The sand-box, in which of course all children delight, lends itself especially to cooeperative exercises.  They gather around it and plant gardens with the bright-colored balls; they use it for geography, moulding the hills, mountains, valleys, and tracing the rivers near their homes; they arrange historical dramas, as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” or the “Landing of the Pilgrims:”  but no child does any one of these things alone; there is constant and happy cooeperation.

It is the aim of one day’s exercise, perhaps, to retrace with the child the various steps by which his comfortable chair and his strong work-table have come to him.

Across one end of the sand-box, a group of children plant a forest with little pine branches which they have brought.  The wood-cutters come, fell the trees, and cut away the boughs.  Another party of children bring the heavy teams, previously built from the play-material, harness in the horses (taken from a Noah’s Ark), and prepare to carry off the logs.  Now here come the road-makers, and they lay out a smooth, hard road for the teams, reaching to the very bank of the river, which another party of little ones has made.  The logs are tumbled into the stream; they float downward, are rafted, carried to the mill; little sticks are furnished to represent the boards into which they are sawn; and the lumber is taken to the cabinet-maker, that he may fashion our furniture.

Though there be twenty children around the sand-box, yet all have been employed.  Each has enjoyed his own work, yet appreciated the value of his neighbor’s.  They have worked together harmoniously and the doing has reacted upon the heart, and strengthened the feeling of unity which is growing within.

Such exercises cannot fail to teach the value and power of social effort, and the necessity of subordinating personal desires to the common good.  Yet the development of individuality is not forgotten, for “our power as individuals depends upon our recognition of the rights of others.”

It is true that the social problem is an intricate one and cannot be worked out, even partially, at any stage of education, unless the leader of the children be a true leader, and be enthusiastically convinced of the essential value of the principles on which the problem is based.  Yet this might be said with equal truth of any educational aim, for the gospel must always have its interpreters, and some will ever give a more spiritual reading and seize the truth which was only half expressed, while others, dull-eyed, mechanical, “kill with the letter.”

“After all,” says Dr. Stanley Hall, “there is nothing so practical in education as the ideal, nor so ideal as the practical;” and we may be assured that the direction of the social tendencies of the child toward high and noble aims, toward the sinking of self and the generous thought of others,—­that this is not only ideal, not only a following after the purest light yet vouchsafed to us, but is at the same time practical in its detailed workings, and in its adaptation to the needs and desires of the day.