SEVENTEEN] CONCLUSION 



connection with the school building. The time is 

 coming when all these town schools will be set in 

 the middle of one or more acres, and education will 

 be half a day with books indoors, and half a day 

 with things out of doors. The ideal school ac- 

 quires knowledge in the morning, and applies it in 

 the afternoon. In this way children leave school 

 with a taste for the land and land culture. They 

 will not conceive the end of education to be memo- 

 rizing the contents of books. The garden school of 

 the future will abolish the prison houses, where 

 children are shut up for eight or nine hours each 

 day, during their most ebullient years, forbidden 

 to stir or communicate. 



The country is the children's natural home. The 

 winds rock their cradles, and in these days, if there 

 be stuff at all in the boy, he can get his living 

 chance — in the country. We must discard those 

 books that tell the stories of lads who, by extra 

 shrewdness, escape the narrowness and pinched- 

 ness of the farm to become merchants, and so get 

 away from growing apples and wheat to measuring 

 calico. No life in the world is broader, freer, or 

 fuller than life on the land. Farming has had its 

 bad day, but that is over with, and let us hear no 



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