338 Stale Horticultural Society. 



facts were not acquired nor were the fancies stimulated within the dingy 

 walls of King Edward's Grammar School. The Stratford meadows, gay 

 and bright with flowers from early springtime till late autumn ; the Wier 

 Brake, where the earliest primroses come and 'where the nightingales sing 

 the night long;' the noble forest or Arden which stretched away through 

 Northwestern Warwickshire, with its hunting scenes and woodland idyls ; 

 the Whitsuntide celebrations, the May-pole dances, the sheep shearing 

 festivals, and the mystery plays ; and on the banks of the Avon, less than 

 a dozen miles away, the noble castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, these 

 are some of the places where Shakespeare acquired his education." 



I cite another illustration : In 1867 the talented Dean Farrar began 

 a crusade in England for Elementary Science. He says : "I was of 

 course howled at as a hopeless Philistine by all who were stereotyped in 

 the old classical system." He gives some letters from Charles Darwin, 

 one of them written March 5th, 1867, wherein Darwin says : "I admire 

 your candor. Had I been a great classical scholar I could not have, judged 

 fairly on the subject. I am one of the root and branch men. I would 

 have classics to be learnt by those who have sufficient zeal and the high 

 taste requisite for their appreciation." 



Then Darwin further says : "I was at school at Shrewsbury under 

 a great scholar, Dr. Butler. I learnt absolutely nothing except by amus- 

 ing myself by reading and experimenting in chemistry. Dr. Butler found 

 this out and publicly sneered at me before the whole school for such 

 gross waste of time." Dean Farrar says, "This letter of Darwin is some- 

 thing of historical interest in the annals of English education." He also 

 says : "Now there is no large school in England that does not offer its 

 pupils some practical and experimental knowledge in science." 



Bungling mediaevalism in many city schools makes school unat- 

 tractive, drives children prematurely into the street and shop, then by 

 the clumsy patchwork of night schools seeks to reclaim the children from 

 the condition of "arrested development" into which it has driven them. 

 Conservatism, now as always, cries "Let good enough alone. Don't dis- 

 turb us with new ways. Don't force us to open the old channels in our 

 brains. Let us run in the old grooves and avoid friction." This is the 

 voice of conservatism which is ever camping on the abandoned trail. 



No enlightened, progressive man is worried about the over-crowded 

 curriculum. The curriculum is crowded only where plodding medioc- 

 rity and sleeping inertia refuse to discriminate, select and utilize such 

 material as is adapted to the children who are furnished them for ex- 

 ploitation. Where the scientific spirit and the laboratory method per- 

 meate the school work there we find the best work m literature, grammai 

 and arithmetic, and in all that is good in the old tkiae cvtnriculum. Then. 



