The necessity for organization and foresight in detail among large numbers is also unfavourable to individual development.  For children to find everything prepared for them, to feel no friction in the working of the machinery, so that all happens as it ought to, without effort and personal trouble on their part, to be told what to do, and only have to follow the bells for the ordering of their time—­all this tends to diminish their resourcefulness and their patience with the unforeseen checks and cross-purposes and mistakes that they will have to put up with on leaving school.  As a matter of fact the more perfect the school machinery, the smoother its working, the less does it prepare for the rutty road afterwards, and in this there is some consolation when school machinery jars from time to time in the working; if it teaches patience it is not altogether regrettable, and the little trouble which may arise in the material order is perhaps more educating than the regularity which has been disturbed.

We are beginning to believe what has never ceased to be said, that lessons in lesson-books are not the whole of education.  The whole system of teaching in the elementary schools has been thrown off its balance by too many lesson-books, but it is righting itself again, and some of the memoranda on teaching, issued by the Board of Education within the last few years, are quite admirable in their practical suggestions for promoting a more efficient preparation for life.  The Board now insists on the teaching of handicrafts, training of the senses in observation, development of knowledge, taste, and skill in various departments which are useful for life, and for girls especially on things which make the home.  The same thing is wanted in middle-class education, though parents of the middle-class still look a little askance at household employments for their daughters.  But children of the wealthier and upper classes take to them as a birthright, with the cordial assent of their parents and the applause of the doctors.  It is for these children, so well-disposed for a practical education, and able to carry its influence so far, that we may consider what can be done in school life.

We ourselves who have to do with children must first appreciate the realities of life before we can communicate this understanding to others or give the right spirit to those we teach.  And “the realities of life” may stand as a name for all those things which have to be learned in order to live, and which lesson-books do not teach.  The realities of life are not material things, but they are very deeply wrought in with material things.  There are things to be done, and things to be made, and things to be ordered and controlled, belonging to the primitive wants of human life, and to all those fundamental cares which have to support it.  They are best learned in the actual doing from those who know how to do them; for although manuals and treatises exist for every possible department of skill and activity, yet the human voice and hand go much further in making knowledge acceptable than the textbook with diagrams.  The dignity of manual labour comes home from seeing it well done, it is shown to be worth doing and deserving of honour.