Questions and exclamations crowded and jostled each other as the eager lad studied his latest prize.
When the captives had been carried to the cabin and duly admired by other members of the family, the question arose as to what should be done with them. Throw them back? Eager protests from their owner. When he was finally convinced that they were not altogether adapted to serve as pocket pieces, he proposed an aquarium, and aquarium it was. An ancient and discarded dish-pan was found, the holes filled with rags, water and rocks supplied, and clams, crawfish, snails and turtles were compelled to live in seeming amity, whatever their personal feelings may have been. Later on other turtles were added to the collection, and a yellow lizard with a blue tail gave the finishing touch to this conglomerate of animal life.
How shall we educate the young? This question, holding first place in the hearts of parents and lovers of children, elicits clamorous and often contradictory answers. The advocate of “cultural” studies finds a sturdy antagonist in the defender of “vocational” training, and school boards make frantic efforts to please everybody, and succeed, as is common in such cases, in pleasing nobody. Meanwhile, our children are the helpless and unfortunate victims of a series of experiments, as the school authorities try out different educational theories.
Far be it from the writer to propose a solution of the difficulty or to proffer any panacea for our educational ills; but in all humility he ventures to suggest the desirability of making it possible for the child to know something about the world in which he lives. Book-learning, essential as it is, is not enough if we would fit the child to live the larger and more joyous life. When we have studied literature and art and philosophy and science, when we have become familiar with the great cities with their bewildering sights and distracting sounds, the finest things remain to be discovered, and these discoveries must be made as we stand open-eyed in the presence of God’s workmanship.
Hills and streams, woods and flowers, bees and birds and butterflies, the flora and fauna of this earth where we have our home for a little time, should, somehow, be brought into the life of the child. The boy who grows up into manhood without being privileged to know the world of nature by personal contact has been robbed. He may be intelligent in many things and a useful member of society, but he has missed out of life some of its deepest satisfactions and purest joys. Indeed, such an one is not symmetrically educated, and is quite likely to be put to shame as the years pass. A story is told of a young woman, able to order her breakfast in six different languages, who, spending some days in the home of a farmer, made most mortifying mistakes concerning the common things of country life. When, coming down to breakfast one morning she discovered a plate of honey on the table, she felt that the time had come for a display of her knowledge and for the discomfiture of those who had laughed at her mistakes, and exclaimed, “Ah! I see that you keep a bee.”
Take the witness box! Yes, I am speaking to you, middle-aged man, city-dweller, slave to business, familiar with paved streets and great buildings, the honk of automobile horns and the love songs of vagrant cats.
“Were you born in the country?”
“Yes.”
“Have you forgotten your boyhood?”