupid that I wondered that children could listen at all. Now it was not that the children under this latter instruc- tion did not gain anything. The trouble was far more serious. The mind was being filled with waste stuff and the entire mental action was being clogged, hindered and hobbled. In- terest under such circumstances was impos- sible and I saw little. Or if interest was aroused, it was of a nature not complimentary to the instruction, as when I saw a youth pass a, paper, during one of these heavy disserta- 106 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tions to which nobody listened and which ob- viously bored everybody, which paper, being dropped, was picked up by me and I read with amusement the following illuminating- screed, "Bet you a quarter she don't know what she means herself." As a betting prop- osition it was worthless ; there could be no tak- ers on a matter so obviously one-sided. Every ill-defined idea and every confused notion put into young people's minds is sim- ply like dropping pebbles into cog wheels. Yet most of our text-books are witnesses that this process has been elevated into a fine art. I have in mind at this moment my own diffi- culties with the so-called problems in algebra. I venture the statement which thousands of sufferers with me will echo, that many, if not most, of the problems in algebra are not mathematical problems at all, but are puzzles in the English language, if such brutal stuff can be called language. I have proved again and again that once you state the equation, the student has no difficulty and this is the im- portant thing. But you muddle up things for the student till the main question becomes not one of mathematics but one of English, and it is supposed to be fine discipline for a young person to find out what under heaven THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 107 the text-book maker was thinking about when he carefully hid away the elements of the question he sought to propound. One might just as well hide a needle and a spool of thread and a thimble about in a barn and set a little girl to find them and call it a lesson in sewing. For sheer stupidity and mental brutality, these so-called problems are prob- ably unmatched in the whole theory of educa- tion. They are the rock pile of youth, struggling toward mental power and self -con- sciousness. They might as well be sent to mental penal servitude at once and be done with it. Nobody will ever know the anguish which has been thus heaped upon helpless young people, who, under any rational deal- ing with exactly the same things, would have had not only interest but pleasure in perform- ing this work. I knew an old lady who in her old age and infirmity found recreation in charades, puzzle pictures and algebra prob- lems. The classification was both scientific- ally and practically sound. The waste, inherent in such a process of communicating knowledge, however, is hardly to be compared with that arising from the ac- quisition of useless and false information through the failure to create and maintain 108 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME some programme for the coordination of the knowledge gained. One reason why the Bi- ble remains incontestably the best book for general culture and the most useful text-book for mental growth and maturity, is for just the reason that almost everything learned from it means that about fifty other things are learned at the same time. Knowledge of the English Bible, for example, means the en- trance into English literature by its widest and most interesting gate. It means the en- trance into history through its most fascinat- ing portals. It means the introduction to hu- man motives by means of the surest and most exacting standards. It means immediate, interesting and fertilizing touch with a thou- sand interests at once. And all these things come together at the time of life when the rudiments of criticism are being formed and lay the foundations for the best structural organization of the mind. Take the most arid portions of the Old Testament and there is no waste in their acquisition, and now that the Bible has a place among the books which may be offered among the English require- ments for admission to college, there is a util- ity about it for that purpose also. There is no waste in any of this material. Hence the Bible remains the most fruitful book for the THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 109 purpose of training children and youth, and, properly done, does other things of even more importance than those indicated. But similar results may be secured in the intelligent choice of other materials. There is a choice, is there not, in giving a child a toy which excites not the slightest effort or one that causes inquiry into what makes it go? There is a choice, is there not, in the kind of activities to which a child is directed? The perpetually recurring question of young chil- dren is, "What shall I do?" That is the op- portunity of the parent and the choice there may be of a character which will fill with se- lected, intensively productive matter the in- quiring young mind. What most people do, is to throw anything that comes handy to the child and get rid of thinking about it. But this question, while not vocalized, in exactly the same way goes on through the earlier years of life. Boys and girls while not ask- ing the question, may be led, directed and en- riched some of the time without their knowing it. And all the time their standards of taste may be raised, their interests widened, their abilities for choice made stronger and their selective habits clarified all along the line. The degree to which this is carefully done, is also the degree to which waste materials are 110 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME kept out of the child's life and mind and worth-while things substituted. In the country village where I am writing this, there is a man who for years has done here what every parent and teacher should do. This genial lover of his kind, until infirmity prevented him from continuing his practice, used to go to the village library, when it was opened for the drawing of books on Satur- day afternoon, and lounge around the place watching the boys and girls as they came to draw books. Friendly with them always, he used to note their perplexity, and answer be- fore it was uttered the question, "What shall I get?" by a suggestion here* and a' bit of in- formation there, and by easy stages he got the young people to read desirable things and has for years done a most valuable work of which the young people who grew up under that practice are at this moment not even aware. One result is that more young people in this village take higher education than is probably the case in any village of its size for miles around. This man was simply preventing mental waste. Left to themselves the young people would have filled their minds with fic- tion simply, and probably not the best of that. As it was they got biography, travel, history, THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 111 natural science and politics. That is exactly the plan which ought to be inaugurated in every household in the land. The collateral result which this has on scholarship is one of the tilings which should not be overlooked either. The cheap and useless stuff, tons of which are printed every year as "children's books," is not only worthless as fertilizing matter, but it is full of misinformation. I lately looked over such a book, which was well printed and of a make-up which will insure its purchase by thousands of well-to-do people, in the interest of the mental life of their chil- dren. It happened to deal with a portion of the country with which I am well acquainted. Simply in glancing through this book, I counted thirty-one errors of fact. I know plenty of books on the same subject far more interesting and full of solid historical mate- rial which an intelligent choice would have substituted for this volume. The children who read this book, supposing they are deal- ing with actual history, will find their mental furnaces choked with slag and be perpetually bothered to find out that what they have been accepting as fact is in reality falsehood. A right choice at that time would have given the mental furnace selected, hand-picked coal 112 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME from a scholar's mind and generated in the mental machinery substantial power for years to come. Prompt substitution of advanced material for material thoroughly digested and under- stood is another element in the successful elim- ination of waste. When do we discard one size of shoes for a child and get a larger size? When the shoes are outgrown of course. But I have seen children wearing the baby shoes of their minds long after they had outgrown them. It is a pleasant sensation to dwell upon what one knows thoroughly and as thoroughly likes. Children in this respect are not unlike adults who love to read and re- read their favorite authors. Now if the au- thor is worth reading more than once, that is one thing. But this is rarely the case with children's books, and when a child persistently is found reading the same thing over and over again, it simply indicates that the absence of mental effort involved in that process is breeding laziness and that the mind is stag- nating. Then promptly something more stimulating and more exacting should be sub- stituted. Here again the Bible is an excep- tion, because almost every text in the Bible has been commented upon so extensively that con- stant contact provokes increasing reflection THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 113 and inquiry, which is of course the end of all mental effort. But there should be a con- stant and steady taking out and fresh putting in of materials which call for exertion and at- tention so that these faculties of exertion and attention may be kept up to their full possi- bilities. One reason why the excessive reading of certain kinds of newspapers is mentally so very damaging to all people, young or old, is that it dissipates the mental powers, causes the mind to dwell indiscriminately upon im- portant and unimportant things and destroys the sense of proportion. The critical facul- ties are thus dulled and finally lost. One gets of course a "nose for news," but few people who have any important business on hand, ex- cept in professions where "a nose for news" is a necessary tool for efficiency, have any use for this kind of a "nose." But the thing can be done with books as successfully as with newspapers. The ability to think consecu- tively and the power of sustained thought in any given direction can be lost quite as surely in a library as in a newspaper reading room. When people say what one often hears, "I never could remember which was which" or "I never was good at that sort of thing," and such-like expressions, they merely mean that 114 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME at the time when these things ought to have been given to them clearly, definitely and with clarified assertiveness, the stream of thought was muddy with other things and they simply got tangled up with a miscellaneous lot of other information, true, false and mixed. These persons have lost even the power of say- ing frankly what is the simple truth, "I do not know." This confusion arises from the hab- its which have been described above and from the want of a clarified, prepared mind to re- ceive what is offered. The art of making everything tell toward a given result is another of the things to be noted in keeping the mind filled with fertile instead of wasteful matter. There is scarcely a subject which does not in the hands of a mature person, who is interested in the work, admit of endless development illustratively and otherwise. Now the more things you link with any important fact, the more you convince, first, of its importance, and, second, the more surely you give it its fixed place in the mental furniture. In dealing with young people, my habit has always been to tell every- thing I knew about the topic under discussion. If I knew little, I made it my business to find out more. But the outstanding impression I always sought to leave, was that the thing had THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 115 infinite possibilities and that there was a great deal about it to be learned which was as inter- esting or even more interesting than that which I had already communicated. That is exactly what an advertisement seeks to do — to persuade you to investigate and finally buy the goods advertised. That is just what the publisher's prospectus does about the book he wants you to buy. As a teacher, I advertise the wares I have to offer. I am not above making my subject as interesting as I can and showing that there is going to be a great loss to my students if they don't take what I offer them. The lure of knowledge is the most fascinating game in the world. The child mind, eager, ready and anxious to be filled, follows any leader who has the capacity to lead. The deplorable fact is that this is a period when we give the children lies of all kinds — lies about religion, lies about social facts, lies about the family, lies about life and lies about everything that has importance and relation to sane and sound living later on. Of course the people who do all this do not call them lies. They invent other fictitious terms but the simple fact remains that falsehoods are substituted for the truth. By and by the falsehoods are discovered to be such and then comes the tragedy of the dropping out of the 116 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME moral underpinning, the loss of confidence in those who should command it most. But the truth is not less interesting than the substitutes for it, interesting as some of these are. Cer- tainly if the same skill were expended in tell- ing true and great things that is now wasted in things worthless and false, the result would be astounding. Reference must be made again here to the Bible because it illustrates the point bettei than any other book. Your child wants a story. A very little study will embellish with side lights and historical illustration al- most any part of the Biblical narrative, and you have the best mind stuff imaginable. For older boys and girls, the interpretive word as a mature person is able to give it will acclima- tize in the mind of very young people the clas- sic authors and give them a permanent place in the intellectual affections. Anybody can prove this by simply trying it. And by so much as this programme succeeds, waste is cast out and the ground firmly and fruitfully occupied. This process has one further and interest- ing result. Parents who employ it will find themselves growing skillful in anticipating possible error and preventing misconceptions developing, and will find themselves organiz- THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 117 ing their own knowledge in a way, which, without this plan, they are hardly likely to do. The path of knowledge, like the path of the just, shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Soon there develops between parent and child a mutuality of understanding, an aptitude of appreciation and apprehension of meaning, and out of this arises a dialectic which is one of the best results of the entire programme. Steadily there begin to recur the little tests of skill, trials of power and comparisons of judgment, by reason of the fact that the child's mind becomes aware of itself, in contrast to the mature mind, and at the same time begins to take the measure of the mind which is guiding and controlling it. It may not be with some parents an uninter- esting collateral result, that they are taught quite as much as the child. But in any case, the worthy occupation of the mind is achieved and that of itself makes certain noxious forms of mental development impossible. The greatest reverence is due to a child! If you are contemplating a disgraceful act, despise not your child's tender years, but let your infant son act as a check upon your purpose of sinning. For, if at some future time he shall have done anything to de- serve the censor's wrath and show himself like you not in person only and face but also the true son of your morals and one who by following in your foot- steps adds deeper guilt to your crimes, then for- sooth ! you will reprove and chastise him with clamor- ous bitterness and then set about altering your will. Yet how dare you assume the front severe and license of a parent's speech, you who yourself though old do worse than this, and the exhausted cupping