762 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 



he learns incidentally alongside his main life. His reasoning is 

 incidental. The same principle underlies, of course, the kindergaiten, 

 though I have not seen the term definitely used in connection with 

 kindergarten work. The child plays with his coloured beads and 

 strips, and incidentally learns number, colour, form. The virtue of 

 the kindergarten is that the child learns while playing. Now there 

 is a host of things that a boy learns at school which are incidental to 

 his school life, and apart from his books. He learns to respect, 

 certainly his superiors, possibly himself; he learns courage and 

 ambition in his games, if not in class. So much so, indeed, that it 

 has been one of the most persistent faiths of England that a boy 

 does not go to school to learn knowledge so much as how to behave in 

 the world among his fellow men. Knowledge, if it comes, is said to come 

 afterwards. This faith of the English parent may not be so far from 

 the truth after all, at least for the average boy, or the boys below the 

 average. It may be well founded on experience, that is possibly not 

 the boys' fault. This widely held idea of education among Enghsh- 

 men is probably the common-sense recognition of the very process 

 of incidental education to wliich 1 am .referring. Average boys are, 

 after all, the boys that will become the most numerous kind of men. 

 The rarer, intellectual boy will learn under any circumstances, or in 

 spite of them. Biit cannot the average boy be made to gain much 

 more knowledge than he usually does at school by an incidental 

 process applied in school subjects? And how far can the process be 

 applied? If we consider our own adult knowledge, we shall be 

 astonished to find how much has been learned by incidental processes. 

 The important things of life, when we think over them, have been 

 mostly learned incidentally, in the A'ast recesses of our experience. 



What has brought the idea of the application of this process 

 irresistibly to my mind has been a short visit among educational 

 institutions in the United States. There, if anywhere, education is a 

 living, almost a palpitating thing. In studying it and reflecting on it 

 there has grown in me an almost subconscious realisation of some 

 principle, evolving, not yet expressed in words, but finding expression 

 in practice. Among such keen observers and experimentalists as the 

 Americans it would not be surprising to find the evolution of ide^s 

 in education as close to Nature as those of Pestalozzi. In Honolulu, 

 under American Government, I found an education in its first 

 stages almost incidental. That is to say, round some mental process, 

 in itself attractive and comparatively easy, more difficult learning 

 is linked. The main occupation is observation of natural phenomena, 

 always delightful to a child. The life history of wasps, mosquitoes, 

 bees, and other living things, is closely and accurately observed. 

 Incidentally, the children learn drawing without copies, writing with- 

 out copy-books, expression without grammar, and Nature study without 

 books, and learn all these things admirably, and with marked indi- 

 viduality. I did not find a hand written like another in the school, yet 

 I saw no bad Avriting. Indeed, the writing was exceptionally good, 

 and personally expressive. Even sums are contrived to be linked 

 around the persistent inquiries of a child's mind, such as why floor 

 matting is joined lengthwise down the room instead of across. Here 

 is a principle with prodigious results in its application. The process 



