DISCUSSION. R59 
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This analysis shows the inherent weakness of this list as a wholé, and of each of the 
ist in itself when viewed alone from the formal side. When this weakness is placed 
beside the ideal of education set up in the early part of this paper the deficiency is pain- 
‘ul. It is the deficiency in these branches of those ideas which nourish and thus 
develop the spirit into its heavenly likeness, and the prevalence in them of the technical, 
sommonplace, temporary ideas, which at best prepare only for prosaic living. 
From this analysis we are driven to the conclusion, therefore, that they are inadequate 
0 produce the desired education. They could but fit out the child with the armor and 
weapons of a giant and leave him a pygmy, unable to wear the one or wield the other. 
The course must be enriched by ideas which nourish and sustain the spiritual, which 
nduce those mental processes which constitute healthful and strengthening activities 
for the spirit itself. 
We must find these ideas in other fields of thought, since the enumerated list 
loes not contain them. Fortunately, we shall not have far to go. External nature 
and the humanities will furnish the needed ideas. It is not even necessary to bur- 
len our course of study with many new names. 1t is only necessary to read new 
meaning into the names already there. Observations, lessons on plants or animals, 
with reference to their structure, life, habits, and environment, will give ideas, de- 
lightfully interesting, elevating, and spiritually strengthening to a six-year-old child. 
These ideas, reproduced by the teacher on blackboard or chart, or on slips of paper 
oy means of the school printing-press, form material for drill in learning to read, 
that never palls on the mental appetite, nor gives rise to soul-benumbing automatic 
epetition of forms without content, interest, or meaning. 
And, if the child thus learns to read by associating the letters and words with 
teresting and iastructive ideas, words will, in reality, become the signs of ideas, 
and so, ever after, the interpretation of the printed page is a soul-inspiring process 
nstead of the perfunctory, automatic process it so frequently becomes when prac- 
dsed from its formal side only. Fairy story, poetry, and charming prose, real liter- 
ature, containing the ideals, customs, hopes, and achievements of institutional life, 
should then be used as an exercise ground for the child’s spiritual nature, and I am 
sure little time need be spent on the formal teaching of inflections or gesture in 
order to make intelligent readers. Learning to read should be chiefly done within 
the first three years of school life ; in the remainder, the pupil should read and 
read much. In like manner, when the child is taught to compose, first orally and 
then in writing, and when his penmanship is judged by his original writing, then 
vill he learn to write a free, rapid, and legible hand. 
Still again, if the child has his observation directed from the first day of his 
school life to those unions of physical forces and human motives which make of the 
sarth’s surface such a bewilderingly interesting theatre for the institutional life of 
man, if he has been led to accustom himself to find either in nature or man, or 
in the combination of both, the reasons which make the earth so dear a home for 
nan, and if even after books, maps, and charts assist him, he is still led to look 
sehind the present effect to the reasonable cause, there is little danger that he will 
spend his time in bounding the states or locating the capitals of African provinces. 
When the history of one’s country is so taught as to lead one to love it because its 
mstitutions are worthy and its associations are sacred; when, besides its time and 
place category, history is seen to be the record of a progress towards freedom ; when 
each institution, the state included, is seen to be an instrumentality which the race 
creates and uses for its own advancement, the spirit will be nourished and strength- 
ned, and something higher than mere prudence will enter into the character of the 
learner and control his conduct. If the other subjects of the list be interpreted in 
this larger and more liberal way, and it seems to me they should be taught in this