glass is long ago looking out for your brainless head? — Juvenal, on Discipline by Parents. VI HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION In undertaking to talk about the imagina- tion one must always be cautious, yet some things seem to be pretty well established now by psychological science which it is worth while to consider in the very practical and in- teresting business of rearing children. Im- agination in children is one of the most pow- erful influences moving them, and to leave so powerful an instrument entirely without reg- ulation, use and utilization seems like a great waste and, in fact, it is an absolutely unpar- donable waste. Professor James in his great work on psychology quotes Galton as saying, after finding that most "men of science" pro- tested that mental imagery was unknown to them, the following, "On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met in general so- ciety I found an entirely different disposition to prevail. Many men and yet a larger num- ber of women and many hoys and girls de- clared that they habitually saw mental imagery and that it was perfectly distinct to them and full of color." This led to investi- 119 120 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME gations which proved the truth of a declaration made by boys and girls absolutely without sci- entific training or interests and established, by this means, a most important element to be kept in mind in the rearing and mental training of young children, of which comparatively lit- tle use is made for the higher intellectual life. Moreover, this imaginative power is not at all connected with vision. Again he says, "In- telligent children take pleasure in introspection and strive their very best to explain their men- tal processes. I think the delight in self -dis- section must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in con- fessing to priests." So much for the science of the thing. On the practical side the facts are very clear and easily verifiable in any household where there are "intelligent" children, which does not mean exceptional children or children highly gifted in one way or another, but children who are well and able to take the ordinary child's part in household life. The imaginative life of a child is usually regarded by parents and ma- ture people merely as a pleasant source of amusement and not as a tool for the child's future development. And not a few persons to whom one mentions the idea of utilizing the imagination are repelled by the thought as in HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 121 some way robbing the child of something pe- culiarly pleasurable and which is the child's very own and, therefore, not to be interfered with. To "harness" the imagination, there- fore, will very naturally strike many persons who read this book as an unpleasant bit of utilitarianism. It springs from exactly the same feeling which persists in letting children misuse words because they are "cunning" and indulge in baby talk because it is "cute." Of course the difficulties which are thus inte- grated into the child's mental fixtures to make trouble in the future are not considered. But then serious consideration for children's intel- lectual growth is one of the things American parents have yet to learn. In a certain nursery with which I am very well acquainted there are upward of thirty dolls of all sizes and descriptions. Probably the whole collection with the single exception of a large French doll, a gift to the children of this nursery, could be replaced for less than two dollars. But the value of that collection of dolls to the intellectual life and training of the children who have and still use them can hardly be overestimated. Their names will prove their peculiar relation to the intellectual interest alluded to, comprising, as they do, Cleopatra, Julius Csesar, Mark Hanna, King 122 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Edward and Queen Alexandra, Lucy and Mary (standing in this case for Lusitania and Mauretania, the great steamships), Jupi- ter, Cupid, John Harvard and a great many others. Here is certainly a very diversified company and they all stand for something in particular. Now, names have figured very largely in the history of all the great human interests. Religion, for example, especially among primitive races and the earlier nations, can be worked out almost entirely from the use of divine names. Names usually connote events and principles and standards of con- duct or relations of one kind and another, all of which are the raw materials of thought and springs of action. Every one of the names in the above list is distinctly connected with the set of ideas which the chil- dren who own these dolls had gained and which they thought worth while to give permanent form. The external representa- tions were made in accord with these ideas, but, as a matter of fact, in this group there was gathered a large fund of knowledge which has been useful in many other ways al- ready and will be useful in still others yet to appear. For example, the name of Cleopa- tra is distinctly connected with certain stories of Egypt which led directly to the investiga- HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 123 tion of other stories about Egypt and left a rather good outline of that land and its his- tory in the minds of these children with a va- riety of detail which would not be discredit- able in most mature people. I recall very well when Cleopatra broke her head and by reason of the studies to which her personality had led, she was "embalmed" (another avenue of information fruitful in many directions) in a compound of olive oil, cloves, cinnamon and other ingredients which I do not now re- call. While she was being buried, a Dart- mouth professor happened into the home as guest and, seeing this procession going on and inquiring into the reasons for it, proceeded to give a lecture on Egyptian life and habits and customs, as he had seen them, which has crystallized permanently a mass of addi- tional information about Egypt in the minds of all the children. "Mark Hanna" was rather fully discussed one day at the dinner table in connection with an exciting political cam- paign in which he figured. His political generalship, his astuteness and his general representative character made a sufficient im- pression to cause a new little doll to be named for him. But the doll has also permanently embodied in the minds of the children the com- plete history of a political campaign with 124 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME numerous incidents of American public life, questions of public morality which have al- ready had and must have an increasing influ- ence on their thought about these things as they become more experienced and mature. "John Harvard" came so early and has had so great an influence that the question of college education and preparation for it has never been discussed by these children except as to the probable date of entrance. "Lucy" and "Mary" were born out of an extensive discus- sion of ocean travel, of the rise, development and expansion of steamship transportation and probably brought into the minds of the children all they were able to contain about that subject. They are the visible symbols of a distinctly understood scientific enterprise. Now that is what I call harnessing the im- agination. In this case it happened to be dolls. But it happened also with kittens who bore the names respectively of Siegfried, Tigris-Euphrates and Peter! It is a per- fectly safe statement that from the doll, "Helen of Troy," these children at a very early age got a full, complete and accurate account of the "Iliad" and a large section of Greek history. "Scipio Africanus" in the shape of a particularly handsome cat more than justi- fied his existence by the increment which he HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 125 brought to the children's knowledge. I have known a pet frog to embody in his title, which for obvious reasons I cannot give, the per- sonality and outstanding characteristics of a well-known town character. Now all this was using the imagination so to speak, for all it was worth. It gave practical things to play with, and it also stirred the mind and stored the memory with things which were in- tellectually fertilizing and distinctly valuable. All that it required was somebody at hand to furnish the material and the children did the rest. The imagination was made a distinct adjunct to knowledge-getting and with this knowledge were laid the foundations for ca- pacity and power of comparison in a great many ways. I should like to know whether this was not quite as childlike and whether it was not infinitely more valuable than the Jessies, Fannies and Bessies and what not, with absolutely no accompanying story? To be sure, these children had their "Maries" and their "Lillians" who were simply creations with no history. But it remains true that the historical characters have been the abiding ones and they are the ones which have enriched the storehouse of memory and knowledge. They also have been the ones which have fur- nished the greatest pleasure. This linking of 126 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the imaginative life with the sources of knowl- edge is one of the most fruitful fields in the intensive training of children. As Galton says, children love to recall and recount the stories with which the experiences which come to them are connected. And if these stories are allied to something of intrin- sic worth and interest the gain is just so much greater. But I know of very little use be- ing made of this vast power which is pecul- iarly strong in children and which is also in children exceptionally active. History be- gun in this way will be a perennial source of delight as long as the brain works. The field for mental enrichment and expansion is by this tool made almost unlimited. And it can readily be seen what an advantage is gained by a child so trained. Names connected with stories learned in childhood and stored in the memory take away the strangeness of these tilings when encountered later on, and not only so, but are met as old friends with whom a pleasant relationship is resumed. They start streams of thought in many directions. They open countless conjectures about men, manners and habits of life. They make, al- most without effort, schemes of life and contrasts of appearance, behavior and ideals of achievement, which become principles of HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 127 action and almost determine the intellectual interests of later life. Children so trained are immune to the cheap and vulgar appeals to their imaginative life, and the ordinary "comic" has nothing for them except a mo- ment's idle examination for the idea, which, usually absent, leaves only disgust for the bar- renness of so much effort expended without result. From what I saw thus developed in my own nursery, I turned to others, and have for twenty years taken pleasure in examining what was going on in the nurseries of the homes to which I have had access. I have watched the life of children and have over and over again proved that children left untouched and untrained in this department of their life suffer a great loss. And I have demon- strated to my own satisfaction, at least, that almost any child will take up almost any kind of material and assimilate it. I have in mind at this very moment a household which rather prided itself upon the fact that it was "untainted" with any religion. Romping with its children on one occasion, I told, in a resting interval, the story of David and Goliath without mentioning its Biblical source. A few days later coming up the front walk of that home with the father of my young friends, many inches taller 128 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME than I, we were instantly hailed as "David and Goliath," and I was called David by those children ever after. That led to results in the use of the Bible in that home which have been nothing short of revolution- ary. The boy who was attracted by that story is now a minister of the gospel and links the transformation of his life and that of his home with the fact that I caught his imagina- tion with a historic tale, which, when he grew to appreciate its significance, caused a spirit- ual revolution. But there is nothing spe- cially new in this. The spiritual revolutions of history have generally found their sources in the stories which, heard in childhood, have roused the imagination and become crystallized into principles of action. A distinguished American who has made a national reputation as a criminal prosecutor told me that, when a famous railroad wrecker had caused the loss of his father's fortune, the effort of his mother to explain their change of life by tell- ing the story not of the family wrongs but of the injustice of such proceedings, making ab- stract for her small boy what they were ex- periencing in the concrete, set his imagina- tion on fire to be a sword of vengeance against evil doers of this kind. He never got away from that early impression. To-day his HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 129 name is a terror to certain great interests which are unjustly employing their privileges and power to the people's disadvantage. Again and again he has been approached to give his brilliant mind to the legal defense of some of these interests. But when the temptation has come, he has heard that primi- tive imaginative note of righteous indignation and he remains the unpurchasable advo- cate of righteousness and justice. The his- tory of the courts in this land has literally been changed by that swaying of the imagina- tion of a child. The country has not a few persons who are figuring large in its institu- tional life who have derived their inspiration and bent in the same way. Their imaginative life was early harnessed to definite human conceptions and made not only their own his- tory but in no inconsiderable degree the life and history of their fellow-men. My small boys very early manifested what is quite common in small boys, the love of arms and armor and weapons and combat. By a little direction their shields became or- namented with crosses and their battles be- came crusades and their exercise in this way transformed into an instrument of historic and ethical culture. This was long before the idea had been embodied in an organiza- 130 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tion for boys which now does this thing in connection with church work for boys. My own impression is that to organize this idea in that way would tend to destroy its useful- ness, but, in any case, others have seen its util- ity for moral and spiritual cultivation. What I am seeking to lay down here, is the principle that the imagination needs and should receive at a very early stage, direction, and the mea- ger equipment of the child supplemented and furnished, where the need exists, with a body and a content. All such additions to the ma- terials for imaginative reflection are sheer gain. It is literally getting something for nothing, for it creates something where noth- ing was before and gives the little mind some- thing to work on and toward, which is usually just what the young mind wants. I venture to say that with all the increase in children's books and the forms of child teaching and guidance and with the enormous awakening of the formative importance of childhood, yet there is no subject to which so little attention is given by the responsible persons as to this matter of directing and controlling what goes into the minds of children and what happens to it, when it is there. It is important to see to it that a child gets food. But its digestion must also be watched. Exactly the same rule HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 131 applies to the mind. We must not merely see to it that the right things are brought before it. We must direct and assist in its assimi- lation and see that every need is supplied and that the processes of growth, and with this the formative ideas and ideals, are carefully directed, sometimes stimulated, sometimes re- strained, but in every case directed. Training and directing a child's imagina- tion has another aspect which is of importance in its mental development. Habits of atten- tion and concentration are, broadly speaking, the surest tests of the real strength or weak- ness of the mind. Now, habits of attention are developed by interest, of which something more will be said later on. But attention will be held when the inward interest, called im- agination, most strongly