=Work a blessing.=—­As a knowledge of all these things filters into their minds, their conception of life broadens, and they see more and more clearly that life and work are fundamentally identical.  They see that work directs the streams of life and gives to life point, potency, and significance.  They soon see that knowledge is power only because it is the agency that generates power, and that knowledge touches life at every point.  They will come to realize that work is the one great luxury in life, and that education is designed to increase the capacity for work in order that people may indulge in this luxury more abundantly.  The more work one can do, the more life one has; and the better the work one can do, the higher the quality of that life.  They learn that the adage “Work to live and live to work” is no fiction but a reality.

=Work and enjoyment.=—­The school, therefore, becomes to them a workshop of life, and unless it is that, it is not a worthy school.  It is not a something detached from life, but, rather, an integral part of life and therefore a place and an occasion for work.  The school is the Burning Bush of work that is to grow into the Tree of Life.  But life ought to teem with joy in order to be at its best, and never be a drag.  Work, therefore, being synonymous with life, should be a joyous experience, even though it taxes the powers to the utmost.  If the child comes to the work of the school as the galley-slave goes to his task, there is a lack of adjustment and balance somewhere, and a readjustment is necessary.  It matters not that a boy spends two hours over a problem in arithmetic if only he enjoys himself during the time.  But, if he works two hours merely to get a passing grade or to escape punishment, the time thus spent does not afford him the pleasure that rightfully belongs to him, and some better motive should be supplied.

=The teacher’s problem.=—­The teacher’s mission is not to make school work easy, but, rather, to make the hardest work alluring and agreeable.  Here, again, she may need to take counsel with Tom Sawyer.  Whitewashing a fence is quite as hard work as solving a problem in decimals or cube root.  Much depends upon the mental attitude of the boy, and this in turn depends upon the skill of the teacher and her fertility of mind in supplying motives.  Whitewashing a fence causes the arms to grow weary and the back to ache, but the boys recked not of that.  On the contrary, they clamored for more of the same kind of work.  This same spirit characterizes the work of the vitalized school.  The pupils live as joyously in the schoolroom as they do outside, and the harder the work the greater their joy.

When work is made a privilege by the expert teacher, school procedure becomes well-nigh automatic and there is never any occasion for nagging, hectoring, or badgering.  Such things are abnormal in life and no less so in the vitalized school.  They are a confession on the part of the teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources.  She admits that she cannot do what Tom Sawyer did so well, and so proclaims her inability to articulate life and work effectively.