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"finished his education," the man you casually meet would prefer to read about something else. The mother of half a dozen children next door and the pastor of five hundred souls in your church do not care to be burdened with the daily duty of being pedagogical. They cannot be on the alert to apply at any given moment the laws of apperception, unity, inner connection, creative self-activity, anschauung, gemüth, interests, reconciliation of opposites, self-estrangement, and all the abstract terms which make up the nomenclature of systematic pedagogy. Trained teachers themselves find it difficult to live up to the terminology to which they are committed. Even scientists forget that they profess evolution when it comes to the affairs of common life. We do not need to be learned in the history or philosophy of education to practice a natural nurture. It is unnecessary to label ourselves Herbartian, Hegelian, or Froebelian, in order to be measurably wise with children. But we must have some conscious principles to tie to, some visible foci for our thinking, some key-notes to tune by.

We may mean to be educative, developmental. But to the average parent, teacher, or preacher, this intention is too general for the best results. Or, conversely, it may be too special; the preacher may think of his educating only when in the pulpit, the pastor only when officially visiting, the teacher only when before the class. So there must be a more definitive idea, one in closer relation to the common processes and aspects of

life. We want to take education out beyond the bounds of home, school, or church, and make it coextensive with the essential agencies and processes of life itself.

Bishop Vincent aptly says: "The sharp line drawn between educational processes and ordinary every-day life is most unfortunate. The limiting of intellectual activity and its best fruits to institutions and libraries and formal curricula and class drills, leaves out the larger field of opportunity, worth as much as these, and without which these lose a large share of their value. It is like that other perversion which limits religion to the church."

Professor Dewey has profoundly noted that education is not merely a preparation for life, but that it is life. Now the one aspect of life-and of education-with which the whole world is on familiar terms, is nutrition-or in the larger soulsense, let us say, Nurture. Says Dr. Oppenheim, "This thing called nutrition is the main fact of interest to those who believe in training." He is speaking of the physical nutrition only. But the body is not to be ignored as a factor in spiritual work. And Francis W. Parker asks, "Is there not a law of nutrition of the mind? Is it not possible that malnutrition of the mind causes mental deformity, just as malnutrition of the body causes physical deformity?" And then what of the heart, the soul? Is there not malnutrition there? We all suffer from it. If we find the terminology of pedagogy dry, forbidding, and too special for the incessant emergencies of life;

if, having acquired the terminology we rest in it instead of in the consciousness of its meaning, and so fail to apply it-what then?

We need an organizing idea of familiar everyday origin. If we can hold this up to the eye, and, looking through it, as a recent writer' felicitously says, then, "a whole forest that before seemed like a thick and tangled jungle of bushes and briers is seen to be in reality an orderly garden."

Such an organizing idea is that of nutrition, or, more largely, Nurture. Once adopt this as a keyword standing for the fourfold process of Atmosphere, Light, Food, and Exercise, and we are at home with the great essentials of education, couched in homely phrase. Let us next see what we mean by Nurture and then study its four essentials in detail, as guides to method.

1 C. S. Peirce in The Nineteenth Century.

T

II

THE IDEA OF NURTURE

HE rich greens of the spring landscape were suddenly interrupted by a brown

acre of ploughed land. We were speeding on the electric wing through a fertile farming country in Eastern Pennsylvania. But the pace was not too fast to prevent my seeing that the mellow earth was dotted with innumerable little white patches ranged in rows, and that through the centre of each patch a baby cornstalk was peeping at the world.

The white patches were "fertilizer." The chemist had said that it contained some elements which, mingling with the earth, the corn would take up and incorporate into itself. What the farmer wanted was that his product should be the very best and biggest possible. He wanted full ears and a grain rich in certain qualities. To this end he not only fertilized the ground, but he prayed and hoped for exactly the right proportions of light and atmosphere-heat and moisture. Without these, his fertilizer would go for nothing. One thing more; the farmer knew that each grain of corn contained a potentiality-a power to become something larger than its pres

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ent self, a corn-producing energy. This he called life.

Now, observe the corn needed food; it could not grow without taking in solid and liquid at the roots. It needed light as an agency for producing certain chemical changes; it could not grow in the dark. It needed moisture and warmth of atmosphere; it could not grow in a frigid vacuum. It must be allowed its initiative of life. It must be self-active, self-determining. It must produce corn or nothing. All it asks is that it be furnished with the most suitable atmosphere, light, and food, and its life will do the rest by its own self-determining exercise. But the product will not resemble the elements of the process, for it will be corn; not earth, nor atmosphere, nor light, nor mere activity.

Again, bring me a piece of bread to eat. I call it bread so that I may be understood, but if by this word I mean food, then only my lifeforces can determine whether or not it is bread to me. If, sooner or later, it reappears as power in my arm, firmness in my feet, or color in my cheek, then my body has been nourished and you have fed me. As the earth was transmuted into corn stalk, blade, and grain, so the bread is transmuted into a material me.

Again, since man cannot live by bread alone, bring me a text, a thought; bring me a truth, a sentiment, a deed, a vision, a story, a hero, a heart. If, sooner or later these reappear in me as motives, purposes, emotions, deeds, and finally,

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