Mental Culture 119 



Professor G. Stanley Hall has approached the 

 question in the following words, ^ — ''We are 

 progressively forgetting that for the complete 

 apprenticeship to life, youth needs repose, 

 leisure, art, legends, romance, idealization, and 

 in a word humanism, if it is to enter the king- 

 dom of man well equipped for man's highest 

 work in the world. In education our very kin- 

 dergartens, which outnumber those of any other 

 land, by dogma and hypersophistication tend to 

 exterminate the naivete that is the glory of 

 childhood. Everywhere the mechanical and 

 formal triumph over content and substance, 

 the letter over the spirit, the intellect over 

 morals, lesson setting and hearing over real 

 teaching, technical over the essential, informa- 

 tion over education, marks over edification, and 

 method over matter." 



We must always remember that the time for 

 education is short. According to some 

 psychologists, it is a serious fact that mental 

 plasticity largely ceases with youth. The mind 

 is apt to be closed to new ideals after the early 



1 Adolescence, D. Appleton & Co. 



