700 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
the practical lessons of experience ; and as they grew up their trade apprentice- 
ship was an education which we have been trying vainly to reproduce. They 
gained some knowledge of the arts and sciences, as then understood, underlying 
their work. Their contact with their surroundings made them thoughtful and 
resourceful, for Nature is the most exacting and merciless of teachers. The 
difficulties they had to overcome compelled them to think, and of all occupations 
none is more difficult. They were constantly putting forth energy, adapting 
means to ends, and engaging in practical research. In the field, in the workshop, 
and in their own homes boys and girls acquired knowledge by personal ex- 
perience. Their outlook was broad. They learned by doing. It is true that 
nearly all their occupations were manual, but Emerson has told us, ‘ Manual 
labour is the study of the external world.’ 
Compare for a moment this training with that provided in a public elementary 
school, and you cannot be surprised to find that our artificial teaching has failed 
in its results, that our young people have gained very little practical knowledge, 
and that what they have gained they are unable to apply; that they lack 
initiative and too often the ability to use books for their own guidance, or the 
desire to read for self-improvement. We seem to have erred in neglecting to 
utilise practical pureuits as the basis of education, and in failing to build upon them 
and to evolve from them the mental discipline and knowledge that would have 
proved valuable to the child in any subsequent occupation or as a basis for future 
attainments. We have made the mistake of arresting, by means of an artificial 
literary training, the spontaneous development of activity, which begins in earliest 
infancy and continues to strengthen as the child is brought into ever closer 
contact with his natural surroundings. We have provided an education for our 
boys which might have been suitable for clerks; and, what is worse, we have 
gone some way, although we have happily cried a halt, to make our girls into 
‘ladies,’ and we have run some risk of failing to produce women. 
If we are to correct the errors into which we have drifted, if we are to avert 
the consequences that must overtake us through having equipped our children for 
their life-struggle with implements unfitted for their use, we must consider afresh 
the fundamental ideas on which a system of elementary education should be based. 
Instead of excluding the child from contact with the outer world we must bring 
him into close relationship with his surroundings. It was given to man to have 
dominion over all other created things, but he must first know them. It is in early 
years that such knowledge is most rapidly acquired, and it is in gaining it that the 
child’s intellectual activities are most surely quickened. 
It is unfortunate that we failed to realise this great function of Elementary 
Education when we first essayed to construct for ourselves a national system. 
The three R’s, and much more than that, are essential and incidental parts of 
Elementary Education. But what is needed is a Lettmotif—a fundamental idea 
underlying all our efforts and dominating all our practice, and I venture to think 
that that idea is found in basing our primary education on practical pursuits, on 
the knowledge gained from actual things, whether in the Field, the Workshop, or 
the Home. 
Instead of fetching our ideas as to the training to be given in the people’s 
schools from that provided in our old grammar schools, we should look to the 
occupations in which the great mass of the population of all countries are neces- 
sarily engaged, and endeayour to construct thereon a system with all such addi- 
tions and improvements as may be needed to adapt it to the varied requirements 
of modern life. By this process—one of simple evolution adjusted to everyday 
needs—a national system of education might be built up fitted for the nation as a 
whole—a system founded on ideas very different from those which, through many 
centuries, have governed the teaching in our schools. In the practical pursuits 
connected with the Field, the Workshop, and the Home, and in the elementary 
teaching of science and letters incidental thereto, we might lay the foundation of a 
rational system of primary education. 
These three objects—the Field, the Workshop, and the Home—should be 
the pivots on which the scheme of instruction should be fixed, the central 