allies itself with the outward process of creating interest. The objective of creating the habit of attention is the important thing. It almost always may be secured when the imaginative elements are properly directed and controlled. And thus very early is begun the concentration of mind which is so necessary a feature of sound men- tality. The right use of the imagination in- stead of being a hindrance to concentration is actually the best means of securing it. This is the case because the interest is spontaneous, 132 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME because it is not projected upon the child from without, has its rise not from something outside of itself but something within craving utterance and expression. What concerns the child itself will always receive some kind of attention and what concerns itself, linked with some other allied interest, secures the same kind and degree of attention and concen- tration for that allied interest that it gives to itself. Every time you link some bit of per- manent knowledge, some fragment of litera- ture, some incident of history, some discovery of science, with some distinct imaginative in- terest of the child, you have planted a seed which is sure to be fruitful in many ways. This is why the songs which mothers sing to their children exercise such a tremendous after-influence in the lives of children who have been thus favored. They hear the song, often they learn a story; they link that story with the sweetest and dearest affection of the heart and thus soldiers and poets, heroes and scoundrels, are created in the very arms of the mothers! A friend of mine told me that he believed certain moral derelictions had been denuded of their moral hideousness because in early boyhood he had heard them treated lightly in a drinking song which he had heard his father sing. HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 133 If the harnessed imagination is an instru- ment of power, the unharnessed imagination is even seven times more destructive as a power making for mental disintegration and discursiveness. The danger of letting the imagination wander without direction and control was very early perceived by church- men who have left a very large body of liter- ature on the subject. They were thinking, of course, only on the subject of the moral and spiritual results of letting the mind dwell fondly on unlawful pleasures and indul- gences. But the lawlessness of action, bred by wanton indulgence of the imagination in matters moral, is more than matched by the anarchy bred in the mind by permitting ideas to flit into and about the mind without context and without purpose. When a man indulges in day-dreams and finds himself unable to fix his mind upon the things he is set to do, it simply indicates that he has not the will power to control his imagination on the one hand or a misdirected imagination on the other. Per- haps the two things are not very different. But this process may be seen in its beginnings at an early age. It is seen in commands by parents which are unheeded, by instructions which are forgotten, by negligence in a thou- sand different directions where the uncon- 134 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME trolled imagination has run away with the ac- tuality. The habit of lying by children often is exactly this and nothing more. An un- harnessed imagination is the best soil possible for every kind of moral delinquency, but it is also the effective agent of mental inefficiency. This arises from the fact that unless connected with verifiable things, linked to matters which have distinct relation to life and actuality, with the remaining activities of the mind, the sense of accuracy and veracity is impaired or destroyed. Nearly everyone knows what it is to think about a thing so long and so long- ingly that it comes to be regarded as real. The number of persons who thus deceive themselves about themselves, the world and the things around them is legion. There is probably not one man in a thousand who has made a failure in life but the almost direct rea- son for which was that he had been living in an imaginative world of falsehoods concern- ing himself and his capabilities instead of a world of realities brightened and directed by a controlled imagination. Naturally what can cast so strong a glow over life as an aroused imagination has the same power for doing evil that it has for doing good. Here again I have a striking illustration in mind. A youth who was a contemporary of HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 135 mine in boyhood and who was skillful with pen and pencil was very early led to imagine himself "destined" to become a great artist. Foolish parents and unfaithful friends per- mitted this imaginative "destiny" to grow into a fixed belief without being scrutinized and brought under the control of severe training and exacting tests by competent and disinter- ested persons. The result has been a pathetic figure in life. And the worst feature of it is that, in the opinion of persons who are qual- ified to know, if this young boy had been trained for draftsmanship, he might have be- come not merely a useful and successful man, but might also have attained what he im- agined he was destined to be by nature. He has missed his ideal and he has missed useful- ness both. I take it that this was due almost entirely to the fact that he was permitted to indulge his imagination without control. There are thousands of music students who flock to the great cities annually with the same delusions. They are led on by an unwise and sometimes dishonest counsel and end in con- fusion and cruel disillusionment. The great cities are full of such people. Now the time to get acquainted with reality, even in the realm of the imagination, is childhood. This does not mean the destroying of dreams, it 136 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME does not mean that high hopes are to be dashed ruthlessly to the ground, that the beau- tiful visions of youth are to be crushed with- out pity by the sober, matured experience and wisdom of age, but it does mean that nobody who is truly loyal to his children will permit them to grow up with an habitually wander- ing mind and playing forever or at all with illusions which have no solid foundations on the earth. It is all right to hitch your wagon to a star, but one must be very sure that it is a star and not a will-o'-the-wisp. They look very much alike at times! And a star to which you can hitch is a harnessed star in any case! In this matter the mind is very much like an aeroplane. Getting into the air is com- paratively simple. It is a question of how and where you will come down that makes the experiment worth while and safe and inter- esting. Otherwise it would be just as well to jump off the roof of a twenty-five-story building. The old idea was to let the mind just wander and then rely that the beautiful dreams of childhood, being a free and delight- ful and irresponsible flight in the fairyland of youth, by and by would be abandoned for solider and more substantial things. But the sober truth is that the disorganization of the HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 137 mind, left for any considerable period with- out responsible control, tends to destroy con- trol altogether and makes the resumption of control, when direction is desired, a very seri- ous matter. We live in a world of law. The law of the mind is no less a law when it has to do with intangible things than when it is dealing with material matters. In children this is especially necessary because the line be- tween actuality and imagination is so faintly outlined in any case. Nobody would dream of letting a little child go out into the street on a cold winter morning in its night-dress because, looking out upon the sunlit, snow- covered landscape and believing it a fairyland, the child proposed to go out without sufficient clothing. To permit this would be called in- sanity on the part of the parents. But is it any less irrational to permit children to take their illusions into the realities of life without guidance and without control? This also I call harnessing the imagination. It is saying "Whoa" to unreality and vision when they tend to destroy the sense of clearness and to mislead the mind. Upon some of the most important human interests in the world at this moment, the vast majority of parents are saying absolutely not a word to the unbridled and uninstructed imagination of their chil- 138 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME dren. I refer, of course, to matters of sex. And for this neglect we are reaping a fearful crop of immoralities which could have been avoided by the principle of harnessing im- agination and making this most important faculty of the mind a help instead of a hin- drance to sound mental development. "The use of traveling," says Dr. Johnson, "is to regulate imagination by reality and in- stead of thinking how things may be to see them as they are." Now children cannot be great travelers. But they can be given the result of much mental journeying by the guidance and instruction of mature and trained minds. And this function, both for enriching on the one hand and for restraining on the other, belongs of right and duty to the parents who should take the childhood equiv- alent for traveling, namely, the use of the imagination, well in hand and so link the re- ality with the dream that the strength of one and the glow of the other will both be re- tained. Let the child-mind glow all it wants to glow and let it shine with all the brilliance of which it is capable. But let us take care that it does not produce sunstroke or confla- gration. It is easy to burn up the mind of a child by the extinction of the sense of reality. It is easier even to cause it to be blighted into HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 139 listlessness and incapacity by becoming over- heated with illusions and dreaming. The re- sponsibility for either calamity must be taken by the earliest guides and teachers of the child. A harnessed imagination is likely to emerge in a chastened steady glow which illuminates without burning and which clears the pathway without blinding the eyes. Let a father, then, as soon as his son is born, con- ceive first of all the best possible hopes of him, for he will thus grow the more solicitous about his im- provement from the very beginning, since it is a com- plaint without foundation that "to very few people is granted the faculty of comprehending what is im- parted to them and that most through dullness of understanding lose their labor and their time." For on the contrary you will find the greater number of men, both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man; and as birds are born to fly, horses to run and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding, whence the origin of the mind is thought to be from heaven. But dull and unteachable persons are no more produced in the course of nature than are persons marked by mon- strosity and deformities ; such are certainly but few. It will be proof of this assertion that among boys good promise is shown in the far greater number and if it passes off in progress of time it is manifest that it is not natural ability but care that was wanting. — Quintiman on Natural Ability and Training. VII MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION The multiplication of power through or- ganization has become one of the common- place observations of our industrial life. On every side we see how enterprises increase not only their efficiency but the area of their in- fluence and utilize all sorts of collateral and allied interests in enlarging their productivity and power. So generally is this principle now understood and applied industrially that there seems to be grave danger that we shall become overorganized in some directions and sacrifice to it the power of individual initia- tive, which is, after all, the most valuable thing which civilization has brought to man- kind. The only domain where this enormous power of organization does not appear to be recognized is in the region of the individual life and mind. Nearly every man organizes or tries to organize his work. Comparatively few men do or try to organize themselves for greater efficiency and power. And yet the two processes are very similar, they involve 141 142 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME almost exactly the same principles and they bring almost the same results when the work has been properly done. The difference, where there is a difference, arises, of course, that in one case you are dealing with mind and will and in the other you are dealing simply with things, and the latter are, of course, more easily handled and directed. But it is not less possible to organize selfhood and create a compact and thoroughly effective mental or- ganization for one's self than it is to so relate mere things as to make each supplement and help the other. The various capabilities of the mind and the various interests of the men- tal structure are, in fact, so far as we can judge, planned for just such coordination. And it would naturally seem to be the first business of life, and the earliest as well, to make the adjustments in a manner to secure the highest and best results. With the psychological problem here in- volved it is not my purpose now to deal. On the practical side, with which this book deals, the way and the results to be obtained are so plain that no man need err therein. The first business in education of any sort should con- template just this matter as, in fact, the old-fashioned education, though largely uncon- sciously, did. When the old-fashioned school- MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 143 masters insisted that the object of education was not facts or knowledge but discipline, they meant substantially this very thing. They saw that isolated facts were not knowl- edge, and they perceived very clearly that the mastery of certain principles made the discov- ery of many kinds of facts easy and sure. What they had in mind was simply that dis- cipline toughened the mental fiber and made men capable of thinking. But, in fact, what it really did was so to coordinate the mental faculties as to make it easy to turn from one thing to another and take with the turn all that was available for the new subject. It was the ability to apply all previous knowl- edge to a new theme and to bring to bear all former experience and contact with facts and interests upon the fresh question propounded, which gave the aspect of a disciplined mind. It was, in fact, mental organization. It was the power of utilizing everything for every- thing else that was thus acquired, whenever it was really acquired. Take now the simple observation here set forth and apply it to any school, a prepara- tory or high school for choice, and observe what happens. The great mass of boys and girls rarely carry the information they secure in one department to another. They rarely 144 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME apply the principles learned in one sphere of inquiry to the problems of another. The in- formation they have secured seems to be packed away like legal documents in separate boxes which are taken out and opened and ex- amined when that particular thing is men- tioned. In fact, we are seeing exactly this thing in the highly specialized education of to-day, where an expert in one department is just a little proud of the fact that he does not know anything about anything else, holding that this in some mysterious way makes him more competent and effective in his own. I have heard of performances on the part of highly developed specialists, doctors of philos- ophy, with regard to the most elementary mat- ter outside of their own special line of work which should have made them ashamed to show themselves in educated companion- ship. But they were not ashamed. They rather plumed themselves on their ignorance of what eveiybody ought to know. Now the process of coordinating knowl- edge and establishing a mental organization is, like all other processes, easiest when the mind is most free from hindrances and while the powers of acquisition are most keen and sensitive, which, of course, means that the period of childhood, that is, very young child- MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 145 hood, is the best time to begin this work. What has been said about language and lan- guage study will apply here with conspicuous force because words and forms of words, phrases and word stems, can be carried over from one department of knowledge