VIEWS ON SCHOOL VACATIONS 371 



The same mind I am convinced finds profit from both these 

 educative agents." 



Another consideration he urges is "the waste of time after 

 each vacation in getting adjusted to school routine, for the rea- 

 son that the work of the student is of a nature to derive little 

 help from inherited usage. It is therefore always difficult if he 

 be a wholesome creature to build in him habits of study ; after 

 each break in his schooling he returns to his work with a mind 

 disused to the tasks of the school-room, nearly half of the year 

 is spent in recovering from the return to the primitive desultory 

 life of the savage or half -civilized state." 



In regard to the lack of inherited aptitude for study in con- 

 trast to the accumulated ancestral habit of muscular activities, 

 he says, "the youth wrestling with the elements of language or 

 mathematics is engaged in the same class of exhaustive labor 

 as the author or the athlete. We cannot expect of him the 

 persistent toil he could well give to mechanical employments 

 which lie within the common inheritances of the race ; few of our 

 children inherit even for two or three generations the intellect- 

 ual habit. School work is the creation of yesterday, while the 

 normal energies of mind and body have been transmitted to us 

 from the geological ages. ... In our schools we are dealing 

 with minds and bodies which have, perhaps happily, a vastly 

 greater inheritance from brute and savage than from civilized 

 life. ... In the matter of our teaching-system, as in many 

 other of our social problems, we seem to be always 'between 

 the devil and the deep sea ' : on the one hand we have the sav- 

 age and barbaric man whose lusty strength and simple nature 

 we need to keep alive, but whose clumsy, unthinking ways 

 we must better; on the other side, the bloodless, half-human 

 creature which our schooling breeds. Our task is to make a 

 middle kind of a man who retains the good of savage and 

 scholar alike." 



These views, new when he first stated them, have since be- 

 come the truisms of the profession. From the beginning he 



