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“Born of full stature, lineal to control;
   And yet a pigmy’s yoke must undergo. 
Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
Must be obsequious to the body’s powers,
Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways,
   Must do obeisance to the days,
And wait the little pleasure of the hours;
   Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
Captive in statuted minority!”
            “Sister Songs,” by FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Lessons and play used to be as clearly marked off one from the other as land and water on the older maps.  Now we see some contour maps in which the land below so many feet and the sea within so many fathoms’ depth are represented by the same marking, or left blank.  In the same way the tendency in education at present is almost to obliterate the line of demarcation, at least for younger children, so that lessons become a particular form of play, “with a purpose,” and play becomes a sublimated form of lessons, as the druggists used to say, “an elegant preparation” of something bitter.  If the Board of Education were to name a commission composed of children, and require it to look into the system, it is doubtful whether they would give a completely satisfactory report.  They would probably judge it to be too uniform in tone, poor in colour and contrast, deficient in sparkle.  They like the exhilaration of bright colour, and the crispness of contrast.  Of course they would judge it from the standpoint of play, not of lessons.  But play which is not quite play, coming after something which has been not quite lessons, loses the tingling delight of contrast.  The funereal tolling of a bell for real lessons made a dark background against which the rapture of release for real play shone out with a brilliancy which more than made up for it.  At home, the system of ten minutes’ lessons at short intervals seems to answer well for young children; it exerts just enough pressure to give rebound in the intervals of play.  Of course this is not possible at school.

But the illusion that lessons are play cannot be indefinitely kept up, or if the illusion remains it is fraught with trouble.  Duty and endurance, the power to go through drudgery, the strength of mind to persist in taking trouble, even where no interest is felt, the satisfaction of holding on to the end in doing something arduous, these things must be learned at some time during the years of education.  If they are not learned then, in all probability they will never be acquired at all; examples to prove the contrary are rare.  The question is how—­and when.  If pressed too soon with obligations of lessons, especially with prolonged attention, little anxious faces and round shoulders protest.  If too long delayed the discovery comes as a shock, and the less energetic fall out at once and declare that they “can’t learn”—­“never could.”