to another with telling power for welding together the facts of one department with those of an- other. The same words used in different re- lations, in differing senses and with varied applications, make one of the best means for securing the result desired. In a similar way, mathematical definitions can be applied in so many ways and to so many things which seem to be unrelated to each other that the stimu- lus to find relations becomes a habit and when the habit of finding other relations than the obvious one, or the one directly in view, is established the business of mental organiza- tion has fairly begun. And when this process is begun in a young child, it has an advantage which no amount of mere cramming or in- dustrious memorizing of isolated facts can possibly match. The reason why it so often happens that a student can get good marks in a given subject and appear from examination papers to know considerable about a subject, and yet betray in five minutes of conversation absolute stupidity and helplessness in the re- 146 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME gion with which the examination seems to im- ply familiar knowledge, arises from precisely what has been just stated. Facts have been crammed into the mind ready to be pulled out for an examiner. But there has been no co- ordination of these facts with other facts which makes them usable for anything but an examination paper. The same thing can be shown in many other ways. It is a possible explanation why often an honor man proves so disappointing a member of society after leaving college. Mental self-organization, however, is not merely the multiplication of knowledge. It is the development of selfhood as well. And here comes in, perhaps, the most important element of the whole problem of child train- ing. Such organization is really training in the use and application of will-power. The intellectual discoveries made through the ap- plication of principles learned in one depart- ment of knowledge to the problems and de- velopment of another, almost irresistibly breed a purpose to do this kind of thing constantly and make for the growth of the will to study, the purpose to know, the habit of inquiry or whatever you choose to call it, and, this es- tablished, you have again another steel girder of the mental organization in place. The will MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 147 to study, the purpose to know, generally flags when the mind conceives and originates noth- ing on its own account. But give it constant exercise in originating, give it a steady dis- play of its own power to make fresh and original applications of its own skill and knowledge, and you stimulate naturally and strongly the disposition and the habit of doing this thing. Anyone who has had anything to do with children as students must have observed the time come when the child's mind seemed au- tomatically to stop. The child stops listen- ing, begins to play with something or fidgets and wants to be released. Just what has hap- pened at that moment? Very probably the child has become tired of simply being stuffed with things, however excellent in themselves or however interesting in themselves, which did not relate themselves to anything which was already in the child's mind or within the sphere of the child's interests. It simply got tired of being stuffed with what was sup- posed by the teacher or parent to be good for it. There was nothing mysterious about it. It was just like stopping eating when the appetite was fully sated. And since I have mentioned eating, may I observe, in passing, have we not all noticed how we 148 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tempt sick children or sick adults, for that matter, to eat? Food is prepared with daintiness and attractively served and chosen with reference to condition and result. Has not many a patient been beguiled into taking nutrition from which, presented in the com- monplace way, he would have turned with loathing or disgust? Everyone knows this experience to some extent. Why is not that principle sound when dealing with a tender mind? In fact, is any other principle sound or rational? But again, you begin with the things which are the matters of supreme interest to a child and you have instantaneous attention. You show that the play, the last book read, the tennis-court, the bicycle, the wheelbarrow, the water barrel, to mention only some of those which I myself have used, illustrate principles of geology or geometry or geography or a hundred other things, and every one of these things becomes a subject of attention and scrutiny for further relations. You thus make the interest in knowledge equal the in- terest in the play or diversion; in fact, you hitch the two together and very often your boy will come from the tennis-court with some observation about angles about which his mind has been subconsciously working while he was MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 149 having his fun. He will come back from digging in the sand with remarks about Cae- sar's ramparts and ditches, using his Latin terms for them, showing that subconsciously he has been applying what he learned in his last lesson. He will astound you by compar- ing some tiny rivulet, in its pathway in the garden, with the process of erosion, and there you are! That is what I call mental organi- zation and when a child begins to do that, he begins to organize himself. And what he or- ganizes himself is his very own and constitutes his reserve stock of mental power, for the grasp and attack on new things. When this method is intelligently directed by a conscientious and observing parent in connection with the fertilizing methods of which I have spoken and with the careful ex- cision of waste matter to which I have also re- ferred, you get results that are simply aston- ishing and are a joy and delight to the parent's heart. There is no satisfaction, cer- tainly very few satisfactions in life, so full of pleasure and delight as watching this process at work. The advance in self-control and will power in all directions because governed by knowledge and not by caprice is among the choicest compensations of all. Now, children can be taught a thoroughly 150 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME scholarly and scientific method of going about these things which they need not alter throughout life. For example, some years ago a group of children trained by this method had learned that the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" was a storehouse of all kinds of interesting information and if you wanted to know anything about a given subject, that was a good place to seek the information. They happened to read an interesting article on the subject of chess and chess players. They had never seen chessmen nor did they know the slightest thing about the game. In- terest being aroused, one of them suggested finding out more about it. They got down the "Britannica" and found the article on chess, found it could be played on a checker- board which they had, devised impromptu chessmen and learned the game from that ar- ticle by simply taking one statement after another and working it out. They all play chess with pleasure and considerable skill and not less so because of the rather unique way in which the knowledge was acquired. What interested me, however, was not that they had learned to play chess but that they had learned to play a far more important and useful and, to me, more exciting game, namely, the pur- suit of knowledge. Nor was it strange that MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 151 at a later period when it came to laying out a tennis-court they got the proper dimensions from the same source. Now the significance of all this is not that they got the facts they wanted. But they had so organized them- selves and their resources and had so familiar- ized themselves with at least one tool of knowledge that they had made their own a scholastic method which is daily employed in every scholar's study in the land. It was not strange that one of the children who did this, afterward, when he had an enforced hour of "study" in the high school, spent it getting stores of interesting information from the cyclopaedias, and that two of these children prepared for a certain history examination by simply reading the cyclopaedia articles having, of course, previously had their minds gener- ally familiarized with the broad outlines of the subject. Of course, at first blush, it seems somewhat uncanny and unfitting to see a rather small child struggling with a big cyclopaedia. 1 But i It occurs to me while reading the proof of this chapter that here was one of those happy accidents of life which gave it zest and enjoyment. The conjunction of the child and the encyclopaedia was the most natural in the world. See the derivation of the word encyclopaedia from iyKvuXios, circular and -iraideLa, education, bringing up a child (7rats). Who has a better right to use an encyclopaedia than the child for whom it was named? 152 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME is it any more uncanny, except for habit and association, than to see a small child with a big- express wagon or a big tricycle or any other object twice as big as itself? The fact is, we have accustomed ourselves to imagining that the child mind must be kept in the region of the trivial, stupid and foolish and have oftentimes rigorously excluded all the serious things which not only would prove as natural as the others to the child but far more interest- ing. The latter have a far greater natural re- lation to the growing child intellect and the capacity and desire for self-expression and self-organization which every healthy child feels. There is no doubt about this whatever. All that it usually wants is opportunity and intelligent guidance. The child will usually do the rest and supply the natural suggestion for the next step in any given direction. There has been a good deal said, first and last, in pedagogical circles about concentra- tion through desire, that is, getting interest and attention, through doing what you want to do, and there is much to be said for this idea. But concentration which is based on desire fails when the desire fails. Concentra- tion which lasts is based upon a disciplined will, and a trained will is acquired, so far as I have observed, by one process only, namely, MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 153 the constant facing of matters which have both the imperative of interest and necessity behind them. With children's minds the im- perative of interest is usually great enough of itself to secure concentration. And that im- perative, sufficiently developed, causes intel- lectual cravings which amount to a necessity by and by and almost automatically compel attention and concentration upon the things which are before the mind. There is another lure of which I shall speak in the next chapter but that comes somewhat later. In general, as the self -organization advances you get stronger and stronger will power because you are getting repeated applications of the will to matters of knowledge. The young mind finds that there is a possibility for hop, skip and jump in the mental world as certainly as in the physical world. It finds that there are "pace makers" and "record jumps," that there are mental "milers" and "100-yard dashes" and all the rest of it, if you want to use that terminology, and that discovery brings into the mental realm precisely the same operative motives that apply on the athletic field. Only you have joy in distancing some mental com- petitor instead of some mere man of legs. Concentration through the trained will is the secret of all successful self -organization. 154 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME Most men have no power to organize them- selves or, if they have, make no use of it. Else why can so very few men manage everybody and everything in this land? Why is the chasm between your captain of indus- try and the mass of men so wide and so deep ? Simply because most men are content to let somebody else organize their capabilities and powers into his particular scheme and when his scheme requires their elimination, out they go. But a man who is thoroughly self -organ- ized cannot be taken thus unawares and cannot be thrown out of his relations entirely on any man's dictum but his own. Holding firm grasp on himself, he keeps a clear eye on all his relations and when he discovers that some- body else is more potent in his life than he is himself, he takes prompt and often drastic measures to see to it that he restores himself to premiership of his own life. The so-called strong man of industry, the so-called man of power, with vast control over many things is a possibility only in a civilization where most people are relatively incapable of minding their own affairs or regulating their own lives. I know nothing that so develops self-govern- ment and self -regulative energy as the proc- ess I have above described, namely, of coor- dinating all kinds of knowledge so that MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 155 application of that which pertains to one thing or one department is smoothly and promptly applied in another. In a child it can be readily and effectively taught. It is the secret of effectiveness in study and self- subordination to a particular task. In a cer- tain measure it is also the secret of happiness in life. Mental self -organization brings in its train another beneficent result which is of greatest importance in study and life, namely, the ma- turing judgment. It is impossible for any length of time to practice bringing the knowl- edge of one department into every other de- partment of knowledge without gradually coming to compare the relative usefulness and availability of what has been gained. Thus a truth which is found to be true in half-a- dozen different forms of mental effort soon, by that fact, acquires a place in the mental machinery which is firmer and of greater weight than one not so generally capable of application. The comparison makes itself and when the thing has taken place often enough the comparison is made consciously and takes the form of conscious judgment on the values of the things gained. Children do this quite as readily as older people if they are given the chance, and while they do not 156 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME call it "judgment," that is, in fact, what it is, and thus the habit of comparison and exact observation, with a view to comparison, stead- ily grows. Moreover, it develops scrutiny on first acquaintance with the ultimate end in view and thus you have developing the habits of foresight and inference which lead to careful and sound reasoning. This is par- ticularly true in matters of natural history and sciences, and the thousands of simple facts about life, which are within the range of com- mon experience. They are generally neg- lected to be sure, but, organized and built into the fixed laws of the mental life, they are a conserving and constructive force which is not to be despised. Now, there remains but one more step after these have become habitual and that is to make the organization work. And the means to this is expression. When a child has done anything capably the impulse is to express the satisfaction in the achievement, and here all the previous training combines to get an ex- pression which is cogent, clear and precise and so finally you have secured just what all edu- cation should bring about, namely, the power to observe, to apply, to infer and to express the results of all these mental operations. 1 i The language is President Eliot's. See the epoch-making MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 157 After these have been established even in an elementary way you have the basis for per- sonal self-government and personal self-ex- amination, and whatever comes into the men- tal hopper will have to be ground through, subjected to these processes. That is how you get a trained mind, a full mind and a balanced mind. That is how you make a mind that finds its springs of action in itself and not in others. Thus you build up self -organization steadily, surely, and limited only by the amount of time and attention bestowed upon it and by the capacity and industry of the person who directs the work. But there is nothing about it that is mysterious or supernatural. It is all to be had for simply the consecration, to use a religious word, which will devote it- self to this duty with the same zeal, the same steadiness and self-sacrifice with which other tasks are undertaken. Even moderately pur- sued, it yields surprising results. Begun early enough and persisted in, it becomes a life asset to the child, of incomparable value. Among the hundreds of letters which I have received on this subject there is a general in- quiry about the question of dealing with the will-power of children when it takes the form essay, "Wherein Popular Education has Failed," in his Amer- ican Contributions to Civilization. The Century Co., 1897. 