1346 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



to the conventionally educated, even in their best conditions and 

 endeavours so far. 



Amongst savages early education is of the senses, of course 

 practically trained, not formally taught ; such training is by example 

 and imitation rather than by precept. No amusements of childhood 

 are more attractive to them than are the precocious imitations of 

 the activities of their elders; so that the practical and economic life 

 is thus arising through play, before it becomes a necessity. It is as 

 adolescence is reached, that full and definite training in traditional 

 lore and custom is imparted; it seems to boys more than to girls, 

 though of course to these more than anthropologists can easily 

 observe. In fact, we may almost speak of home apprenticeship in 

 childhood, and of this early education as followed by something 

 corresponding to our academic stage. 



Instead of the teacher, as in most countries, on duty in the 

 classroom for a long succession of hours — a number beyond the 

 experience and powers of university teachers and thinkers, who can 

 teach but a small number of hours at most, and practically that of 

 the long business day — is not he the best teacher who is actively 

 cerebrating with his pupils every morning, and then playing and 

 working with them in the afternoon ? Hence the English school pre- 

 ference for the picked athlete, the "Blue", as schoolmaster; though 

 the grave deficiencies of his customary education need to be supple- 

 mented; and these in at least two ways, by fuller environment of 

 Nature and by active occupational and even artistic activity. "The 

 Play- Way" is here a good example of this line of progress. 



If so, may not our needs of secondary and technical education — 

 as of choice of occupation, and preparation for it, of sound and 

 steady attainment of one's efficient place in the social whole, and of 

 fuller and fuller inheritance of its scientific, literary, esthetic, 

 moral, and social culture — be increasingly met; and this centrally 

 through the recapitulation of the fundamental occupations, with 

 their respective cultural developments ? 



LIFE-METHODS IN EDUCATION VERSUS POST-MORTEMS 



— ^The so often poor results of educational endeavour — patent as 

 these have been and more and more are — ^are too commonly blamed 

 by parent on child, by teacher on boy and girl, and by professor on 

 student; as often conversely, by pupil on instructor; while, too 

 often also, all parties more or less come to the feeling that the given 

 subject — and so more or less every subject — is "difficult" — and 

 even "dry". But all these views are essentially nonsense; for every 

 subject, whenever presented as living, is full of interest and that 

 ever-growing. Thus geometry has been fascinating to all its initiates, 

 from earliest Pythagoreans to subtlest post-Einsteinians. The like 

 too from astrologer to astronomer, alchemist to chemist; and the 



