Next to the personal power of the teacher to influence children in learning lessons comes an essential condition to make it possible, and that is a simple life with quiet regular hours and unexciting pleasures.  Amid a round of amusements lessons must go to the wall, no child can stand the demands of both at a time.  All that can be asked of them is that they should live through the excitement without too much weariness or serious damage.  The place to consider this is in London at the children’s hour for riding in the park, contrasting the prime condition of the ponies with the “illustrious pallor” of so many of their riders.  They have courage enough left to sit up straight in their saddles, but it would take a heart of stone to think of lesson books.  This extreme of artificial life is of course the portion of the few.  Those few, however, are very important people, influential in the future for good or evil, but a protest from a distance would not reach their schoolrooms, any more than legislation for the protection of children; they may be protected from work, but not from amusement.  The conditions of simple living which are favourable for children have been so often enumerated that it is unnecessary to go over them again; they may even be procured in tabular form or graphical representation for those to whom these figures and curves carry conviction.

But a point that is of more practical interest to children and teachers, struggling together in the business of education, and one that is often overlooked, is that children do not know how to learn lessons when the books are before them, and that there is a great waste of good power, and a great deal of unnecessary weariness from this cause.  If the cause of imperfectly learned lessons is examined it will usually be found there, and also the cause of so much dislike to the work of preparation.  Children do not know by instinct how to set about learning a lesson from a book, nor do they spontaneously recognize that there are different ways of learning, adapted to different lessons.  It is a help to them to know that there is one way for the multiplication table and another for history and another for poetry, as the end of the lesson is different.  They can understand this if it is put before them that one is learnt most quickly by mere repetition, until it becomes a sing-song in the memory that cannot go wrong, and that afterwards in practice it will allow itself to be taken to pieces; they will see that they can grasp a chapter of history more intelligently if they prepare for themselves questions upon it which might be asked of another, than in trying by mechanical devices of memory to associate facts with something to hold them by; that poetry is different from both, having a body and a soul, each of which has to be taken account of in learning it, one of them being the song and the other the singer.  Obviously there is not one only way for each of these or for other matters which have to be learnt, but one of the greatest difficulties is removed when it is understood that there is something intelligible to be done in the learning of lessons beyond reading them over and over with the hope that they will go in.