158 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME of obstinacy. When children are "obstinate" people generally assume that the child has a "strong will." That is, the many letters I have seen seem to indicate that this is the gen- eral opinion. But, in fact, an obstinate child has usually a weak will rather than a strong one and the obstinacy is the evidence thereof. Obstinacy arises from want of interest and in- ability to catch the threads of thought around which interest and will-subjection are trained. When not due to physical causes, it shows sim- ply that greater effort must be made to match the natural interests and tendencies of the child by more interesting experience and greater personal force of mentality by the parent. I have seen a very obstinate child brought into almost servile obedience by a teacher who simply showed in her dealing with others a way so much more excellent that the weak child longed to be led into the same path of enjoyment and pleasure in which those around it were obviously proceeding. With the dawning of the knowledge of its own in- ability to do at will what the others were doing, the sense of isolation speedily produced the normal desire of being like and with the rest, and the end of the problem was in sight. I have seen the same plan followed very sue- MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 159 cessfully with older children and sometimes even with college students. Throughout this discussion the reader will not be deceived, of course, by the employment of certain terms into imagining that all these things are attained at once or in highly de- veloped forms. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that the mind shall be started right and not be left creeping when it ought to be walk- ing; that it shall not be kept in bondage when it ought to be developing freedom; that it should not be permitted to indulge itself on feeble stuff which makes no draft upon its growing and acquisitive powers when it ought to be kept trained day by day for severe tasks and build up strength which is resident in itself rather than dependent upon outside stimu- lus and outside nutrition. Mental foraging should be encouraged, books of all kinds being left for casual examination and for the mo- mentary impulse to look at them and some- times into them. Materials for inquiry and comparison should be furnished in variety and abundance and no inquiry left to caprice or carelessness and never to indolence. When the attention is arrested in any direction, its possibilities should be explored. When inter- 160 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME est develops in any form, its collateral rela- tions, especially for mental organization, should be examined and the fixed laws of men- tal development promptly hitched to that interest. The attention and instruction thus be- stowed in the few early years of childhood will convince anyone who gives them that there is almost no subject the elements of which can- not be firmly, clearly and rationally fixed in the child mind, that it is not necessary to deal with trivial things, which pass with the using, but that the serious, abiding principles of hu- man knowledge may be implanted at a period when most people still indulge in baby talk with their little ones and hold up their hands in horror when someone proposes that it should begin to be prepared for the serious work of life. There is a moral phase of this question of self-organization which cannot be omitted though I have strenuously tried to avoid moralizing throughout these discussions for obvious reasons. It is, of course, true that the coincident moral growth of the child, with the development of all its other powers, adds a measure of strength and resource which is greater than any other single element. Care- ful mental organization is, next to thorough religious training, the soundest safeguard MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 161 against moral delinquency that could possibly be devised. Moral defects are commonest where the ability to foresee consequences is least. Once you train a child to look only a few steps beyond the immediate relation of anj^thing and you have made a great many of the moral defects of childhood not impossible but very much less insistent, because most of these on even the slightest reflection lose their attractiveness. I have observed this even in very small children, so small, in fact, that I would not without this observation have be- lieved that such effective and deterrent moral reflection was possible. But so it is. Parents often complain of the bad influences upon their own children of other children, which is simply admitting that some other child, not in- frequently one of inferior opportunities and breeding but higher self -organization, often induced by necessity and hardship, is leading and governing their own. The building-up of the ability for coordination and the habit of reflection which is incident to it and the percep- tion of relations which grow out of any given act or programme, will provide a rampart against many moral wrongs, which is not easily scaled. This is a subject by itself which can- not be treated here, but it may fairly be claimed that as a moral protective agency, to inculcate 162 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME self -organization and the observation of ef- fects, relations and consequences, is one of the best instruments in the rearing of young people. Here again leadership is power and the ability to discriminate, in even the most rudimentary way, operates in the choice of companionships, the estimate of influences, jealousy for one's own selfhood, all of which are safeguards for upright character. The multiplication of power which comes through effective self -organization diminishes by just so much the number of individuals who have any chance for entrance into the citadel of personality. Into a trained mind the num- ber of persons who have access is fewer and they are of higher quality and ability, other things being equal, than those who have free access into an untrained and unorganized mind. The same is true of the entire person- ality, which, organized on an all-round basis of insight, knowledge, observation and thought for ends more remote than those which appear on the surface, has a wall of protection which is moral insurance of the highest type. But do you, parents, impose severe exactions on him that is to teach your boys : that he be perfect in the rules of grammar for each word — read all histo- ries — know all authors as well as his own finger ends ; that if questioned at hazard, while on his way to the thermae or the baths of Phoebus, he should be able to tell the name of Anchises' nurse and the name and native land of the stepmother of Anchemolus, tell off- hand how many years Acestes lived, how many flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phryg- ians. Require of him that he mold their youthful morals as one models a face in wax. Require of him that he be the reverend father of the company and check every approach to immorality. "This," says the father, "be the object of your care; and when the year comes round again, receive for your pay as much gold as the people demand for the victorious charioteer." — Juvenal, Satire on the Estimate of the Teacher. VIII BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION One of the standing sources of distress to the college faculties of this country at the present moment is the immense chasm between the interest which the students manifest in athletics and that which they show in scholarly achievement. A freshman class which will easily raise a thousand dollars for its football team will let its debaters travel to a rival col- lege town at their own expense and even when the debate is held in its own borders, attend it in very small numbers. Many thousands of college alumni will go long distances to see the annual football game between their colleges and their favorite rivals, who will not take the trouble to appear at Commencement time and who know absolutely nothing concerning the great educational interests of the college. People who are in hot haste to condemn the colleges should first examine the practices of the alumni. Those who are quick to visit wrath upon the college authorities for seeming to yield so much to the athletic tendencies and demands of the student body, should above all 165 166 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME things find out first what moves the vast body of parents in sending their sons to college. Even the most casual inquiry along this line will reveal the fact that most of the alumni have no scholarly tastes, no intellectual ambi- tions, properly to be described as such, and it should not be very strange that their children are lacking in the same direction. Indeed, it is a fair question to-day whether the majority of the vast and steadily increasing student body have strictly intellectual or educational purposes in entering college. Certainly the major activities of the student body and the distribution of their time, energy and force does not seem to indicate this to be the case. And yet there was a time when all these young people were as susceptible to the appeal of the mind and the heroism of intellectual achievement as they later became to the glories of the athletic field. There was a time when all these interests were contending for the premier place in the youthful mind. The desire to excel, the willingness to be prominent, to be differentiated from the mass of other children and young people, is very strong in the youthful mind. What finally assumes the first place comes to that dignity by a per- fectly natural route. No boy loves baseball better than football except for reasons which BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 167 can readily be traced. No boy comes to col- lege with a highly developed yearning to be a tennis champion or a champion shot-putter or a speedy quarter-miler without having had certain well-defined influences operate upon him to bring about this result. Where the child develops interest, the agencies which make for that interest have been at work and have allied themselves with the child's disposition to know and shine for something distinctive to itself. Ask any boy what he plans to be in after life, and as a rule, unless he has had his career clearly outlined for him by circum- stances which dictate his future in an absolute way, he will respond in the line of his intensest interests, entirely oblivious of the absurdity or grotesqueness of his choice. Thus the son of a great brewing magnate a few years ago electrified his father, a worthy German who had pursued his profession of brewer with an eye single to making a good product, after the German fashion, and who thought only of see- ing his son succeed him in his great enterprise, by announcing that he intended to become an evangelist! Inquiry developed the fact that he had had as a teacher a man who was a great admirer of D wight L. Moody. He had so portrayed that man and his moral and spiritual influence over men to the brewer's son that he 168 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME had captivated his imagination and aroused his ambition to such a degree that the youth thought nothing so great, nothing so admira- ble and nothing so worthy of attainment as such a place in the esteem of men as he imag- ined D. L. Moody to hold. It caused a family difficulty of great proportions and was years in getting settled and, when it was, the brew- er's son did not succeed to his father's business. The great brewer, and he was a man of splen- did qualities and character as well, had per- mitted another ambition to be bred in his son than the one he hoped would develop naturally and found too late that the soil was occupied by another growth. His case does not differ except in the antithesis from that of thousands of American fathers. In analyzing the case just named, the potent factor should not be overlooked and that was a teacher who had himself so assimilated the meaning of a great career that he was able to awaken the longing to reproduce that career in a boy whose natural surroundings forbade such an ideal in the ordinary course of things from even getting a hearing. Yet it was the triumphant one in the boy's mind. Another fact to be kept in mind is that the ideal was one worthy, admirable and spiritually and intellec- tually attractive in itself. It is rather unfor- BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 169 tunate that the scholarly personality has not always been attractive either in the character of its performances or in the presentation of itself to the youthful mind. The highest scholarship, both as to outstanding character- istics arid the personalities which represent it, has not been and is not now specially attrac- tive to youth. This can be amply proven by examining the current caricatures of the scholar as a person who is full of abstractions, unpractical and generally not to be compan- ioned. Whatever the public may think of the usefulness of the teacher, the solid and unan- swerable fact is that the real estimate is found in his classification in the community, which is that of a higher menial. It is entirely within the facts to say that the mass of the people in any given city feel no interest, no gratitude, no particular respect for the teaching force of that city and know it chiefly through the medium of complaints or trouble of some kind in connection with the education of their chil- dren. This fully explains why a street laborer with a hoe, scraping mud in the streets, is often paid a larger wage than the teacher who is molding the minds of young children. Money, of course, is not the standard of finality in this world but compensation follows pretty closely the public estimate of the serv- 170 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME ices bestowed. But that, of course, is another question. What I am trying to make clear is that, as the case stands at the present time, if you get intellectual ambition for any child you get it at the cannon's mouth. You get it in spite of parental negligence, in spite of communal in- difference, in spite of the utter neglect of every rational means by which intellectual in- terest and ambition are stirred into action. And yet the mind of a child is as ready to re- ceive impulses along this line as any other. It is ready to contemplate an intellectual hero, when one is presented to its attention, as any other. It stands as ready to follow in the pathway of emulation after a strictly intellec- tual ideal as any other. Indeed, it is often found to be so to such a degree that though neglected at home, in the school and in the community at large, it survives. Sometimes it is created by some far-seeing and enthusias- tic teacher, but generally intellectual ambition, when it comes at all, comes out of a home where such ambitions are cherished and where the triumphs of the mind are rated above the vic- tories of the body and where the scholar is not crouching at the feet of the football hero, praying for a few fragments of time for his branch of knowledge, but the real leader and BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 171 guide of humanity without whom knowledge and civilization alike must perish. I can well recall as a child visiting the home of one of my playmates and being introduced to a gen- tleman who seemed to be doing all the talk- ing while the family listened with reverence and rapt attention to what he was saying, and, asking afterward who he was, was told, "He is a scholar!" with an air of finality that as- sumed that I ought to know that a "scholar" was a person of such distinction that everybody ought to keep silent and listen. It is not strange that every one of that family of boys, five in number, who that evening listened to their visitor, impressed with the reverence which was felt by their parents for a scholar, themselves became scholars and form a re- markable group of men in the community where they live. Though engaged in widely differing pursuits they are scholars all of them and they would have been "scholarly" persons no matter what pursuit they