dgment in making
what has been observed and read practically useful.

Encourage the child to talk about what he reads in a natural way, but
do not allow him to become a prig by saying what he supposes you would
like to have him rather than what he really thinks.

Do not be too eager to stamp your individuality upon the child; he has
a right to his own. Find out what his tastes and inclinations are and
develop him through them. Ascertain what he is really interested in;
very often it is something quite different from what you suppose. His
point of view is different from yours. Translate what you wish him to
be interested in into terms of his own life and experience. Success
in education comes to a great extent from skill in establishing
relations between what the child already knows and that which you wish
him to acquire.

No part of education has more to do with character-building than the
inculcating of a love of good literature. S. S. Laurie calls
literature "the most potent of all instruments in the hands of the
educator, whether we have regard to intellectual growth or to the
moral and religious life". "It is easy," he says, "if only you set
about it in the right way, to engage the heart of a child, up to the
age of eleven or twelve, on the side of kindliness, generosity,
self-sacrifice; and to fill him, if not with ideals of greatness and
goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions which enter into
these ideals. You thus lay a basis in feeling and emotion on which may
be built a truly manly character at a later period--without such a
basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any future time.
But when the recipient stage is past, and boys begin to assert
themselves, they have a tendency to resist, if not to resent,
professedly moral and religious teaching; and this chiefly because it
then comes to them or is presented to them in the shape of abstract
precept and authoritative dogma. Now, the growing mind of youth is
keen after realities, and has no native antagonism to realities merely
because they happen to be moral or religious realities. It is the
abstract, preceptive, and barren form, and the presumptuous manner in
which these are presented that they detest. How, then, at this
critical age to present the most vital of all the elements of
education, is a supremely important problem. It is my conviction that
you can only do so through literature; and the New Testament itself
might well be read s