EDUCATION 87 



examination which revealed little to the teacher be- 

 cause of its mechanical limitations. Two hours of such 

 study, I agreed with Mrs. Borsodi, were sufficient for 

 the sort of thing upon which the public schools con- 

 centrated; the rest of the day would prove of more 

 educational value to the boys if devoted to reading 

 and play. The play, in such a home, was just as educa- 

 tional as the reading. Productive and creative activi- 

 ties in the garden, the kitchen, the workshop, the 

 loom-room furnished the boys opportunities to "play" 

 in ways since adopted as regular procedure by the 

 progressive schools. In our home, however, such play 

 was directly related to useful functions; they were 

 not merely interesting exercises. 



Best of all, the new scheme furnished plenty of time 

 for reading. The reading seemed to us all important. 

 One of the terrible things which the average school 

 does to its pupils is to kill their love for books. All 

 books, to the child who has had to "read" in class, tend 

 to become textbooks. The poetry, plays, novels, essays 

 which are parts of their courses in English are read, 

 not to furnish rich experiences and to expand the 

 imagination, but as subjects for recitation and gram- 

 matical analysis. This is a process which dissects what 

 should be a living thing, and the corpse of a poem 

 which the child is made to study is no more what the 

 artists who created it intended it to be than the corpse 

 which medical students dissect is a living, breathing 

 human being. The reading of Ivanhoe was a part of 

 the prescribed course of English in the public school 