gave themselves to. This was purely a case of cause and effect and it can be repeated in any home when the proper means are taken. It is an interesting fact also that intellectual ambition has the first opportunity with the child and the loss of it is, therefore, even more reprehensible in those who suffer it to be lost. 172 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME A young child cannot take a very large part in affairs until its physical abilities are very considerably developed. It has its games and play, to be sure, but these are within a very limited area. Its mental life, on the other hand, may be world-wide almost from the start through the processes which I have al- ready described. Its interests intellectual may be diversified, entertaining, alluring and ex- citing in a thousand directions before the little feet are able to kick a football or it has the command over its arms required to catch a thrown ball or over its legs to run a base suc- cessfully. The mind works a thousand times as fast as the physical structure. You can see this any time by asking a child to write what he has told you so brightly and interest- ingly in an oral discussion. You will see at once that his hands are undeveloped, the mus- cles of his arms stiff and unpliable, and hin- drances at every turn fret and prevent him from moving in quick response to his mental activity. That is simply because the mind moves much more rapidly than the body possi- bly can. Thus it comes about that ambitions of an intellectual kind, which have their origin in vivid mental images, picturing the vast in- fluence of the mind, or in powers which are the evidence of great mental force, or social BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 173 and spiritual revolutions which are the im- mediate outworking of the powerful thought, really have the right of way in the child mind. The only reason why that primacy is not main- tained, is because it is neglected. By regular stages the physical life is permitted to be- come the ideal of life. The book gives way to the sword or the gun or the football or some- thing else. The games follow largely along similar lines and by the time the boy or the girl comes to the place where the blossoming mind should begin to realize some of the things which it has been contemplating with longing, it has become deflected from the in- tellectual to the physical ideal, if it happens to be a boy, or the social idea, if it happens to be a girl, and the ambition to excel intellectually remains only as a desirable asset which may possibly be secured but only through a process which is necessarily long and very unpleasant. In this of course the false use made of some of the noblest emotions materially aid. Pa- triotism means to fight for your country. Hence the idealization of the soldier, the sailor, the battle-ship and the man behind the gun. The triumphs of science, of art, of culture, of statesmanship are neglected, partly from want of appreciation and partly from inca- pacity to present them, and the ambitions of 174 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the child sink into lower and more material channels. While all this is going on, there is probably no passion of the American people about which they feel themselves so sincere as the passion for education. But if it is really as sincere as it seems to be, and there are grave doubts on this point, it is woefully misdirected and helpless. Personally I do not believe a man when he tells me that he wants above all things a thorough education for his child and then does not make the slightest effort from one year's end to another to acquaint himself with the means and the persons and the insti- tutions, public and private, which are giving or failing to give his child the education so highly extolled. It may not be hypocrisy, but it looks suspiciously like it. I have absolutely no confidence in the utterances of such a person on this subject. My observation is that people do what they want to do. They go after the things they want most and first. And if a father wanted thorough and effective educa- tion for his child "above and beyond all other things," he would do something more about it than simply issue eulogies on the subject of education and all the while neglect his child. But even allowing that it is all sincere, it in- dicates a curious want of knowledge and com- BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 175 mon sense to imagine that a high and intense longing for knowledge and the things of the mind will grow without cultivation, or that it will survive luxury, coddling, idleness and in- dulgences of every kind. Yet this is what we see on all sides. The wrongs done to young children by the neglect of their intellectual am- bitions and aims by their parents is one of the wickedest things about the American home. It is losing to the American people taste, cul- ture, civilization and social advances of incal- culable worth. But above and beyond all this, it is losing for a large fraction of the human race happiness and delight beyond computa- tion. Ambition follows interest and interest is bred by the study of models. If the models presented for the inspection and commended to the attention of the young child, are dis- tinctly of an intellectual quality, admiration for the intellectual qualities comes by a per- fectly natural method. If to this is added conscious progress in the direction in which the model leads as ideal, the ambition grows by leaps and bounds. It has always seemed odd to me that parents did not utilize their own ad- mirations for the benefit of their children. By this I mean that their favorite figures in history and life are rarely held up and their 176 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME children taught to look upon them and under- stand just why they are worthy of admira- tion. But whenever this is done, there is never any douht as to the result. Why is Schiller the best loved poet of the Germans? Because you will find him quoted and his verses re- peated in the thousands of German households where the children hear about him and are familiar with his work long before they have any literary sense or any ability to make any distinct choices of a literary character. Who made Burns the national poet of Scotland? The homes of Scotland, of course. That is how national poets are made. I well remem- ber a time when multitudes of children were believed to be unable to learn how to sing. But as soon as they began to hear songs and were urged to believe that they could sing, they broke into singing. I know any number of children whose parents believed them to be incapable of strenuous intellectual work till somebody woke them up and showed them conspicuous examples of victorious struggle and made them admire the model enough to make the effort to go and do likewise. Hu- man beings insensibly grow to be like what they are taught to admire and if the admirable qualities of the intellectual life are made clear to the young child, they will love knowledge BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 177 as much as they love anything else. It is but simple truth to say that we have not expected little children to take any interest in the great heroes of the intellectual life and consequently they have been given over to the heroes of lesser accomplishments. When we speak of an ambitious child, we usually mean a child that has found a specific direction in which it wishes to go. And that will ordinarily be found to be a child that by some process, natural or unnatural, has had its attention kept fixed upon something which it has been led to admire. Why should the ad- mirations of a child be left to accident, or caprice? Why should we not select the things which we wish the youth to love and point out with exactness and care what is desir- able, what is beautiful and of good report, in connection with them? And why should not such a process be the result of a dis- tinct plan and kept distinctly outlined as a part of the child's development? I have in- terviewed many successful men in many call- ings of life and have uniformly found that they were inspired to make the efforts which made them successful men by some personal- ity, sometimes a living model, sometimes an historical character which had so arrested their attention that they felt an irresistible desire to 178 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME follow in his footsteps. I have lately heard of a youth who has for a dozen years been an incendiary with a passion for setting fires. It is now known that his father was a firebug before him and added to this vicious tendency a lovable personality which so impressed his young son that he glorified the criminal habits of his father and made them the ambition of his life. All of which suggests a phase of this subject which should cause deep reflection on the part of parents. The love of parents, strong in most households up to a certain point, makes the father and the mother the working models of manhood and womanhood. In this matter example is much more power- ful than precept. I had an illustration of this not long ago. I was interviewing a boy of thirteen whose school work was not successful and, while searching for the causes and trying to find out at what point to attack his disin- clination to work, naturally tried to appeal to him on the score of his affection for his par- ents. While I could not draw from this boy any expression of disloyalty concerning his father, it was perfectly evident that he re- garded my effort to show that he could gratify his father in no better way than to make a fine record at school, with amused contempt. Indirectly I discovered that all he knew of his BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 179 father's academic career was the part which was not exactly inspiring and not at all calcu- lated to make his son feel that he regarded scholarship as of any particular importance. Now this gentleman had a really good record. He had within his grasp probably the most successful tool possible for inspiring his boy, namely, the natural expectation that his son should follow in his footsteps. But he never dreamed, till I called his attention to the fact, that the creditable stories of his academic ca- reer could be told without boasting or that anything might be interesting to his son but his escapades! At all events, that is all the youth heard about with any show of enthu- siasm or interest on the part of his father. But I know another man whose boy, a lad of six playing with his Phi Beta Kappa key, one day heard the story of his father's struggle for that coveted badge of scholastic honor. "Then I must get one, too," said the six-year-old. And he did. That is what I call breeding ambition. That young boy went to college with a distinct vision of scholastic achievement in his mind. He had through college a visible symbol before him of industry, energy and fidelity to the interests of the mind. He made numberless sacrifices of pleasure to attain it. Who will deny that the brief time taken to tell 180 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME that story and to explain the meaning of the little golden key did not bring forth abundant fruit? But how many Phi Beta Kappa men who have young children think about this pow- erful resource for the breeding of intellectual ambition in their children? Certainly not a college professor, friend of mine, whose chil- dren are constantly in trouble with their school work, which bothers children and par- ents alike, though the father is an academic star of first magnitude! Why do certain families send representative after representa-* tive to the great football teams of the great colleges? Because the one subject which the younger boys hear from their elders is football and they plan to be football stars as much as they plan to be men. And given the requisite physical equipment they usually are. If you do the same thing with scholarship you will get scholars. But you cannot talk football and get scholarship. You cannot talk money for- ever and get idealists. You cannot talk stocks or any other kind of business continually and get young people who will think about the pleasures and satisfactions of learning. Children, like all the rest of the world, thrive by what they feed upon. Ambition is not a heaven-sent quality given to some people and withheld from others. It is a seedling in every BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 181 child's soul. Nurtured, trained and fertilized you can get just what you want to get. You cannot of course make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But you can cause the young mind to grapple with what it makes its supreme in- terest, and, in the vast majority of cases, master it and bring forth fruit, some thirty, some sixty and some an hundred fold. Emerson says, "Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody; and to that person what- ever he says has an enhanced value." This truth, true of all persons, is trebly true of children in the home. If the father chooses to be a hero to his sons, he may be one and re- main one to the end of his days. If the mother chooses to be a heroine to her daughters, she has the first and the best chance with her own children. If father and mother let that dis- tinction go to somebody else, it is their own deliberate choice. That should be understood by every parent in the land. And if it is thoroughly understood it will be seen that not only is great power transferred by this enor- mous influence but likewise enormous respon- sibility shirked. It must be true from what we see before us everywhere that parents either do not think about this matter or de- liberately abdicate from the throne of influence with their children. We often speak of what 182 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME is bred in the bone. But what is bred in the bone is comparatively unimportant beside what is bred in the thought, experience and idealiz- ing* tendencies of children at an early age. I know a little girl whose older brother and sister very early developed special tastes and tendencies which they frequently expressed. "And what are you going to be, little girl?" she was asked. "Oh, I am going to be just a mother," said the child. It is superfluous to remark that this child has one of the most re- markable mothers in the community where she lives. She has idealized motherhood and her children need no Madonnas of legend or poe- try or art to give them sweet, enduring and inspiring visions of what beautiful motherhood is and ought to be. Her children will call her blessed to the end of days. And it is safe to say that they will carry into life as among the strongest influences of their careers that lovely model of perfect motherhood! Breeding ambition has another important function which must be noted in dealing with this subject. The moment you have roused ambition in a child you have created a fresh source of power within the child's mind and at the same time located there the responsibil- ity, in so far as it relates to effort, instead of BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 183 in authority exercised from without. Once ambition is aroused the process of auto-educa- tion begins — self-examination, self -discipline and self -direction — crudely enough at first but nevertheless clearly apprehended and acknowl- edged. This leads to independent efforts which are more valuable in their mental result than all formal education. Spencer refers to this in his essay on Education when he says: "Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired, any problem which he has himself solved, becomes by virtue of the con- quest much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it and the excitement con- sequent on his triumph conspire to register all the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher or read in a schoolbook can be registered. Even if he fails, the tension to which his faculties have been wound up insures his remembrance of the solution, when given to him, better than half- a-dozen repetitions would." It is clear enough here that the important thing is to inspire that effort, to cause the child to want to do some- thing worth while so much that it will get the "mental tension" and the "activity of mind" 184 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME incidental to the satisfaction which it craves. Notice, too, that failure in this direction and under these conditions is not failure at all. The increment gained from a solid effort pre- cludes serious distress because the exercise of the faculties has so greatly increased