30 RUKAL RECONSTRUCTION 



how to carry this auto-instructional system of teaching a good 

 stage further for practical purposes, with the effect of obtaining 

 admirable, practical results — results admirable in more senses than 

 one, and fully worth noticing by ourselves. 



Nothing, so it is generally admitted, is better calculated to 

 stimulate a child's interest and zeal in any learning than being 

 allowed to do something for itself, according to its own fancy and 

 conception of what such thing should be. And, once more, nothing 

 tunes up a child's interest to top pitch of wanting to learn every- 

 thing about everything than having to do with some live object, 

 be it plant or animal, being set to watch, study, still better to handle, 

 feed, teach and train it, look after its well being and make it to 

 accommodate itself to the student's ideas. Plant life is attractive 

 in this way. The growing even of a simple pea plant or a flowering 

 shrub in the child's own garden bed, or during the rougher season 

 in a pot, teaches the child more botany and vegetable physiology 

 than a whole course of lessons in the classroom. But the ideal 

 object to have to deal with is an animal of some kind ; and such 

 study acts upon sentiment as well as upon knowledge. It is not 

 among people so brought up from childhood that are found the 

 persons indifferent to plant life, not troubling whether their land 

 brings forth full, good crops or bad, clean crops or foul, or else, 

 worse, who treat animals with cruelty, or with unconcern to the 

 quality of their produce. Nothing trains to kindness, or to apprecia- 

 tion of quality, like habitual contact, observation, entering into 

 the life of other creatures in their parents' modest menage. Well, 

 that infantile tendency can, and assuredly ought to, be turned to 

 educational account. The success of the practice which is to 

 result from the learning will be effected. 



Our own labourers' children — though it is among them that we 

 look more and more for our future farmers, and for whom we are 

 democratising agriculture — have for a long time had to go without 

 such natural automatically instructive help to learning, or else have 

 had it meted out to them with an only grudging and niggardly 

 hand. In their parents' modest menage there was no room for it. 

 There was little enough of garden, less of field, restricted plant life, 

 very little animal life that they might turn their attention to, and 

 on which to whet their desire for knowledge and to expend their 

 tenderness of sentiment ; in contact with which to initiate themselves 

 in the principal duties and occupations of their coming life ; nothing 

 at the same time to impart zest and brightness to their infant 

 existence and on which to form their mind. 



