not the obtrusive insertion in arithmetics of so-called concrete problems, as, "If I have four apples, and I give two to John, how many have I left?" when the child who works the problem has not had one apple, much less four.

Children are hungry for facts, and no fairy tale can hold a deeper interest for them than the truths of life itself. Nature is at work everywhere, tearing down and building up, and the children may watch her in her workshop. Little children may not understand the term "erosion," but they will listen with rapt attention to the story of how the sand was made, and come to a new consciousness in regard to water, wind, and weather. Animal life, from the tiny earthworm to the bulky elephant, from the grasshopper to the wonder animals of the sea, seems to weave a spell of enchantment for children, and to surpass the cleverest bits of fiction in interest.

They are ready likewise to hear the marvelous truths about the sun, to indulge their imagination in the immensity of its great distance from the earth and yet to know that the sun touches their lives at every point. A study of the sun opens up hours of fascinating thought about light and darkness, day and night, month and year, sunset and sunrise, sundial and shadow; about the effect of the sun upon plant and animal, upon food, shelter, clothing; about its relationship to health and even happiness, and to all the interesting facts of temperature, steam, fuel, evaporation, etc. Besides these truths, for which primary-school children are ready, there is a wealth of material in myth, poem, and folklore which will stir the imagination and charm the listener.

Children feel the wonder and beauty of life; they are in love with it and hold intimate communion with its humblest expression. Nature is reluctant to give them up, and still holds them by the hand to let them share her secrets with

the birds and flowers. Self-consciousness has not yet broken the spell, and a child feels himself a part of one great, triumphant burst of life. All the world's akin. The wind talks to him, the flowers bloom and hide for him, the sun sends a shadow playmate to him, and he does not question why. His quick imagination interprets the messages of sight, sound, and touch which greet him everywhere, and the purity of his contact with life fortifies his faith in it.

The child who stands on tiptoe to peep cautiously into the new-found bird's nest, who feels the velvety softness of growing things beneath his feet as he hunts out the tiny wild flowers in the spring, who sows his own garden seed and waits to see the first young green push its way through the dark, moist soil, is building up a reverence for life, a sense of kinship with it, which will uphold him in hist later and deeper understanding of its meaning.

Why is it that the little child who bends in hushed tenderness over the new baby's crib, who instinctively strokes the baby cheek as gently as if it were the frail petal of a rose, who assumes at once the attitude of defense and parental protection toward it, often becomes the guilty, inquisitive, unclean boy or girl? Why do children run to meet life with eager purity and go away soiled by the contact? Is it not because we are all afraid of truth; because we give them feeble, foolish makeshifts about life instead of its wonderful facts? We begin, with the perverted interpretations and sentimentality of the so-called nature study in the primary grades, to offer unscientific and inane fairy tales about nature, which degrade the imagination but do not deceive the understanding. Children are poetic, sensitive, and pure-hearted. They are never startled by the truth, but are more logical than we concede, and silently reject what their reason tells them is untrue. The little boy

of five who said, "I always knew the stork never brought me, for I have n't a peck in my side, have I ?" had become a common-sense skeptic. A failure to give him then and there as much of the truth as he was ready for and the consciousness that he could always find an answer to his questions would have started him upon the unclean path. Nature is frank; she presents a beautiful panorama of life, death, reproduction, mating, and parenthood, and calls the growing child to come and look upon it; the child is ready to take it in with pure eyes, to catch the wonder, beauty, and responsibility of it all, to become the champion of its cleanness and of its health. But instead of such frank contact with nature, which is fundamentally necessary to awaken a true regard for the great facts of sex, he is stopped and blindfolded on the very threshold of his experience; he is given fiction instead of truth, and filled with sophisticated and false ideas of modesty which eventually drive out genuine purity and reverence for truth. The child who has truth confided him as a precious gift will cherish and guard it, but the child who ferrets it out for himself with inquisitive suggestiveness will feel no responsibility for its keeping, but toss it about in boastful grossness. Ignorance is not purity, knowledge is not purity; but knowledge of facts colored with emotional reaction, reverent possession of truth, can never soil the mind. The child who in nature study holds some frail bit of life in his hands and reverently watches its beautiful unfoldment will appreciate and champion its sacredness.

CHAPTER XVIII

BUSY-WORK

Busy-work occupies an unenviable position in the course of study. Its opponents call it "idiot's delight"; its supporters smile inwardly and regard it as a necessary evil. It is a veritable Cinderella in the educational household, -tolerated because there is no available substitute. Like Cinderella, however, it only needs a fairy godmother to bring it to its own. Properly handled, busy-work offers endless opportunities for training. What can be done, then, to give it value? It must be so planned that it will give opportunity for independent thinking on the part of the child and enable him to reënforce, by his own effort, the knowledge or skill gained in previous recitations. Busywork must do more than consume time; it must make wise use of it. It must not be administered as a kind of quieting potion, to impress the superintendent when he makes his hurried rounds, but must be full of definite purpose.

Busy-work, to be effective, must conform to certain conditions. It must present a problem commensurate with the ability of the child; it must afford sufficient variety to hold the attention of the child; the period of concentration must not be too long; the directions given when the task is assigned must be definite and simple; the results accomplished during the period must be noted by the teacher.

Power develops in proportion to the effort expended. The utter absence of individual effort in an exercise of twenty-five minutes the time usually allotted to the

busy-work is an irreparable loss. Laying sticks to make a pigeon house, which a child of three could do with his eyes closed, represents the character of a large portion of the work. What is the result of such vacuous occupation? Young children are forming habits either of healthful activity, or of inconsequent dawdling, every day that they live. One chief reason why we find a lack of individual attack in study, an inability to concentrate, and a disintegrating languor in the upper grades is the pretense of industry and semblance of study in the first grade.

The child who is not productively occupied necessarily hunts mischief as a relief. He steals a chance to disobey, to talk, or to destroy what he is oftentimes ashamed to have made. When children are allowed to manage their own time you never find them lounging for twenty-five minutes, or languidly gazing out of the window. Natural children keep wholesomely occupied. Their brains and hands are busy. They are plying questions, collecting oddities, or enjoying a well-earned rest. Busy-work often makes use of one tenth of a boy or girl, and leaves the other nine tenths actively in trouble, or humped up in an inert mass of crooked shoulders. On the contrary, the moment a child has a task to perform which is worthy of his effort, what happens? His body straightens up, his blood flows freely to his brain and tingles in his finger-tips. During lazy busy-work the child knows that he is merely being disposed of, that the task imposed is nominal, and that he is not responsible for its completion. Such a state of affairs breeds false conceptions of work.

If you are not skillful enough to plan and direct this period, turn the children out to play vigorously in the yard. They will come back glowing with energy, not crippled with inertia. They will be set for work, not against it. Idleness