Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/740

734 but too subtle to be pictured either in words or in illustrations. I mean the sweet, unconscious influences of nature and of one's native environment. By taking care that the child's associations with home are rich and full, we provide for the man an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

The reader will have observed that all that I have spoken of so far is really history—the history of nature and of man; and he will have seen how impossible it is entirely to separate these two things in any natural treatment of them. This is because they are not so much two separate things as two aspects of the same thing. Does not the reader see the application of this truth to education? Does it not suggest to him the thought that in taking his children away from nature,

away from their natural environment, and shutting them up all day in a schoolroom, chained to desks and books, he is doing violence to all that makes boyhood precious—to its naivete, to its love of all out-doors, to its instinctive craving for activity, and he is depriving it of the most natural means of its own development?

I wish to guard against a possible misapprehension. I am not laying down a school course for teachers. My school was situated in Ottawa, and the choice of culture material was governed largely by that fact. If I were to teach in Halifax, or Toronto, or Calgary, or Vancouver, I should deem it my first duty to study the conditions existing there. For I hold that the teacher will find in the locality, in the environment in which he lives and in which his pupils live, the most appropriate and the most educative material of instruction, far exceeding in value that found in any text-book or in all the text-books.