Page:Preparation of the Child for Science.djvu/69

Rh injudicious comments of adults, we do something to turn what should be a preparation for future revelation into a preparation for future vice or brain-disease. The element of competition has its place, and a very important one, in education; but its function is to stimulate to active exertion among known facts. Children may legitimately run races for a prize, or compete together as to speed and accuracy in working out sums by methods already quite familiar; but whenever the business on hand is revelation, whether by learning to understand a mental process, observing a natural fact, or tuning the nervous system into harmony with Nature's rhythmic law, the idea and feeling of competition should be entirely absent. Too much stress cannot be laid upon this point. The false crossing of influences, the applying of stimulus inappropriate to the particular function, especially the dragging of the element of competition into the wrong portions both of the educational life and the professional life, are responsible for more of insanity and vice than any one dreams of who has not given very special attention to the subject.

Of arithmetic and algebra I shall say little here, as they are treated in another chapter. Only one point I will lay stress on. Many a life of intellectual muddle and intellectual

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