THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES. 93 



the spirit of the in-door game, the children would still prefer to man- 

 age it in their own way. 



But if the exercise in the house, so far as muscular action is con- 

 cerned, answered every purpose, it would still be unwise, because it 

 begets the habit of in-door life, and this is destructive of all educa- 

 tional development except in a few very narrow lines, and it is ques- 

 tionable if these lines are educational in any true sense. A child with 

 the in-door habit may be an adept at parsing, he may be skillful in 

 translating Latin and Greek, and be able to follow in the beaten track 

 of mathematics ; but when it comes to any of the sciences, when he 

 attempts any of the studies which relate to the phenomena of the liv- 

 ing world, or of the objective world about him, because he has never 

 observed these phenomena himself, he will fail. He will fail because 

 in what he has seen and experienced there is nothing by which he will 

 be able to translate to himself the words or the pictures of the text- 

 book. In all the branches of natural history he can learn nothing but 

 the words of the book. What the science of chromatics would be to 

 a blind child, or acoustics to a deaf one, is the greater part of our sci- 

 ence-teaching, in cities especially, to the boys and girls Kaspar Hau- 

 sers whose life is spent in the house. Knowing so little of the phe- 

 nomena of the world, they are, of course, unable to comprehend any 

 of the grand generalizations which follow a knowledge of their causes 

 .and sequences ; and, being deprived of this, they are without both the 

 powers of observation and of the deeper reasoning which can come 

 only as a result of facts obtained by observations of their own and kin- 

 dred ones of others. To teach such children text-book science is not 

 only a waste of the time of the child, but it is a very great damage to 

 him, both because it will have a stultifying effect upon his mental 

 powers, and because it will make him believe if he learns the words 

 and secures a fair per cent from his teacher that he has an under- 

 standing of the subject, when, as a matter of fact, he knows nothing 

 of it but the words in which the thoughts are expressed, while the 

 very existence of the true thoughts is all unknown to him. 



To speak of the advantages of an out-of-door life seems almost like 

 stating truisms universally accepted ; and yet the great mortality among 

 the dwellers in-doors, their precarious tenure of life, the prevalence of 

 nervous diseases among them, and the tendency to crime, all show that 

 it is still necessary to refer to the ruddy health of the farmer, to his 

 greatly prolonged life, to his freedom from insomnia, to his immunity 

 from pulmonary complaints, and to his absence both from the prison 

 and the almshouse, as a proof that out-door life is necessary to health 

 and to happiness. The tendency of book-learning, under the most fa- 

 vorable conditions, is to too much in-door life, and, when this tendency 

 receives the additional influence of the no-recess plan, it certainly has 

 a powerful hold upon the young person just emerging from the school- 

 room. Is Solomon's injunction, to "train up a child in the way he 



