REPLY TO ARTICLE IN DECEMBER NUMBER OF EDUCATOR-JOURNAL
UPON THE "BIG LEAK IN OUR COURSE OF STUDY," BY DR.
D. W. DENNIS, EARLHAM COLLEGE.

J. H. TOMLIN, SUPERINTENDENT SHELBYVILLE SCHOOLS.

Dr. Dennis either has perpetrated a huge, pedagogical joke or he has made a great educational discovery. If the article in the December number of the Educator-Journal was intended as a joke, it should have been cracked upon the undiscerning. The public school teachers have had so much educational pabulum forced upon them in late years that they are becoming suspicious; but they are, withal, open to conviction upon reasonable grounds. The Doctor really seems to be serious in his arguments, and notwithstanding his enthusiasm, which has led him into many extravagant statements, his purposes are doubtless good.

Two radical things are proposed in the discussion: first, to save four years of time to the child; second, to change the course of study of the first six years from the standard or legal branches to a threepronged course, consisting of a foreign language (German or French), literature, and nature study. The language is to be memorized and taught by the conversational method; such books as the Arabian Nights, Marco Polo, and Gulliver's Travels are to be in the course in literature; the work in nature study is to be done. without the use of a book in the early stages. All work is to be stopped at the point of weariness.

The pedagogy suggested by this course is sufficiently effeminate to meet the views of those whose sole purpose is accomplished when all things in school work are made easy and pleasant. There would be no naseau or indigestion accompanying this course for the simple reason that there is little in it to digest. After six years, when the pupil has fully assimilated the course and it has been transmuted into mental tissue, he would have a fairly good memory and possibly some power of observation, but it would be unsafe to send him to market and unfair to expect him to do anything useful.

He could talk like a parrot, but his real, substantial scholarship would have been neglected.

We submit it as a fundamental principle that the time element can not be eliminated in the process of growth either in the physical or in the mental. It is the unchanging law of nature that everything develops in its time and season. The hothouse plant is not healthful or hardy. Its fiber is soft and pulpy. The proper conditions of heat, light and soil being supplied, the full-fledged oak requires one hundred years to perfect its growth. This law of time holds equally true in mental development. There must be time for assimilation. Before any form of culture can tell, there must be time for experience and maturity of judgment. The mere accumulation of facts is not highly educative, nor does it constitute power. In so far as teaching arithmetic in one or two years and grammar in six months is concerned, it is a feat that those actively engaged in teaching those branches many years have not been able to accomplish. There are no short cuts in education. Good method and a lively interest facilitate progress; but it is the climax of pedagogical folly to presume to eliminate the time feature to any great extent.

Let us see the meaning of the saving of four years of time from the concrete or utilitarian side. Supposing the expense of board and clothing and the value of the time saved to the child represent a saving of $300.00 per year, there would be $1,200.00 saved to each child. Indiana has about 800,000 children, hence the saving would be $240,000,000.00, and this would recur every twelve years. Add to this the cost of teachers' wages and the incidental expenses, and carry out the same ratio, and we have in the United States a saving of $10,000,000,000.00 every twelve years. Grammar

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sented his discovery to the Indiana Legislature. After due consideration, the discovery was referred to the committee on swamp lands. Would it not be a good thing for the National Educational Association to appoint a Committee on Fads whose duty it should be to investigate and report on all queer educational notions and movements? This would

save many wrecks, and it would protect
the blind followers.

The earnest teacher will always strive
for better things in his profession, but
he will at the same time be conservative,
forever holding on to the experience of
the past that has borne the test, and ac-
cepting the new only after it is shown to
be frue.

NATURE STUDY.

L. M. SNIFF, PRESIDENT TRI-STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, ANGOLA, IND.

I dread the thought of examinations in nature study. Not that our teachers should not know and love nature; but I am wondering if this force work, this scientific analysis, is going to make us love nature. Ruskin has defined art as "The expression of our joy in Our work." That does not mean that we have a piece of work done by our skilland that we express our joy, our admiration of the work-not that for the same author says that "the true artist has little to say of his work. The moment a man can really do his work he is speechless." What a rebuke to the so-called artists in pedagogy. Art is the expression of joy or grief in our work.

May

I have in my soul a great love. Then. if I am a musician I express it in music. If I am a great poet, I express it in poetry. If I am a sculptor, I give it form in marble. But I'm speechless about the work if I'm a true artist. Where, then, are our true artists as teachers? we not study the greatest art critic to profit? But to nature study. I love nature. I commune with nature, and I can't get away from the feeling that when I lay my ear to her sweet soundswhen my eye is enchanted with her perfect combinations of color, I am close, very close to Him in whose presence I am subdued, and you must allow me to be silent, that He may speak to me.

