Present Day Tendencies in Education

responds to his environment. While we do not understand the action of nerve force on the nerve cells, we know that, in some way, it causes them to develop. We know that when nerve cells are not used, they remain undeveloped, and that when they are used, they grow. A postmortem examination of the brain of Laura Bridgman, who was blind from her early childhood, showed that those nerve cells that had control of vision were undeveloped and that the cortex of the brain was thinner at that point. The several functions of the brain may possess great potentialities, but if they are never used, they will never attain their best. It is a well-known fact that the great musicians have lived in a world of music, in most cases, from their childhood, and have developed the part of their nervous system that controlled their love and appreciation for music. We cannot make a musician of a child if we do not place him in an environment of music. If we would have the child acquire an appreciation for poetry, we must early introduce him to poetry suited to his age. If we would develop in him a kind disposition, we must let him live in an atmosphere of kindness, and all the teaching in the world will be valueless unless it is in such an environment. In fact, we cannot teach the child to be kind, to love music, art, and poetry, or to develop his tastes along other lines, unless we do so by means of an environment of such things. When the child hears good music, the nerve cells in the music part of his brain become active, the blood rushes to them, carrying nourishment, and thus the neural coördinations are developed. If we would have the child love flowers, we must put him into an environment of flowers, and bring into use the corresponding nerve cells. We might have him read about flowers until he is gray-headed, but he will never come to

appreciate them unless he is made to live in such an environment.

However, it must be remembered that after one has acquired an appreciation for music-for instance, has developed that sense and can recall former images of sound-the nerve cells will respond to the memory in about the same way as when in contact with the thing itself. When I remember the smell of a rose, I put to work and develop my olfactory nerve centers in about the same way I do when I actually smell the rose. The memories of taste, touch, and the other senses have the same effect, and we should make use of this fact in the child's education. However, if there is neither a recall of the memory of these things nor actual contact with them, the nerve cells that control them will waste away and cease to function. In his autobiography Darwin says that until he was thirty poetry of many kinds gave him great pleasure, and, as a school boy, he took intense delight in Shakespeare. He also enjoyed music; but at the time he was writing, he could not endure to read a line of poetry and he had long before lost his taste for pictures and music. He had devoted himself so exclusively to grinding out general laws from a multitude of facts that the nerve centers that controlled his love for music, poetry, and art dwindled away. He regretted that he had not kept up his love for these things by devoting a little time to them each day.

It is environment that affords the developing stimuli for the several faculties of the nervous system. We have already referred to the fact that the great musicians were reared in an atmosphere of music. This is true also of the great poets. They lived with nature and learned to love her. One cannot read Shakespeare without realizing that his faculties of taste, of touch, of smell,

of sight, and of sound were accurately developed, and those who have visited the home of his childhood at Stratford-on-Avon tell us that there is in all the world no more ideal place for the development of the senses. If Shakespeare had been born and reared in London, he could never have written his plays. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning were all students of nature. They loved and lived with nature. Their nervous systems were developed by their appreciation of nature, and they grew to appreciate it more and more.

EDUCATION SHOULD BE NATURAL

We cannot expect to develop the nervous systems of children by confining them to books within the musty walls of the average schoolroom. We cannot hope to have them learn to appreciate the beauties of nature and the good in men and women if we confine them to the back yard of the average city home, where they have no communion with the birds, the flowers, the grasses, the trees, and the growing fields. We must get it out of our heads that education is learning to read, to write, to spell, and to cipher, or the gaining of knowledge from books. We must quit rushing our children off to school just as soon as they are able to walk. What the schools teach to-day, for the most part, is required as a result of our civilization's being what it is and not because the needs of the growing child demand it. A very large part of the school's program is uneducative rather than educative, and those parents who send their children away from home and the beauties of nature-the real educators to the kindergartens and the schools, are making a very serious mistake-a mistake for which these children in after-years will have to pay dearly in the lack of a proper development of their nervous systems.

BAD HABITS OVERCOME BY PERSISTENCY

Let the young man or woman remember that, while the years of plasticity are the early years of life and those habits that shape our character and give us our attitude toward the world are formed at that time, many, many habits are formed later in life, and that there is hope in the fact that the nervous system is never absolutely fixed, at least not until long after the age of maturity. We may have let into our lives in childhood and early youth many enemies that will keep us from being as happy and successful as we might have been; but the battle is not entirely lost, and our hopes may be greatly enlarged if we will but seriously set ourselves to the task, set up those ideals we would attain, and struggle after them day after day. It is true that the fight will be harder than if it had been fought earlier. The enemy has intrenched himself in our territory and will not be dislodged without a struggle, but a constant hammering at him will get results if the battle is kept up day after day. Such persistency will find itself one day recompensed with a reward that will far outweigh all the hardship borne and all the difficulties overcome, The virtues such as kindness, generosity, honesty, accuracy, thoroughness, judgment, friendliness, and the others are not acquired in a single day, but the youth who keeps up the fight will win in the end. Those virtues will gradually grow to be a part of him and he will be surprised one day at how well he has made them his own. This is the way men and women are made.

Then our nervous system is the raw material out of which our lives are made. What we are physically, mentally, morally, and as men and women in the business and social world, depends upon how well we write our story. We hold in our own hands our destiny. We are each

moment in every thought we have and in every act we perform spinning, for good or evil to ourselves, our web of fate. While we may in a way patch up our past lives and cover up the mistakes we have made, we can never remove the scar. What we have written in the book of

life can never be

erased, but will remain a message to bring us happiness or unhappiness as long as we live.

TOPICS FOR REPORT AND INVESTIGATION

1. The central nervous system.

2. The place of environment in the education of children. 3. The education of Shakespeare.

4. The place of nature study, art, and music in education. 5. The educational system of the Greeks and what it had to do with their race ideals.

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