i 3 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



States just now are the extent to which boys go into electricity, par- 

 ticularly wireless telegraphy; and the extent of their mastery over the 

 automobile. Nothing has astonished me more than the quickness and 

 thoroughness with which I have in several instances seen boys of from 

 six to ten years learn the automobile when one has come into the family 

 for the first time. I believe thousands of men throughout the land 

 will bear witness from their own observations that an ordinary lad of 

 ten will learn an automobile as readily and nearly as thoroughly as a 

 full-fledged man, and with no seeming effort whatever. 



How long, I ask any school teacher, do you suppose it would re- 

 quire for the same boy to master the automobile with equal thorough- 

 ness, were it to be taken into the school and studied in the usual school 

 way with no other interests and notions than those ordinarily present in 

 school learning? My own earlier experience as a teacher in the ele- 

 mentary schools, and my later observations on learning and acquiring 

 skill, lead me to venture the opinion that no matter how long a boy 

 should be taught the automobile by school methods under school con- 

 ditions, he would never gain such a mastery over it as thousands of 

 boys are now doing in a month or six weeks with no particular instruc- 

 tion at all. The principle is the same, I take it, as that of learning 

 languages. We ordinarily make the sharpest distinction between native 

 and foreign tongues. As a matter of fact, there is no such distinction 

 to a child beginning to talk. To it one language is as native or as 

 foreign as another and two or three, who knows how many? will be 

 acquired simultaneously and with equal facility during the proper 

 language-getting period and under the exigencies of real life. 



The point for education is that in our systems as they are, the 

 natural correlations between the stages of individual development and 

 subjects to be acquired, native curiosity and interest, spontaneous 

 spiritual and physical activity, and social and other environmental 

 impingements upon the growing boy and girl, are given the most hap- 

 hazard attention by those who make and operate the systems. In the 

 matter of the child's contacts with and attitude toward natural history, 

 I merely point out how objectively and largely a child's first knowledge 

 is biological. Its contacts with its mother and its nurse, through all the 

 avenues to its inner life, are continuous and vital. The first hours and 

 days and months of a babe's life are a continuous laboratory course in 

 biology. Then come the earliest wider contacts and noticings and 

 curiosities and attentions and movings about. Think of the inevitable 

 conquest of the family cat and dog, and the cow, the horse, the pig, the 

 sheep, if by good fortune the youngster's world contains these animals. 

 The nursery and the toy-shop, not the schoolroom and the educa- 

 tional supply store, tell the story of how the natural education of 

 children runs. 