I spent a week at my cottage last fall on Lake James in Steuben County. I have never seen more beauty in flowers than were on the banks of this pretty lake at that time. More than a dozen times I rowed my boat, while fishing,

past a patch of lobelias, growing out on
a little peninsula not over four or five
feet long. As I passed them slowly their
loveliness was so real that my soul was
subdued yet lifted toward the Source. I
wanted others to see them, too, and I told.
a couple of young ladies where they were.
In an hour they came back to our cot-
tage with hands full of lobelias from my
beautiful Eden. In our swamps we have
several splendid varieties of orchids, but
we are pulling them and bringing them
home to wither in a few hours, and they
are passing. Our people are getting an
interest in botany, but there is the at-
mosphere of the laboratory, the sound of
scientific nomenclature and so much of
undue talk that I am wondering if we
are not entering the holy of holies with.
undue haste and a lack of wholesome re-
spect. I am finding it very difficult to
express my fear as to nature study. I
am not fearing that our children may
know too much, but, rather, that the
danger is they may be led to approach.
nature from the point of science rather
than from the point of the affections. I
would have them love nature that she
may fill their souls with a peace that has
rest and culture in it.

This rest, this peace, is to hold the
farmer to his land and bring back the
people from the artificial life of the city
to the simple life of the country. This
rest, and peace, is to save the business
man and the professional man from nerv-
ous collapse.

But how are we to woo and win nature? As for myself, I have won my fair love through two ways:

(1) By a study of botany; (2) By fishing.

As to the study of botany, I would say I have never been a profound student, When a young man I won the heart of the woman whose loveliness has grown upon me through thirty years, and to me now she is the loveliest of all. But do you know I have never had even a slight desire to study her from the standpoint of psychology.

Mind, I have no scholarly conception of her, nor do I care to have such notion. She is my companion in joy and grief. She is past fifty now, and she was never as beautiful to me as now. I am reading pyschology some these days, and a good deal about art and the artistic, but my love for her is never to be measured by such standards.

I studied enough botany to put me into communion with plants. Years ago I won them, and their loveliness has grown upon me ever since.

Maybe if I had gone deeper and deeper -analyzing and classifying, making a comprehensive study, drawing universal conclusions, I would have loved them more and lived more. Of course I would know more, and maybe like Josh Billings said of Eli Perkins, I would know a "whole lot of things that warn't so." My study has not gone so deep as to connect with the thought that there is no immortality of the soul, because if you place. the embryo of a man, a chick and a plant under a powerful microscope you will see no difference.

I am wondering, then, if after all there are not ways for just common folk like us to get into communion with nature without taking the responsibility of the scientist. How a scientist would laugh at me--and how he would pity me-but while he laughs and pities me, I'll just go on loving and being loved, and have no responsibility.

(2) Fishing-In the next.

THE LAW OF LOVE AND KINDNESS.
MARTHA JEWETT, EVANSVILLE, IND.

"To live completely is to be as useful as possible and to be happy."

This is the true aim of all education, and we are all interested in its best fulfillment. The most practical and the one most wedded to the past can but acknowledge that the times have changed. George Washington or even the great Lincoln would be astonished at the wonders of our age. If the candle, the coal oil lamp and even gas have been obliged to give way to electricity; if the stage coach of ye olden time is a myth and people are verily shoved through the air in our machines of rapid transit—if everything else has changed and advanced -why not education?

The birch rod of the old school should be forgotten. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" of the old Mosaic dispensation should be transformed into the loving utterances of the Great Disciple.

"Spare the rod and spoil the child" is an old proverb of the time of Solomon,

before the race had progressed, when the mental had to be reached through the physical.

Do away with punishment-love the children—make them happy. Speak only of the good-expect the good and you will get it. The meaner the boy, the more ragged and soiled, the more impudent, the more sullen, the more love you must give him. Study his disposition, his environment; help him, rescue him from an after-life of crime and disgrace,

There is no one, even though steeped in crime, that has not some good in him if we look for it; so it is with the children. There is no boy so utterly gone that the good in him will not respond to a smile of love and kindness. Ah! he knows the real thing-it can not be feigned.

A little patience for those whose young feet have gone astray-a little kindness to reassure them-a little love, although it seems unworthily bestowed at the time,