SCHOOLROOM EDUCATION 479 



education and performs its task supremely well. This phase of 

 education, because directed by instinct, is full of pleasure and 

 interest, and follows the same lines in the children of all races. 

 With the aid of the hunting instinct it bestowed on primitive man 

 almost all the acquirements that enabled him to maintain exis- 

 tence. But as soon as man became man, and more especially 

 when he became civilized, labour, a new mode of activity to which 

 he was compelled by the environment he himself had created but 

 to which he was not prompted by instinct, and which, therefore, was 

 not pleasurable, became necessary. Labour is seldom associated 

 with pleasure, unless interest is awakened by some element of 

 sport, curiosity, imitativeness, or some other instinct. At first, 

 doubtless, all labour was associated with some instinctive prompt- 

 ings, but as civilization advanced, as life grew more complex and 

 labour aimed at ends more and more remote, its instinctive 

 promptings withdrew further and further into the background, and 

 were replaced by motives derived from intelligence. Through 

 labour men learned new dexterities. They fashioned tools, and 

 learned to use them. They invented a mode of recording words 

 and thoughts by written symbols and learned to become skilful in 

 interpreting them. Ever, as the mental horizon widened, toil 

 played a greater and greater part in education. At present our 

 children spend many of their most receptive years at such labour ; 

 and when we speak of education we mean, as a rule, only the toil- 

 some part of it. 



787. This laborious, or schoolroom, training is formally de- 

 signed to achieve two aims. An endeavour is made, on the one 

 hand, to impart knowledge of a kind that cannot be gathered by 

 the child during the course of his non-laborious education outside 

 the schoolroom, and, on the other, to train the mind to deal skil- 

 fully with the ordered knowledge thus acquired, and in this way 

 develop powers of thought (i.e. skill in thinking) more far-reach- 

 ing and accurate than could be otherwise attained. A third aim 

 to which the schoolmaster is supposed to devote attention while 

 he is the immediate guardian of the child is the formation of 

 ' character.' ' Character,' however, is not acquired with the same 

 obvious toil as knowledge and skill in thinking. It arises, more 

 or less unconsciously, as a reaction between the child's capacities 

 and the total environment, of which ^ the schoolroom is only a 

 part, though it may be and often is, an important part. 



788. The three aims of the schoolmaster are separable in theory, 

 but not in practice. If facts be taught to the pupil, he tends to 



