2 BARKER : 



before. The High School work has been in one sense a light 

 case, though at a fearful cost in the total to students and 

 teachers, all at the heartbreaking business of useless work. 

 And it has served, like vaccination, to keep them from any- 

 thing more serious. If the boys had been in the shop and 

 the girls in the house they might have been accomplishing 

 something. They might have learned to work and to do a 

 great many things well. 



But the child is sent where a vast and complex system is 

 at work ; where its instruction is sprung on it ; where it is 

 hurried from one unfamiliar fact to another, seldom under- 

 standing clearly even for the moment ; never returning to get 

 a permanent hold on these facts or their relation to one 

 another. Learning, however, to memorize, and after recita- 

 tion, so one student confessed, to discharge the mind of its 

 undigested contents to prepare for another recitation. The 

 worst of the school system is that it makes no continued 

 demand for knowledge which it is supposed to impart, and 

 that demand is made nowhere else. 



The study work is left to limp after the recitation in the 

 tired hours, the forms of study are made needlessly abstract 

 and out of relation to the daily life of the community, the 

 school itself supplies no atmosphere for the informal and 

 spontaneous use of the newly acquired idea, and diplomas 

 and marks come to be the desired end. " Why didn't I ask 

 the teacher?" said one Normal School girl, "I had my 

 mark already and I had to look out for my diploma ; you 

 can' I teach ivithout you get that.'' 



These are some of the conditions and contributory causes 

 of our recognized failure to educate. Let us see which is 

 really fatal. If we find that without systematic instruction, 

 or set hours for the free use of suitable room and instruments, 

 the boys do learn one thing well, perhaps we can also find the 

 reason and profit thereby. For if one half of the passionate 

 devotion that is given to the study and practice of the pre- 

 cious truths of base ball were given to the acquirement of any 



