tion of play and amusements. Teachers must study variety, for monotonous repetition soon becomes distasteful. Notice how marbles succeed tops, and kites follow ball, and one play another, as often as the moon changes.

The cold, formal, precise, unsympathetic teacher should never set foot on the playground. An owl frightens singing birds. The only teachers who succeed well in directing children in calisthenics, gymnastics, or games are those who can enter into the spirit of girlhood and boyhood. "He was always a boy, and he will die one," was the remark I once heard made about one of the best teachers I ever knew.

The indirect lessons of the playground are often more valuable and more lasting than the formal teachings of the class-room. For in the hours of play, when off duty, the teacher can best win the confidence and love of children. What man or woman would not be remembered by pupils as a sharer of their amusements, a director of their games, a sympathizer with their impulses, rather than as nothing but an expounder of text-books and a taskmaster of lessons? It is on the playground, too, that boys get their first lessons in social life outside of the family circle.

"You send a boy to the schoolmaster," says Emerson, "but it is the schoolboys who educate him. He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing up if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. Provided always the boy is teachable, foot-ball, cricket, climbing, fencing, riding, archery, swimming, skating, are lessons in the art of power which it is his main business to learn." "Moreover," says Charles

Kingsley, "they know well that games conduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health; that in the playingfield boys acquire virtues that no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honor, unenvious approbation of another's success, and all that 'give and take' of life which stands a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world; and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial.”

IV. INDUSTRIAL TRAINING.

And, in connection with physical training, there is the question of industrial or technical education in the great cities. In the country, boys work on the farm half the year, and girls work in the house all the year through. The country pupils combine mental and physical work, and are the better for it.

Children are not content with reading and thinking; they burn to be doing something. The kindergarten supplies this want with the little children; but from the age of six to fifteen there is at present, in the city public school, little for boys but books. There is no doubt whatever that many boys get a distaste for school, and leave it as soon as they can find any work to do, and before they have obtained any education beyond the ability to read, write, and cipher a little. How the combination of head-work with hand-work can be effected, if at all, is one of the educational problems of the future. It is not safe to assert that it cannot be done. On this subject, John Hancock, of Ohio, speaks as follows:

"But to impart in the schools of our cities and large towns all this general knowledge and training without the

slightest abatement, and to add, not the knowledge of a trade, but such a knowledge of the uses of tools and materials as shall enable the scholar readily to adjust himself to several trades, seems to be something worth striving for. That this can be done, and without greatly lengthening the period of school life or enormously increasing school expenses, has been pretty well established by the experiments made within the last two or three years at the Boston School of Technology. Indications are strong that the education of the brain and of the hand are, at no distant day, to run on side by side, mutually strengthening each other in the race. To unite a thinking brain with a skilful hand is the way to make labor respectable, and any other way than this there is not under the sun."

"Froebel did not value manual work for the sake merely of making a better workman," says Emily Shirreff, “but for the sake of making a more complete human being. His teaching rested upon the principle that the startingpoint of all we see, know, are conscious of, is action, and, therefore, that education must begin in action. Bookstudy, in his system, is postponed to the discipline of the mental and physical powers through observation and work."

V. TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

As yet, technical education can hardly be said to form a part of our common-school system, except in one state, and in some cities where a beginning has been made in the evening schools. I dismiss this part of the subject by giving a few quotations to show the drift of opinion among prominent educators:

"Technical education, in the sense in which the term is ordinarily used, means that sort of education which is specially adapted

to the needs of men whose business in life it is to pursue some kind of handicraft. . . . Moreover, those who have to live by labor must be shaped to labor early. The colt that is left at grass too long makes but a sorry draught-horse. Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not: it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly."-Huxley.

"A knowledge of some form of industrial labor is as necessary as a knowledge of books, and the state which acknowledges its obligation to teach children to read cannot logically deny its obligation to teach them to work. Do I think it possible to attach workshops to all our public schools? Certainly not. But I do think it possible to have public workshops where boys can learn trades, as well as public schools where they can learn letters. And just as we transfer the few from the state school to the state college, where they learn to be thinkers, I would transfer the many from the city school to the city workshop, where they would learn to be workers."—Superintendent Newell, of Maryland.

"I hold it to be a correct principle that, while the common-school does not aim to make farmers or mechanics, but leaves this to the special schools, it is the business of the common-schools to teach the elements of technical knowledge, both scientific and artistic.”—Superintendent Carr, of California.

"I have given what I believe a good reason for the assumption that the keeping at school of boys who are to be handicraftsmen beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen is neither practicable nor desirable; and it is quite certain that, with justice to other and no less important branches of education, nothing more than the rudiments of science and art-teaching can be introduced into elementary schools; and we must seek elsewhere for a supplementary training in these subjects, which may go on after the workman's life has begun. . . The great advantage of evening technical classes is that they bring the means of instruction to the doors of the factories and workshops."-Huxley.

VI. SCHOOL HYGIENE.

1. "The laws of health," says Dr. Willard Parker, “are the laws of God, and are as binding as the Decalogue." "The fact is," says Spencer, "that all breaches of the laws of health are physical sins." "Nature's discipline," says Huxley, "is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left for you to find out why your ears are boxed."

2. No education is worth the cost if gained at the expense of health and cheerfulness, or under the penalty of nervous weaknesses, dyspepsia, or near-sightedness.

3. A sound body is the groundwork of sound intellectual faculties. A morbid condition of body leads to dulness of mental perceptions and weakness of the intellectual faculties. Excessive or premature mental development checks the growth of the body; over-development is antagonistic to growth.

4. "The physiological motto is," says Dr. E. H. Clarke, "Educate a man for manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity. In this lies the hope of the race." "Get health," says Emerson, "for sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters."

5. "Mental labor, rightly directed," says Dr. Lincoln, of Boston, "is a most healthful occupation; and there is no real reason why this should not be true at all periods of school life. But the difference between forced and spontaneous action is of great consequence to the health and mental energy of the child."

6. "At college," says Horace Mann, "I was taught the motions of the heavenly bodies as if their keeping in their