THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION 509 



ures with greater and greater accuracy as he makes experiments in me- 

 chanics and heat and chemistry. Every boy is fond of stories, and if 

 treated reasonably is easily induced to learn to read. Heading aloud is 

 easily made a pleasure and a habit, and so the boy learns to speak prop- 

 erly. Any boy whatever will become fond of reading if the people about 

 him are fond of reading : I state this as a fact which I have investigated. 

 A boy who is fond of reading gets later on to know the value of books 

 and the use of books, and he will go on educating himself till he dies. 

 Any attempt at coercion, unless it is the very gentle coercion of a per- 

 son whom he loves, is fatal; even coaxing is not always good. He as- 

 similates knowledge from everything which he does, and therefore he 

 ought to be induced to do things which not only keep him healthy, but 

 which give him knowledge and teach him to reason. Do you remember 

 how angry Lanfranc of Bee was at the idea that any pupil could be 

 forced to learn ; he said " it turned men into beasts." I speak to you 

 who love children, who love young people, who know that there is 

 hardly one child in a hundred, even among rather spoilt children, who 

 does not love to do his duty. 



Under the best and most loving of teachers a lonely child has enor- 

 mous disadvantages, but these can generally be remedied. The usual 

 mistake is to send it to a large school. If it is merely a day school there 

 is no great harm. But no child under thirteen ought to be sent to a 

 boarding school unless it is a small school and the master and his wife 

 have a love and sympathy for other people's children. There are such 

 people in the world, God bless them ! but they are not numerous. They 

 are so few that we must return to nature as the best of teachers. The 

 time is coming when a child's own father and mother will have much 

 more knowledge and wisdom than they have now, and they will refuse to 

 give up to others the doing of their highest duties. It is at present not 

 sufficiently recognized that the most important duty of the parents is 

 the education of their children. At present, men who are building up 

 fortunes are too busy to think of their children, and so we find that the 

 sons of Lord Chancellors and other successful men have been marrying 

 chorus girls and squandering those very fortunes to which their educa- 

 tion was sacrificed. Of course, if parents are uneducated, and there- 

 fore selfish or otherwise foolish, any kind of school may be better than 

 home for their doomed children. It is one of the great advantages of 

 poverty that the children go to day schools and they keep in touch with 

 home life. If the day school is really a boarding school as well, it will be 

 found that there is always a differentiation in favor of the boarder, which 

 has a very bad caste effect, just as the "modern-side" boy of any public 

 school suffers in character because he is of a lower caste than the class- 

 ical-side boy. It is usual to remove a stupid classical-side boy to the mod- 

 ern side, and every boy on the modern side has a sense of injustice. The 



