To work properly in adult life there must be natural and abundant play in childhood. Bagehot wrote: "Man made the school, God made the playground. Before letters were invented or books, or governesses discovered, the neighbor's children, the outdoor life, the fists and the wrestling sinews, the old games (the oldest things in the world), the bare hill, the clear river,— these were education; and now, though Xenophon and sums become obsolete, these are and remain. Horses and marbles, the knot of boys beside the schoolboy fire, the hard blows given and the harder ones received,-these educate mankind."

Influence of Chance Environment.-Not only purposive influences educate, but also all chance environment. The slums educate as forcibly as do Grand Avenue, the church, and the school; a candidate for the penitentiary helps to educate our boys no less than does the Sunday-school teacher. Sometimes the chance and baneful education is more forceful than the designed and elevating. According to Spencer's definition the purpose of education is to prepare for complete living. This even is a conception of an ideal education. Dewey has defined the term in a much more fundamental sense by declaring that education is not solely a preparation for something in the future. It may include that, but there is something more basal. Education, he says, is life itself; and conversely life is education. Here is the only conception which is broad enough, even when we consider ideal education. According to this conception every individual becomes educated, in fact, none can escape it. Even the lower animals, as well as man, undergo education, for do not their experiences bias their future conduct?

Influence of Primitive Arts and Occupations.-Shall we not consider the stride from savagery to civilization as education? But through the long struggle there were no schools except the effective school of experience. In this struggle with the elements, with wild beasts, and with each other, were men not taught some things? Whenever one is taught anything or learns anything there is education. Were not primitive men

for long ages learning how to make implements for warfare, for the hunt, and the chase; learning to make fire, how to cook, and how to spin and weave; how to clothe themselves, provide shelter and protection; how to plough, plant, and harvest; how to cure disease and avoid pestilence; learning methods of transportation, barter, and exchange; learning how to dig, smelt, and fashion the ores; how to utilize the wind and water, and employ the simplest mechanical principles? And when learned were these things not taught? And have they not influenced profoundly the whole character of subsequent history?

We are prone to forget that the school of experience has been in session since the world began and there have been no vacations. Nature has not missed assigning a single lesson. The credits received for the training have been recorded with absolute fidelity. The education which man has received in this wise is incomparably greater and the results are much more enduring than the results of a few centuries of formal education since schools began. In cudgelling his brains for some new school arts which might interest and profit the children it would be well for the school-master to take a retrospective glance and pass in review the school arts which mother nature has employed. If he can discern anything which is related to getting a living, providing food, clothing, shelter, amusement, or advantages, there he will find an interesting and effective school instrument. Utility has been the watchword of nature; it should be the school-master's.

When considering the function of school training it is important to remember that the development and progress attained since the invention of systematic schooling might be represented by a dot, while that achieved in the pre-school period through the exercises gained in connection with the everyday occupations in providing food, shelter, clothing, protection, and recreation would have to be represented by a line of infinite length. If the educational values of industrial activities were correctly understood, we should utilize them far more than we now do in formal education instead of bringing forward something far

removed from the basal instincts of mankind. The school ought to be the most effective instrument of evolution, and should coordinate all means that have proved valuable in phylogenetic development instead of discarding them and using only the latest discovered means.

1

Bain wrote that, "in the widest sense of the word man is educated, either for good or evil, by everything that he experiences from the cradle to the grave. But in the more limited and usual sense the term education is confined to the efforts made, of set purpose, to train men in a particular way—the efforts of the grown-up part of the community to inform the intellect and mould the character of the young; and more especially to the labors of professional educators or school-masters."

School an Interpreter of Experience. The school should be the educational institution par excellence. It should be, and is coming to be, the institution which co-ordinates all the best educational processes of life and adds its own special forms. The school studies principles of life rather than mere mechanical modes of immediate use in gaining a livelihood or deriving momentary pleasure and happiness. It thus furnishes an interpretation of life and gives significance to all other modifying influences. It looks to the future more than to the immediate present. The school is the standard-bearer of the highest ideals of the present and of the past. Advanced forms of schools, also, seek to discover new truths and new ideals, and thus become not only guidons of established forms of conduct, but heralds of new ideals. Universities have been the greatest factors in advancing civilization that the world has ever known.

The Child the Centre. But even after cataloguing all the ideals of education and all the institutions and agencies that have a modifying influence upon the individual during his life, we have considered education from only one side and that the least potent. Such a study is like a study of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Modern educational inquiry has shifted

the view-point to include not only ideals and agencies but the

1 Education as a Science, p. 6.

central figure in the process-the child. Nature has been proceeding slowly, steadily, for eons in the production of the crowning product of evolution, and if we would educate wisely we must spell out at least the fundamentals of the secret. Though we may utilize artificial substitutes here and there, yet all must be in harmony with the almost indelible traditional ways found efficient in ages of experimentation. The modern educationist is admonished to go to nature, consider her ways and be wise. The latter part of the nineteenth century deserves lasting credit for centring the attention of educators upon the child instead of the curricula. Though not losing sight of ideals and means, yet an effort is made to understand these in relation to the developing being. The most suggestive history of education is not the history of man-devised practices and theories, but the history which nature has written in the human embryo, disclosing a long, circuitous march from the humblest beginnings to the present wonderful attainment. Every child comes into the world freighted with potentialities gathered laboriously during long past ages. These are so integrally woven that to devise inharmonious educational machinery which cramps or distorts is to produce monstrosities. This suggests that there is no fixity of powers. Evolution has not ceased. Where there is evolution there is plasticity. But the plasticity of the child is not that of a lump of clay, yielding, resisting, but passive when modified. Biological plasticity means in addition to mere modifiability that new lines of growth and development are possible. Through heredity there are strivings along old lines of growth, but with power for new growth. The education of the child is a problem of life, not of an inert lump of putty; a problem of biology, not of physics; a problem of kinetics, not of statics. Hereditary Prepotentialities. - Donaldson, in his monumental work says: "Education consists in modifications of the central nervous system. For this experience the cell elements are peculiarly fitted. They are plastic in the sense that their connections are not rigidly fixed, and they remember, or,

1

The Growth of the Brain, p. 336.

to use a physiological expression, tend to repeat previous reactions. By virtue of these powers the cells can adjust themselves to new surroundings, and further learn to respond with great precision and celerity to such impulses as are familiar because important.

"In its size and development the central nervous system is precocious. Long before birth all the cells destined to compose it are already formed, though by no means all are developed in the sense that they have acquired the form and connections characteristic for those at maturity. At the close of embryonic life the sensory nerves rapidly extend, and the connection of the central cells with limiting surfaces of the body being thus established, all experiences become those of education. The act of living is thus the most important natural educational process with which the human body has to do, yet it is usual to restrict the term education to a series of formal events falling within the period of school life. . . . It appears probable that the education of the schools is but one, and that, too, rather an insignificant one, of many surrounding conditions influencing growth."

Heredity marks out in broad outlines the limits of the abilities of each individual. Formal educational processes will determine the extent to which latent possibilities are rendered kinetic, but it cannot create tendencies. For example, one devoid of genuine musical capacity cannot develop into a master any more than an oak shoot can develop into a pine, or a racing filly into a draught-horse. Mathematical power, linguistic capacity, or delicacy of touch which will give surgical skill, artistic imagination and execution, are inborn and not created through school training. Besides his physical inheritance of bodily form, size, appearance, his instincts, mental predispositions, and capacities, every child receives a social inheritance in the form of language, institutions, laws, customs, printed literature, and the results of scientific achievements, which at once put him a long way ahead in the march of civilization. Without them his physical heritage would be incapable of securing him much advancement.