Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/828

708 which children are being educated does, it is true, make enormous demands upon educators, and practically summons into being a new profession, if not a new race of women and of men. There is no conceivable "training course" that would fit any one within a stipulated time to be a young child's stimulus and steadying power, his sensitively adequate connecting link with the universe, his intellectual source of supply. That "cultural background" so often spoken of must be reinforced, one imagines, by definite native gifts. It is probably because of defective equipment, defective personality, on the part of teachers, that both the old education and the new have perhaps a tendency, so far as actual content is concerned, to be a little meagre. Teachers can scarcely supply a child's life and imagination with what they have not found for themselves. In his exposition of "The Play Way," the English schoolmaster, Mr. H. Caldwell Cook, gives a far broader notion than is current in this country of the extent of a child's intellectual and imaginative appetite. The bulk of poetry and science, of drama, of mechanics, of the general apparatus of living and thinking, that his children assimilated through the single stimulus of play, is highly suggestive. Perhaps no school has yet been devised that adequately estimates the amount either of phantasy or of reality that a child of the sort known as "promising" longs for and can digest. Which makes it all the more apparent that companionship with the very young, which has always been assigned to a class of left-overs, should properly be the task of philosophers and seers; of some Thoreau who should also have a pleasant taste for whimsy; some Pied Piper who should also be the intimate of electricity and steam; some poet who should know the secret ways of leaf and star; some master of rhythm or design, who should know how tales are told; some heroic runner or swimmer or dancer, who should also be able to think and to rouse thought. It may be that there is nothing valuable, significant, in life or art to which even the first stages of childhood cannot achieve an enriching relationship.