CRUSADE FOR THE COUNTRY SCHOOL 



consistent, a public and general affair, broad 

 and liberal in spirit rather than technical, 

 narrow, divisive. This condition is not 

 difficult to fulfill. You can teach black- 

 smithing with pupils' mentality ever in 

 view, as you can teach arithmetic with a 

 purely huckstering aim. 



Nature, the central object of attention in 

 modern schooling, city pupils can approach 

 only with travel and expense, but it lies in 

 all its departments open and ready for in- 

 spection under the eyes of country pupils, 

 without money and without price. Country 

 people forever have before them our ador- 

 able Mother Earth, with her infinite and 

 ever shifting species of matchless loveliness 

 surfeits of eye-beauty in landscape, wa- 

 terfall, frost-play, lightning, sunshine, sky 

 and rainbow; surfeits of ear beauty in the 

 wind, in the rush of brooks and rivers, in 

 the thunder's diapason, and in the choruses 

 of inimitable bird-music waking them 

 morning by morning. All these influences 

 are esthetic, and they are moral as well, 

 which is one great reason why country folk 



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