of measurements with glibness, and who performed with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor contained one acre or two hundred and forty!  None of them suspected that it contained less than an acre.  Although they could bound the States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons.  The teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest in their children’s studies, and never attempted to link them to the things of every-day life.  But while this claim might be justified to some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the case.  The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers’ duty to link these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents’.

[Sidenote:  Dead Knowledge]

Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can best help on the work of children in school.  So long as these studies are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books, children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the effort to master them.  Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and mother may have seen, or which their books tell about—­such fathers and mothers will make their children’s school work easier, at the same time that they increase the sum of their children’s knowledge.  It is dead knowledge only—­knowledge wrenched from its living content—­that is difficult of digestion.

[Sidenote:  The New Education]

It is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or not.  The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits appetite.  The object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form.

Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities.  For this reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial schools.  That is, they add to the three r’s—­reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic—­drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory work.