Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/224

210 principle of mental growth. Self-activity does not mean activity in working out the directions of a teacher or any other superior mind; it means the revelation or execution of the conceptions of the child himself. The child's work should be self-expression, not imitation, not mere responsive action in accord with the suggestion of a teacher. "The children are not interested in study, and most of them need to be forced to learn; so it would be worse than folly to expect them to find problems for themselves." So says the teacher who has had no true inspiration, no clear enlightenment. My dear friend, it is quite true that the children are not interested in your problems. It is true, moreover, that the few who gratify you and their parents by paying attention to your problems and learning your lessons usually make weak men, lacking in originality and force. Every head boy who leaves school with a load of prizes in his arms and a load of knowledge in his head, and then becomes a respectable nonentity, is an unripe, falling apple to set educational Newtons thinking.

The pupils do rebel against your problems; but they do not rebel against the problems of Nature before they go to school. Wake up! There are apples falling all around you. The greatest development in school processes during the next twenty-five years will be the introduction into the schoolroom of appropriate material, calculated to stimulate the investigative and executive powers of children, and thus continue the natural educational processes that led to such rapid and definite growth before school life began.

By reversing Nature's plan, and bringing the problems to children, instead of allowing them to find them for themselves, teachers prevent the development of the power to recognize new problems. This is the most important of all intellectual powers. The solution of new problems is a simple matter when we can clearly recognize them. The ability to see the things yet unseen must precede the knowledge of the things yet unknown. The power to see new problems should grow in strength and clearness more rapidly than any other mental power. It can not grow unless it has the opportunity for exercise. The greatest teacher is the one who presents to the child the best opportunities for the recognition of new problems by his own mind, and the most perfect facilities for expressing or representing his new conceptions in material form. The wonderment of the child in regard to the material world should become much more than a mental stimulus; it should ultimately become our highest, broadest, keenest spiritual insight. We are ever in the midst of new spiritual problems that we fail to recognize, because our wonder power was not allowed to act up to its natural limit.

In the kindergarten, knowledge is made clear by the