Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/513

Rh with greater and greater accuracy as he makes experiments in mechanics and heat and chemistry. Every boy is fond of stories, and if treated reasonably is easily induced to learn to read. Heading aloud is easily made a pleasure and a habit, and so the boy learns to speak properly. Any boy whatever will become fond of reading if the people about him are fond of reading: I state this as a fact which I have investigated. A boy who is fond of reading gets later on to know the value of books and the use of books, and he will go on educating himself till he dies. Any attempt at coercion, unless it is the very gentle coercion of a person whom he loves, is fatal; even coaxing is not always good. He assimilates knowledge from everything which he does, and therefore he ought to be induced to do things which not only keep him healthy, but which give him knowledge and teach him to reason. Do you remember how angry Lanfranc of Bee was at the idea that any pupil could be forced to learn; he said "it turned men into beasts." I speak to you who love children, who love young people, who know that there is hardly one child in a hundred, even among rather spoilt children, who does not love to do his duty.

Under the best and most loving of teachers a lonely child has enormous disadvantages, but these can generally be remedied. The usual mistake is to send it to a large school. If it is merely a day school there is no great harm. But no child under thirteen ought to be sent to a boarding school unless it is a small school and the master and his wife have a love and sympathy for other people's children. There are such people in the world, God bless them! but they are not numerous. They are so few that we must return to nature as the best of teachers. The time is coming when a child's own father and mother will have much more knowledge and wisdom than they have now, and they will refuse to give up to others the doing of their highest duties. It is at present not sufficiently recognized that the most important duty of the parents is the education of their children. At present, men who are building up fortunes are too busy to think of their children, and so we find that the sons of Lord Chancellors and other successful men have been marrying chorus girls and squandering those very fortunes to which their education was sacrificed. Of course, if parents are uneducated, and therefore selfish or otherwise foolish, any kind of school may be better than home for their doomed children. It is one of the great advantages of poverty that the children go to day schools and they keep in touch with home life. If the day school is really a boarding school as well, it will be found that there is always a differentiation in favor of the boarder, which has a very bad caste effect, just as the "modern-side" boy of any public school suffers in character because he is of a lower caste than the classical-side boy. It is usual to remove a stupid classical-side boy to the modern side, and every boy on the modern side has a sense of injustice. The