AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 525 



I maintain that in proportion as you develop the ability and 

 skill of such pupils, and in proportion as you secure physical 

 strength and a dexterous use of the physical faculties, and afford 

 the mind facilities for receiving its appropriate food, you make it 

 certain that such mind will yearn for its model farm, its model 

 family or workshop. But in proportion as you refine and dignify 

 and develop the mind, you must improve the opportunities for 

 the expression of the model thoughts of the future man. Refine 

 the tastes of a girl six, eight or ten years old, and she wants 

 something more than a bundle of rags for a doll, with a charcoal 

 sketch for a face. That is not and cannot be her baby. Nor 

 can piles of broken crockery be her cupboard. Teach the boy of 

 ten, agricultural chemistry and botany, and he will not be satis- 

 fied with roadside gardens and sand flower-beds, but he will de- 

 mand grounds, trenched and subsoiled, manured and watered. 

 Nothing else affords a chance to express his thought. Give him 

 these, and he will express thoughts of which older minds might 

 well be proud. 



But it will be asked. How much of such instruction can form 

 a part of an ordinary school education 1 It will be insisted that 

 teachers cannot have time to take all the amusements of cliildren 

 under their supervision. This will never be necessary. In the 

 organization of my ideal school, I should allot much less time to 

 the study of the languages and the sciences than is now given to 

 them; yet I should expect to secure much greater proficiency in 

 each of these. All my efforts would be to feed each mind with 

 the food which that particular mind needs to live out its own 

 spirit-life. I would never make any mind a store-house for other 

 people's thoughts, or a pack-horse to drag off either the rubbish 

 or the treasures of other minds. 



If the body is made healthy, strong and active, and the mind 

 is accustomed to use all the information it gains in ways that are 

 attractive to the child, and never required to bear a burden of 

 words, simply because a parent or teacher thinks best, there will 

 be more acquired in two hours than in six, as the time is now 

 spent, with such minds as we now have, and in bodies so deficient 

 in energy. 



