But if scientific training is to yield its most eminent results, it must, I repeat, be made practical.  That is to say, in explaining to a child the general phenomena of Nature, you must, as far as possible, give reality to your teaching by object-lessons; in teaching him botany, he must handle the plants and dissect the flowers for himself; in teaching him physics and chemistry, you must not be solicitous to fill him with information, but you must be careful that what he learns he knows of his own knowledge.  Don’t be satisfied with telling him that a magnet attracts iron.  Let him see that it does; let him feel the pull of the one upon the other for himself.  And, especially, tell him that it is his duty to doubt until he is compelled, by the absolute authority of Nature, to believe that which is written in books.  Pursue this discipline carefully and conscientiously, and you may make sure that, however scanty may be the measure of information which you have poured into the boy’s mind, you have created an intellectual habit of priceless value in practical life.

One is constantly asked, When should this scientific education be commenced?  I should say with the dawn of intelligence.  As I have already said, a child seeks for information about matters of physical science as soon as it begins to talk.  The first teaching it wants is an object-lesson of one sort or another; and as soon as it is fit for systematic instruction of any kind, it is fit for a modicum of science.

People talk of the difficulty of teaching young children such matters, and in the same breath insist upon their learning their Catechism, which contains propositions far harder to comprehend than anything in the educational course I have proposed.  Again, I am incessantly told that we, who advocate the introduction of science into schools, make no allowance for the stupidity of the average boy or girl; but, in my belief, that stupidity, in nine cases out of ten, “fit, non nascitur,” and is developed by a long process of parental and pedagogic repression of the natural intellectual appetites, accompanied by a persistent attempt to create artificial ones for food which is not only tasteless, but essentially indigestible.

Those who urge the difficulty of instructing young people in science are apt to forget another very important condition of success—­important in all kinds of teaching, but most essential, I am disposed to think, when the scholars are very young.  This condition is, that the teacher should himself really and practically know his subject.  If he does, he will be able to speak of it in the easy language, and with the completeness of conviction, with which he talks of any ordinary every-day matter.  If he does not, he will be afraid to wander beyond the limits of the technical phraseology which he has got up; and a dead dogmatism, which oppresses, or raises opposition, will take the place of the lively confidence, born of personal conviction, which cheers and encourages the eminently sympathetic mind of childhood.