life. A strong, keen intelligence is like a perennial flower-a source of unfailing delight. But its individual charm, like all life variations, is in the beginning precarious, uncertain and easily deflected.

The humor of a child's unprovoked comments is usually of a more subtle quality than that called forth by bandying words with him. In these naïve expressions appear the faint outlines of his own distinctive originality. If it is to emerge the bright, free, soaring thing it was meant to be, we must not put a heavy weight upon the intelligence of the child by overriding his remarks by our commonplace wisdom, to the extent that he is continually abashed, nor must we make him selfconscious by giving undue and admiring attention to his prattle, encouraging him to further bids for attention. At least, our admiration may be of that quality which Emerson describes in the one who can "love the woodrose, and leave it on its stem.'

Maeterlinck has taught us to see in the silent child more wisdom than was possessed by all the sages. When we come to feel that the child himself is truth, manifested afresh to the world, we shall know that it is our duty to protect and respect the expression of his personality.

A MOTHER'S PLEA FOR THE NEW

EDUCATION

A LITTLE boy came around the corner of the house one spring morning and hailed me joyfully. He invited me to gaze into an old tin can in which he was carrying a mucilaginous mass interspersed with black dots. "It's frog's eggs," he explained excitedly, "and they'll hatch into pollywogs and then they'll be frogs, and they'll sing for us tonight." "Won't they sing for us to-night?" he added eagerly. "Not so soon, my dear," I said, smiling into his radiant face.

That April day was long and eventful, and before nightfall, when the frogs were expected to sing, many subsequent sensations had obliterated from the little boy's mind the episode of the early morning.

Weeks afterward, behind the house, I came upon the forgotten old tin can. In it was a mucilaginous mass interspersed with the familiar black dots. The "frog's eggs" had not hatched into pollywogs nor pollywogs into frogs. The frogs had not sung upon the appointed night, nor

would they ever sing.

Presumably, however, the universe had not greatly missed fifty frogs or more from the resources of that springtime, nevertheless there was a pathos about the old tin can and the fate of the pollywogs deprived of their native pond and the quickening currents of Mother Earth.

There came a time when the little boy himself was captured and confined. He was taken from his natural environment-the wood-lot, meadow brook, the orchard, or maybe only the sand pile in the back yard, where he had been learning by the use of his hands and feet and the exercise of sense and wit, where nature and his own developing faculties were beguiling him to the mimicry of the arts and crafts and the labors to which men go forth.

Thus compulsory education with the best intentions of developing his potentialities comes to every little boy, silences the happy shouts that swell his growing lungs and constitutes itself a criminal court to sit in judgment on a whisper. It puts the clamps of conventional postures upon his climbing, jumping, wriggling body and arraigns him for the crime of shuffling his feet.

Frogs that never sang-a little boy's mistake that resulted in a bit of pathos on an April day! How does this differ from the crude human ex

periment with the most precious and plastic material that the universe affords, the mind and body of a child? It differs as pathos differs from tragedy. So cries the voice of the new education which protests eloquently that no latent possibility wrapped up in the little boy can be spared, and that the traditional school violates the law of his growth.

We are told that education should not proceed upon the assumption that the child's mind is a sort of receptacle like the pouch of a marsupial to be filled with so many facts per day. Modern psychology reveals the growth of the mind as a dynamic process through which more and more appropriate response is being made to environmental stimuli, which process involves the forgetting as well as the remembering of facts.

he Montessori school for young children is a practical assertion that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among the inalienable rights of the child, and moreover that liberty in the pursuit of happiness is the essential condition for the development of any physical or mental life worth while.

The Fairhope school in Alabama, for older pupils, discards the formal task and waits reverently upon the factors and forces that govern the child's response to the stimuli of the favoring

environment in which he is turned loose. The breeze does not bring perfume on schedule time or the leaf burst forth at the striking of the clock, nor does the spontaneous interest of the child coincide with the fixed program of the formal educator. Ministering to the child's needs means being alert to those mental tides indicated by his curiosity, which, taken at their flood (of questioning) leads on to the good fortune of knowledge.

The shifting and diverse interests of the child are not meaningless and valueless. They are to the final and permanent interests what the random and apparently accidental movements of infant limbs are to the coördinated movements in the ultimately successful attempts at walking. One and another hereditary tendency is stimulated and quickened to life as nature searches out in the racial depths for that peculiar and special gift that is to synthesize all of the others and to enable the individual to find his true calling. It is vital not only to the personal happiness but also to the success of our democracy that Carlyle's saying should be true of every one: "Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask for no other blessing.'

"The tragedy of life is not battle, murder and sudden death, so much as it is failure in initiative -a commonplace, colorless existence due to the