The Vitalized School

Table of

come and go, but the child remains as the focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child, and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education, parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its prime objective. Colleges of education and normal schools, in l

school is good for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization would surely decline. If school attendance s

be an asset in his manhood. In this hope time and money are devoted to his training. But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use them for their own comfort or profit. They seem to think that their

to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a life. He goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one who denies him this boon is doing violence to his right to have life. He does not go to school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one of the ele

a proof of his normality and good health. His buoyant life and good health may prove disastrous to the furniture in his home, but far better marred furniture than marred childhood. If, at this age, he should become as quiet and sedate as his father, his parents and teacher would have cause for alarm. It is the high privilege of the par

eir appointed work in after years. Entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties and responsibilities of adult life. One such mother went to the high school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, u

lders to attain that maturity of strength that is needful for supporting the "old heads." Then ensues a lack of balance, and, were all children thus denied their right to the full period of youth, we should have a distorted civilization. Dickens inveighs

s a right to the best teacher that money will secure. If he has a teacher that is less than the best, the time thus lost can never be restored to him. A lady who had an unskillful teacher in her first year in the high school now avers that he maimed her for life in that particular study. Life is su

slate. Happily that sort of barbarity disappeared, in the main, along with the slate. The vitalized teacher rejoices in the pictures that the child draws and turns this tendency to good account. Through this inclination to draw she finds the real child and so, as the psychologists direct, she begins where the child is and sets abo

s playing proceeds apace without abatement of zest. The vitalized teacher knows how to attach the arithmetic to this play instinct and make it a fascinating game. During the games of arithmetic, geography, history, or spelling, life is at high tide in her school and the work is thorough in consequence. Work is

xpression there is no impression, and without impression there is no education that has real value. The more and better expression in the school, therefore, the more and better the education in that school. In the vitalized school we shall find freedom of expression, and the absence of unreasoning repression. The chil

ation of people in the past we should not have the rich treasures of mythology that so delight us all. Every child with imagination is constructing a mythology of his own, and from the gossamer threads of fancy is weaving a pattern of life that no paren

y exercise this function sympathetically and rationally, she must know the nature and extent of his capital. If he knows a bird, he may invest this knowledge so as to gain a knowledge of many birds, and so, in time, compass the entire realm of ornithology. If he knows a flower, from this known he may be so d

ositions for the enlargement of his life. He has no inclination to become a deserter or a tenant, for life is agreeable there, and the school is made his chief interest. His work is not doled out to him in the form of tasks, but is graciously pr

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