RURAL EDUCATION 25 



struction. ... In vegetable physiology and botany 

 there is in the neighbourhood of all rural schools 

 matter for thought, observation, and teaching." 



To be effective, however, in developing the tastes 

 and influencing the career of children, this teaching 

 must be begun early. For children engaged in book- 

 learning and literary cramming till they are thirteen 

 or fourteen years old, it is too late. By that time 

 other ideas and habits will have been acquired, and 

 a dislike for country work confirmed. Lord Kelvin 

 states:^ "The work on which I am eno^ao^ed this 

 day is work to which I was initiated when I was a 

 child," and he goes on to narrate the subsequent steps 

 in his great career. So, on the same principle, chil- 

 dren in the elementary schools, if " initiated " in rural 

 subjects, and with some prospects of a career held out 

 to them, would become the natural feeders of those 

 admirable classes for "technical agricultural teaching" 

 which so many County Councils have instituted, and 

 these classes would then become continuation schools 

 in the true sense of the term. 



But teaching of a kind quite different from this 

 was adopted at first in our rural schools, and with 

 some modifications has been continued to the present 

 day. Children are subject to a steady grind of book- 

 work, practised without much interest, and often with 

 aversion. As Sir Oliver Lodge describes it, "a certain 

 amount of orthodox but dull material is laid before 

 them, and they are condemned to spend a certain 

 number of hours over it." The memory is loaded 

 with facts and information often useless and mostly 

 soon to be forgotten, w^hile the powers of observation 

 are destroyed and the "innate inquisitiveness of child- 

 ' "Nature," 29 October, 1903. 



