Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/511

Rh to other subjects? What is so tremendously important about natural science laboratory work is that a student must be thinking all the time about the same matters, not from one but from ten interesting points of view. He is not merely observing, he is measuring, he is computing, he is reasoning; he has to write out descriptions of what he sees and does, and he thinks then of his spelling and grammar; he has to sketch; he has to read books about what other people have done before him on the same subject, and also for statistics. He learns the value of a bit of work done in a clean honest way, and when he gets some more experience he glows with the feeling that he has really added to the knowledge of the world. He is a discoverer, and he feels the emotion of Cortez! It is marvelous the alteration which has occurred in the mental attitude of the common average boy. Instead of feeling that he is a degraded slave he feels the emotion of his childhood returning to him. He once made the great discovery at the age of six that the back garden was inhabited by fairies and lions and Indians and pirates. He was the Caliph Haroun Alraschid for a while. And now, after a wretched life at Latin and Euclid, a new revelation is vouchsafed to him, and as he gathers years he finds that nature is placidly willing to let him steal her secrets little by little, one by one, secrets that are gradually changing men from the bewilderment and spirit possession of the Middle Ages; so that at length he enters into complete communion with nature and rollicks with her, and quarrels with her, and loves her more and more until he dies. And his reasoning power has been growing all the time, so that more and more he understands complex things, for, after an experimental study of story-books, he probably entered the kingdom of Shakespeare at the age of fourteen. Things requiring memory can be learned only in early life—weights and measures, the multiplication table, languages. He knows games involving spelling. But, over and above all these, he has from infancy repeated all sorts of poetry long before he could enjoy much more of it than the jingle of its rhyme.

Education consists in the development of a man from his earliest day, and does not cease till he dies. Any thoughtful man must see that there is no science so important as that of education, the preparation of children of this generation to be the citizens, the rulers of the country, in the next generation. The whole future of our Empire depends upon the education of the children. By the study of this science we hope to improve teaching so as to make future citizens not only to have more knowledge and more skill, but to make them wiser than the people of the present or the past.

Early training determines what later training ought to be. Let us consider what the early training of a boy ought to be. In his very early days nature has provided that his education shall proceed very rapidly by observation and experiment, and the only teaching needed is through careful nursing and affection. He teaches himself, and he loves