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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