LEAF AND TENDRIL 



whose work on mind-training I commend to all 

 teachers, — has hit upon a simple and ingenious 

 method of doing this. She has a revolving black- 

 board upon which she writes various figures, num- 

 bers, words, sentences, which she exposes to the 

 view of the class for one or two or three seconds, 

 as the case may be, and then asks them to copy or 

 repeat what was written. In time they become 

 astonishingly quick, especially the girls, and can 

 take in a multitude of things at a glance. Detec- 

 tives, I am told, are trained after a similar method; 

 a man is led quickly by a show-window, for in- 

 stance, and asked to name and describe the objects 

 he saw there. Life itself is of course more or less 

 a school of this kind, but the power of concentrated 

 attention in most persons needs stimulating. Here 

 comes in the benefit of manual-training schools. 

 To do a thing, to make something, the powers of 

 the mind must be focused. A boy in building a 

 boat will get something that all the books in the 

 world cannot give him. The concrete, the definite, 

 the discipline of real things, the educational values 

 that lie here, are not enough appreciated. 



IV 



The book of nature is like a page written over or 

 printed upon with different-sized characters and in 

 many different languages, interlined and cross- 

 lined, and with a great variety of marginal notes 

 12 



