i 3 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



most unfortunate things, it seems to me, about the education young 

 people now get is the supposed completedness of it when the class-room 

 door has been passed for the last time. 



Any normal man or woman who looks back over his childhood finds 

 at least a few great enthusiasms entering in the makeup of his early 

 world, which came upon him unawares and were only dimly connected 

 with the little exact knowledge he may have possessed. Some of the 

 brightest memories of childhood are of feelings, vague, perhaps, but 

 none the less real, as to the beauty, the vastness, the mystery of the 

 world. The time 



Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, 



is no fiction for most persons. Poets' fancies are apt to find response 

 somewhere in the constitution of most of us, however successfully we 

 may have Bessemerized ourselves by mental discipline or business. 

 Nearly all children, like nearly all primitive peoples, have in their 

 natures the material out of which mystics are made; and of all the 

 flames in human nature none burn higher and holier than that of 

 mysticism. To utilize this raw material, not to the making of mystics 

 but of sane, wholesome men and women, I conceive to be one of the 

 great educational problems on the hands of this generation. 



Education is failing so signally to meet the needs of rapidly ad- 

 vancing civilization because it is not calling forth the best powers of 

 the boys and girls. It is not getting at these powers because it is not 

 appealing to the real interests of the children; and it is not appealing 

 -to these interests because it is not taking the children whole; it is try- 

 ing to educate pieces of children. Under an educational regime that 

 should do no violence either to the nature of children or the nature of 

 nature, I am convinced that much of the alert curiosity, lively imagina- 

 tion, automatic attention, and spontaneous acquisition characteristic of 

 early childhood could and would be carried up into the later inevitable 

 strenuosity and anxiety of advanced scholarship and " sure-enough " 

 life. 



Emerson somewhere exclaims, " The earlier generations saw God 

 face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an 

 original relation to nature ? " 



The kernel of the educational problem, at least as regards nature, 

 is here. Not only " earlier generations " but our own children, enjoy 

 " an original relation to nature." That they ever lose that relation, is 

 largely chargeable to defective education. 