the con- sciousness of power. The habit of aiming at a great result, of looking to an ultimate instead of an immediate goal of effort, tends to enlarge the mental powers and expand the mental horizon in children as it does in adults. Once get young persons in the way of looking for some- thing that is palpably great and as palpably beyond their easy reach and you get the same kind of action in the mind that you see in the arms of a small child reaching for an object upon a shelf just beyond its reach. The ob- jective point may not be reached. But the effort has strengthened the mental fiber, it has felt its possibilities, it has tried itself for an end ; demanding the best that is in it, and this habitually done, will breed personal deter- mination and perseverance which are simply ambition at work. It is not material just how the effort works out. But as a matter of fact, nine times out of ten the child succeeds and immediately tries for something still higher. But to inspire this effort, the memory must be BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 185 stored with high thoughts and splendid deeds which call for intellectual activity, and the vision must be kept fixed upon the great per- sonalities who have enriched the thought of the world. The playing of games may have, indeed, ought to have, the excellent results which Bowen claimed for it, and yet it may be doubted whether the experience of life shows that boys so brought up do in fact turn out substantially more good-humored, unselfish and fit for the commerce of the world than others who have lacked this training. And the further question remains whether the games are worth their costly candle. That they occupy a good deal of time at school and at college is not necessarily an evil, seeing that the time left for lessons or study is sufficient if well spent. The real drawback incident to the excessive devotion that games inspire in our days is that they leave little room in the boy's or the collegian's mind either for interest in his studies or for the love of nature. They fill his thoughts, they divert his ambition into channels of no permanent value to his mind or life, they continue to absorb his interest and form a large part of his reading long after he has left school or college. — James Bryce, Sketch of Edward Bowen of Harrow. IX THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND Perhaps the general impression upon many readers of what has been previously written, will be a f eeling that, after all, desirable as all these things may be and profitable for the child's future and its advancement in life and usefulness, the price which it demands is too great to be paid. Most people mature in life, conscious only of the burdens of life, often of the struggle for mere existence, and not in- frequently disillusioned by their own experi- ences, will reason that the young people will meet the severe struggle of life soon enough and that they should not be denied the pleas- ures of childhood, so called, and should be kept care and fancy free as long as possible. Many parents have said substantially that to the present writer. Such opinions assume that worth-while activities of the child mind are necessarily devoid of pleasure and that somehow the consideration in childhood of what afterward constitute the serious studies of life, despoils children of pleasure, vitiates the natural freedom and artlessness of children 187 188 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME and prematurely induces solemnity of mind and sedateness of behavior. Let me assure every person who holds this view that there is no more mistaken assumption possible than this. I have at this moment come in from the meadow adjoining my summer home where I have officiated as "catcher" in a "battery" where a very young person, just past his tenth year, officiated as "pitcher." For an hour I sweated, ran and dodged and jumped around trying to perform the duties of this onerous position to the satisfaction of the young twirler who is planning to make a baseball record along with the rest of his ambitions. Previ- ous to the baseball episode he had been put through for an hour what the persons to whom I have referred above, would probably style a grilling lesson in verbal analysis, and im- mediately succeeding the play another lesson equally grilling in Latin was taken up. It can be said with absolute truthfulness that the delight in the first and third periods was not only not less but if anything more than that in the baseball achievements, which was, all things considered, not despicable. The de- light of a "straight throw" in Latin composi- tion was not less than that in a ball sent ac- curately over the plate. The pleasure of prompt and fruitful recognition of numerous THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 189 verbal relations between various word stems did not seem to be one whit less than that which resulted from a happy "catch." In fact, I observed that the same expressions of delight and the same symptoms of pleasure ap- peared in both cases, and the spontaneous move- ments in both instances were so similar, so alike, both in the sources from which they sprang as well as in their manifestations, that the conclusion was irresistible that one thing gave as much pleasure as the other. The same thing has appeared to me many times, and this was simply a momentary test made for the purpose of a careful and minute study of results in a given case. The fact is, pleasure in mental achievement especially when due to conscious and sustained effort, is quite as great and quite as satisfactory as any other; if anything, more so. Mental activity and mental effort, as sources of pleasure, have rarely been adequately considered by teachers generally, and the pleasure motive to study is. almost absolutely ignored by both parents and teachers. Many teachers do at times observe the pleasure of children when they have done any work satisfactorily, but, for some reason or other, probably the assumption to which I have referred, avoid making use of the pleas- ure motive in inducing special advance in 190 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME this direction. But I cannot see why a child should not be taught and guided to seek pleas- ure in one kind of exercise as well as in an- other. Here again the child generally knows how to play one thing and does not know how to play the other. It is a question often of which game it knows best and if the games of the mind (and these games continue through- out life, and one of the conspicuous joys of a scholarly life is the delight and satisfaction of discovery, whether original or otherwise) were as steadily taught and as carefully outlined in one instance as in the other, you would get sub- stantially the same results. How many times a little girl making the first doll clothes comes to the mother or nurse for instruction! And it is usually given because here various kinds of motives combine in the parent's mind to give the needed lesson carefully and often with extraordinary care. Expert needle- women can remember such instruction often given and illustrated over and over again. It soon comes to be a pleasurable exercise to do these things because the little girl knows how. The same thing is true of the boys who want to be taught how to "pitch" and "catch" and how to "curve" balls and what not, things that relate to the athletic field. But how many people ever give the child an exhibition of the THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 191 pleasures which they themselves have in some distinctive mental achievement! How often is a fine paragraph in a book or a specially beautiful passage in a classic poem read and its excellencies shown to the child, its imagery praised, its force and power extolled and the desire for emulation aroused? The assump- tion that this has not interest for the child is wholly gratuitous. What can be done and is done can be seen in the celerity with which some smart speech, usually an impertinence, I may add, is repeated which raises a general laugh at the table or in a company of adults, when the child is made to feel that it has gained general approval or applause which is mis- taken for approval. What is thus secured on an utterly false basis is possible on a sound basis as well and will not only give pleasure, but, I believe, greater pleasure than mere athletic skill because it is seen to involve higher and better powers. The reason why many a young boy wants to be a baseball player above all things is that he hears everybody give praise to a successful pitcher or batter and comes to think these are the great achievements of men. The same motive operates among college students to so great an extent that scholarship by general consent has lost its eminence in American educational institutions. But let 192 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the emphasis be changed so that a crack scholar is pointed out instead of a crack football player and you will instantly find a change of feel- ing among the young students whose future as such is still before them. One of the greatest motives to activity in any direction is the pleasure incident to the approval of those whom we esteem most and love best. With young children that means father and mother. Let father and mother place the emphasis where it belongs and half the battle is won. It is a common saying that things display the qualities of their source. Get it once into the youthful mind that mental effort and men- tal achievement are the great glory of human beings and bring into the foreground of its consciousness not the gladiators of history but its statesmen, its thinkers, its scientists, its phi- lanthropists, and you have furnished, first of all, a means of comparing results which almost any child will comprehend very quickly. His- tory is full of examples and the instinct of hero-worship tends to reenforce the example. But if all your heroes are warriors, your child will want to play with drums, guns and swords. If the major part of its notion of great men and great works is connected with destruction, you will very likely stimulate every instinct of destruction and provoke ex- THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 193 periments in this art at a very early stage. But if your heroes are in another realm and the heroes of science, many of them yet to be discovered so far as literature is concerned, or the heroes of humanity, you create mind stuff that rebels without eif ort against destruction and starts out with entirely opposite notions of activity and self-expenditure. And started on such a course, pleasure in its fulfillment fol- lows naturally and inevitably whenever any- thing in this direction is achieved. This can be inculcated very early in life by the habit and praise of smooth and careful articulation, accuracy in speech and any distinctive achieve- ment which has a mental origin or character. The child will very soon feel what its elders value most and will seek to meet the demand by furnishing the supply. The pleasure which the child experiences and of which it gives the most instant signs, is more than exceeded by that of the parent or teacher who thinks along this line. I know nothing so fine and so thoroughly satisfying as to see the mind of any human being work- ing soundly and smoothly and with apparent self -regulative power. And to see this proc- ess in its early stages, growing in a child's mind, is a very delightful sensation. You get the happy consciousness that your own mental 194 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME processes are sound because your errors will be repeatedly thrown back at you in large let- ters like the big hand of a child's penmanship. You will have a constant corrective for your- self and you will unconsciously be kept on edge, so to speak, to make your own power more accurate, your own insight more acute and your own habits more careful. And in- stead of being irksome, the first time you see your own effort eventuating in a fine effort on the part of the child, only improved with the child's simplicity, naturalness and artless- ness, taking on naturally what you have labor- iously acquired by heavy self -subordination and self-restraint, you will feel that you have made a genuine contribution to the fulness of the life of mankind. In fact, you have made such a contribution because his genera- tion will do almost by nature what you have had to acquire by effort, and a real and per- manent advance in the standard of humanity has been made. And as one capacity after another develops and they begin to cooperate and you see growing up about you, healthy, sane, self-controlling and self -directing indi- viduals, who are mentally strong as they are morally sound, you feel that the hero who has simply killed so many thousand people is a mere slaughterer and not worthy to be men- THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 195 tioned by the side of one father or mother who advances by ever so small a degree the type of humanity by which this world is to be inhabited. It looks like extracting a very great and portentously big satisfaction from one insignificant little baby! But it is there for every parent who will take the trouble to find it. Moreover, it furnishes a touchstone for testing most of the things for which people spend life and substance, which is very comforting. The vain competitions of life and the silly inanities for which many people pour out their strength and labor are by this work shown in their true relation and their true valuation, and the estimate is wholly gratify- ing. What shall it profit a man if he be a captain of industry and his son a debauchee or a hairbrained idiot known only in dance halls and chorus-girl shows? What shall it profit a woman if she be a leader in every club in town, the first figure at every social splurge and her gowns reported in every Sunday news- paper if her daughter is a silly person from whom no serious opinion can be extracted by anybody? What indeed shall it profit if you are everything in this world and your suc- cessors are distinctly less creditable as human beings than your own generation or that which preceded it? The knowledge that you have 196 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME improved your own family, your own genera- tion and your own contribution to the race, is the highest satisfaction in this world, with only the one exception — the knowledge of an hon- orable, unstained life. The pleasures of the mind last longer than any others. Bodily pleasure at best has its necessary limits. The shouting and the tu- mult of physical satisfaction even of the best sort dies and disappears. But the genuine pleasures of the mind last forever. They have a staying quality which enriches advanc- ing years and forms the natural linkage with the growth of the world. Everyone must have noticed the differences between that kind of people who at any age seem to be in touch with what is going on and who read with de- light and avidity the newest things that are taking place everywhere in the world and others not so constituted. I have in mind such a man, an octogenarian now, who is the youngest person I know. His childhood was such a childhood as I have described in the foregoing pages, nurtured, fertilized, trained and enriched at every turn, and his old age, which term, by the way, applied to him seems foolishness, finds him one of the most active men of the community, keen in intellect, stored in learning and a perennial source of THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 197 pleasure to all his friends by the sumptuous- ness of his remembrance of personal and his- torical lore. Mental pleasures last. And if it is true that advancing years tend to revert to the earliest impressions of life, then why not make the "second" childhood a noble, full and worthy one in which the mind shall turn back to great things, high thoughts and com- panionship with the princes of the earth in thought, imagination and knowledge? Could anything be more reasonable or desirable? There is an exquisite pleasure in all this which cannot be expressed in words but which only the initiated know. The durable pleasures are those, generally speaking, which are founded upon some fixed expansion of the personality, either by way of qualities of mind or alliance with some of the permanent forces of life. Knowledge is the one thing which never fails to present attrac- tion and allurement to those who have once become acquainted with her varied stores. Nor does this mean that a man need to be a person of vast learning. It means, simply, that he shall