Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/171

 time in life when one can learn languages easily, and can manage to learn to play instruments well, and when, moreover, we are very restless, and on the look out for new kinds of movement; a time when a workshop is entered eagerly; and this period is childhood and early boyhood or girlhood. In elementary school children the middle brain is having its spring-tide. The spring-tide is short, and it does not return.

And yet this middle brain—the great centre of movement is also the Mecca of the indolent. When some kind of movement or activity has been perfectly learned the upper brain ceases to pay any more attention to it, and is free for other tasks. But if the power of attention is not kept alive, and given a new task, education proper ceases. "The absence of training of attention," says Dr. Kerr, "means almost automatic reading, writing, or speaking of a comparatively useless character educationally, as it is done without effort and scarcely rises above the threshold of consciousness." In such exercises the middle brain is working like a machine. A great deal of the school work of the present day is of this kind.

The tendency of State education is to make the middle brain its goal.