Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/808

784 remains, but the main value has not been appropriated. This is also true of modern languages where they go along side by side in too attenuated courses. It is wise, I think, in our present social state, and perhaps it would be wise anyway, to make each day rich in its own rewards, each hour, each lesson, to teach, though without any loss of serenity or faith, as if each occasion were the last, and must con- tribute such content as it has.

If we worked in the spirit that I have tried to make clear to you, the early years of childhood would be given to manual training en- larged into faculty training — would be given, that is, to organic education, and to the cultivation of the sentiments, and not to the pursuit of knowledge as such. Knowledge may be better than riches, but children are little qualified to use either, if the knowledge is at second hand. It is quite surprising how happy a child can be and how wisely occupied without knowing whether the moon be made of green cheese or not; and for my own part I do not think that it much matters whether he ever knows, unless he be prompted by an inner curiosity to inquire. Children are organically impres- sionable and alert, and they have a fountain of feeling that may be so nourished that it will keep fresh and green the years of later life. They have, too, an immense appetite for the concrete world, but they are satisfied with a very small seasoning of the abstract. They are not logical, and I think the attempt to make them so, on such a slender experience of life, is not only time-consuming, but absolutely disastrous to the best results in later years. The hope and promise of the future lie in keeping children children, and boys boys, and girls girls. It is quite fatal to have men and women prematurely born.

The enrichment of the curriculum along organic lines can only be carried out at an expense of time, but just so soon as we are per- suaded that this is what we want the time can readily be found. The old curriculum must be heavily pruned in any case, and this will make room for better things. We shall want to omit two classes of studies altogether: first, those that are abstract; and, secondly, those that are involved in other studies, or in a general experience of life, and would be learned by the children themselves a year or so later. To sweep away these two classes of study from the elementary school — happily, they have never been given place in the kindergarten — • would leave a large gap, and would make us very rich in the oppor- tunity for more profitable organic work. Here is the list of elemen- tary studies: reading, spelling, English, modern foreign languages, Greek, Latin, writing, arithmetic, geography. United States history, civil government, drawing and science lessons (usually physiology, with special reference to the shocking effects of alcohol and tobacco).