have peeped behind the curtain and seen what there is to learn and how many people there are in the world who are finding out interesting and valuable things for the world's happiness and the world's work. If 198 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME that peep behind the curtain is gained in child- hood, by just so much earlier is the happiness of knowledge-getting and knowledge-giving begun and a career of delight is entered upon which no loss of the things which the world com- monly finds delight in, can possibly disturb or diminish. It brings into common life and annexes as a permanent resource for daily use an asset which is among the most valuable as it is altogether the most enduring. It creates companionships, lofty, inspiring and satisfy- ing. It induces emotions as varied as the skill of the human mind to delineate and express. It arouses and stimulates interests which last as long as life lasts. The intellect of child- hood is fitted by nature to begin this process at once. It has momentum, the greatest it ever acquires in its entire history. It suffers no ennui and all its faculties are awake to receive what is offered. Happy indeed the childhood, which, when that appetite awakens, is fed upon the great things of life and brought at once into contact and acquaintance with the great minds of the race. It means that the pleasure motive in life, of a kind and quality which, other things being equal, rarely does harm and always does good to the soul, is harnessed to the work of life and pulls him who has it over many a hard place and THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 199 makes many an arid spot in the human strug- gle blossom and bloom like the rose. This phase of education has been too little dwelt upon and in fact has in many cases been elim- inated from the thought of education. Edu- cation, properly speaking, is work. It is and should be hard work, effort to the limit of capability always. But it is work, allied to delights, properly conceived, which rob the name of its terrors and which offer at every turn new scenes to charm the intellectual vision and fresh vistas to lure the inquirer into choice spots in the great world of knowledge. It is among the finest attainments of man- kind when they achieve that balance of emo- tion and intellect which keeps them serene and strong and undisturbed by the vicissitudes of life which few human beings in this world ever altogether escape. To see a man serene and self-contained under great pressure, whether it arises from business, from private trials or personal sorrows, griefs or misfor- tunes, is to see the greatest triumph of the will that is possible. This is the proof and sub- stantially the only proof that man is superior to the beasts and to things. The instrument that gives it in its finest form is religion, of course. But next to religion, immediately after the consciousness of the supreme order 200 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME of the world and the government of God, is the full mind, conscious that the worst aberra- tion of fortune is not the major fact in life nor even the important fact of the immediate situation out of which it arises. Knowledge of the laws of nature, ability to discern even ever so dimfy the varieties of forces at work in the world, and certainty that in the darkest moment there is sunlight somewhere, steadies the mind and uplifts the heart because it is based not on some blind hocus-pocus, hastily summoned and repeatedly muttered to obfus- cate the already confused mind and make it forget the present need, but on wide knowl- edge of men, literature, science, art, nature, and of itself supreme over all and producer of them all. To feel the kinship which the awakened and trained mind feels with all the great intellectual producers of the world is to guarantee serenity and strength for every possibility of life. This fact at once and au- tomatically releases the mind from many anxieties and it can, therefore, without fear and without stint, take in, as it develops, the pleasures of each condition and can drink to the full of the springs of delight which abun- dant knowledge opens. When shall these springs be opened? After ten or a dozen valuable years have been THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 201 lost, when the mental edges have already been dulled, when coarse and ugly things have al- ready integrated themselves into the juvenile intellect and, weed-wise, sought the best places and fixed their tenacious grip on most fertile spots? Shall we wait till mature life has sown the seeds of self -distrust and doubt, made suspicion a habit and organized the an- tagonisms of the mind behind which lurk ene- mies, real and imaginary, to be overcome at every turn? Or, when the unclouded intelli- gence first looks out on the world, surrounded only by aff ection and unconscious of the great issues to be fought, and steadily strengthened by supervision, by instruction, by the ever- widening circle of information, by self -equip- ment through organization of the mind, till, when it breaks forth into the world, its strength is as the strength of ten not only be- cause its heart but its mind is also pure? Hap- piness in life comes thus almost necessarily because the feelings, the judgments, the ob- ligations of life combine to secure adherence to fundamental law, and in these, happiness is secure. There ought to be no question as to which answer should be given to these inter- rogatories. Speculatively, most people give only one answer. Open the mind of youth to the best, they say, promptly and with no hesi- 202 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME tation at all. But who shall do it? Who will take from the moments of self-indulgence a few, to give them to the work of thus enrich- ing the child by his side? Who will make the child the first and supremest interest and so- cial enjoyment, travel, amusements and all that these imply secondary? That is the great question! No school can do what the school in the home can do and ought to do. No teacher can do what the parent can do and ought to do. No educational establishment can possibly achieve that first and greatest success for education, which is won in the home, where the first things are kept first and where lofty and beautiful ideals crystallized in the memorials of knowledge through the works of the intellectual leaders of the race, are among the earliest associations of the child mind. It is here that the great battle is really fought and is fought usually not by the child but by him or her who is the child's sponsor. Life being what it is, one cannot do every- thing and its disposition becomes simply a question of what one desires most. Hav- ing settled that, it becomes a question of character, of resolution and devotion. The end seems so distant and at times it does have the appearance of projecting into THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 203 the young life things and matters which seem remote from its natural interests. Why should my little nine-year-old be told all about the struggle concerning the House of Lords, its entire history carefully rolled out before him, its great names identified, its place in English history illustrated and recounted in forty different forms and methods to give him a vivid picture of what the present political revolution in England really means? Is that matter for a child? Why not let him have the exhilaration of simply wasting his emo- tions on the momentous question whether the "Tigers" or the "Athletics" will win? Sim- ply because I choose the remoter pleasure, leaving aside for the moment all else, that when he is twenty-five or possibly less, and, in the revolutionary progress of history, the House of Lords will be in English life what a horse car is in the streets of a modern city, if it is there at all, he will have among the per- manent furnishings of his mind the events which have made history and life for him what it then will be and have them stored up for the many varied uses. That information will be habited in his mind which others will labori- ously seek out in books and libraries. But above and beyond all these, he will have the pleasure of recalling that this history is also 204, THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME allied to his home, to his child life, to the dear- est and best associations which this world brings, and will, when that subject is men- tioned (as will be true of many hundreds and perhaps thousands of other themes) , give him the pleasure of seeing in his mind's eye his childhood home and the faces of those whom he has loved long since and lost awhile. Is there anything more alluring than this? Is there a more beautiful and worthy task to ex- alt the parental mind or charge the parental heart with zeal and patience? Thus there is established a reciprocal intel- lectual relation which is pleasurable beyond anything else in lif e. In extent, there is noth- ing which matches it whatsoever. It not only fills this life but it reaches far beyond. Many persons whose intellectual traditions reach beyond a single generation can readily recall things which came to them from the elder day by inheritance, so to speak, which merely means that they had been inculcated naturally and formed the mind stuff of daily existence and thought. When new letters or memo- rials of such elders are unearthed and when the treasures of memory are unlocked and one sees the power of the continuous stream of knowledge-loving people, not necessarily pro- fessionally engaged in the so-called intellect- THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 205 ual callings (all callings are becoming intellect- ualized and even the industrial race is to the trained mind now already won), there is the peculiar pleasure of being in the stream of that life and the natural representative of cer- tain things which have come down from other days. Sometimes the profession is handed down from father to son for generations in this way. Sometimes certain responsibilities, civic, philanthropic and otherwise, are handed along from one generation to another, and the public expectation demands, as the natural responsibility creates, definite attitudes and services to the community. In the older por- tions of America even already there are fam- ilies of whom the communities in which they live expect certain kinds of things and are disappointed, shocked or grieved, as the case may be, if the desired result is not forthcom- ing. This is the kind of hereditary succession which we need in a democracy if we are not to have eternally a raw community alert in- deed and intensely self-conscious and vital in power and deed, without doubt, but essentially unlovely and having at its base, heartache and barrenness. Americans especially need to think about these things and, if they have even the slightest experience of the pleasure which is created in having this view firmly before 206 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the mind and in accordance with it, set out to make the next generation what they wish their own might have been, the onward march to- ward perfection is begun. But the strategic point for this larger re- sult, as for the individual perfecting, lies in the mind of the child. It seems to be reason- ably well settled that the struggle for exist- ence will steadily grow harder and also the contests of the future, though the competi- tions in some directions will undoubtedly be lessened, in others they will be highly intensi- fied. Once in the struggle, there is little hope that men will take time for this kind of cul- ture and the kind of life which such culture requires. The ideas and the ideals must be firmly planted in the heart and thought of youth. And this youth must be early youth, for here again the economic tension is more and more invading the years of youth and hastening the thousands of our children out into the world with only the equipment which they get in childhood and sometimes hardly that. That, at least, should be made as rich and fertile as it is possible to make it. This subject is too vast even to hint at in this place, but it is broached merely for the purpose of mentioning again that no struggle is severe if there is pleasure mixed up with it, and en- THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 207 durance is vastly extended and interest quick- ened and every power heightened if there goes with it the sense of delight and inward satis- faction. The earlier that fact is mastered, the earlier the whole view of life is altered and the sooner rational living begins. It does not need a very reflective man, seeing the feverish way in which the mass of men hurry to and fro to get what they call pleasure or relaxa- tion from the struggles of their daily life, to realize that these people are not only not get- ting what they are seeking but are wasting valuable powers and corrupting and degrad- ing life while seeking recreation. One does not have to be a seer, sitting in a street car and looking into the worried faces of men and women, to know that most of these people have no real peace of mind and not many re- sources which make for serenity within or joy in the work of life. It is easy to see that in many of these people imagination has utterly perished. They are simply the pawns worked by other men of power and imagination who have brought their minds into a high state of efficiency and effective reaching after the re- sult they seek. It is easy to see that the ca- pacity for real and recreative pleasure even, in many cases has disappeared. The joy of life springs from the sources 208 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME of joy and is not pumped into life by buying admission to a place labeled amusement, just as education is not to be secured necessarily at a place called a college. Joy comes from real alignment with the things that make for security, contentment and peace. Funda- mentally these qualities are moral, but though the nature of them is moral, their strength or weakness and their sterility or fertility depend upon the mental furnishings with which they are buttressed about. Deep down at the sources of life, before birth in many cases, but at birth and immediately thereafter, certainly are the foundations of life to be laid. And the spirit in which they are laid must be that which contemplates a result so sublime that all the imaginative powers are stirred to their ut- most to make them secure and strong and capa- ble of upholding the greatest superstructure that can possibly be laid upon them. Who can know but this small creature whom you can hold almost in the palm of your hand will one day be the pivot upon which some vast and mighty human interest will revolve? It is no impertinence for any mother to think this possible! History, if it teaches anything, teaches that the obscure and unknown great outnumber the known and magnified great by many millions. I think often of the obscure THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 209 and unknown man of whom we are told in the New Testament, who held the rope that held the basket by which St. Paul was let down outside the city walls, escaping with his life and thus saving to the world that marvelous mind and activity with all its subsequent re- sult in the history of the world ! But upon so slight a thing may rest so vast a result! The importance and supremacy of the individual will never be reduced however society devel- ops. To take a large and comprehensive view of the possibilities of life for the humblest child is not only not presumption but is the only true view at least for the parents who brought it into the world. In the home school will its earliest and its most effective lessons be taught. In the home school will its first and substantial ethical outlook upon life be de- veloped. In the home school will the perma- nent joys of life and the springs thereof be opened and the seat of the abiding pleasures of life be uncovered. But these springs are within, and they are found only by the pa- tient, persistent and intensive utilization of the earliest moments of life. "Vergiss' nicht am Morgen die Lampen zu sorgen," is one of the maxims the little German girls are taught. "Forget not in the morning to trim the lamps," is the housewifely instruction to 210 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME the becoming home-makers. Let us not for- get that this homely maxim has a larger mean- ing. Forget not in the Morning to trim the Lamp of Life, and at Evening Time there shall be Light! THE END \* O n ' V -;"' V s* VL' * o v *»tt;-' .«*■ - r oY < <&> & o » o „ *V6 <5 ^