eing that such instruction was entirely and only practical.

It has often seemed to me that the tendency of education in the present
day is more toward giving information than it is in preparing the mind
to receive and use interesting and useful information of all kinds:
that is, in helping the mind to attract what it needs; to absorb what
it attracts, and digest what it absorbs as thoroughly as any good
healthy stomach ever digested the food it needed to supply the body
with strength. The root of such cultivation, it seems to me, is in
teaching the practical use and application of all that is studied. To
be sure, there is much more of that than there was fifty years ago, but
you have only to put to the test the minds of young graduates to see
how much more of such work is needed, and how much more intelligent the
training of the young mind may be, even now.

Take, for instance, the subject of ethics. How many boys and girls go
home and are more useful in their families, more thoughtful and
considerate for all about them, for their study of ethics in school?
And yet the study of ethics has no other use than this. If the mind
absorbed and digested the true principles of ethics, so that the heart
felt moved to use them, it might--it probably would--make a great
change in the lives of the boys and girls who studied it--a change that
would surprise and delight their parents and friends.

If the science of keeping rested were given in schools in the way that,
in most cases, the science of ethics seems to be given now, the idea of
rest would lie in an indigestible lump on the minds of the students,
and instead of being absorbed, digested and carried out in their daily
lives, would be evaporated little by little into the air, or vomited
off the mind in various jokes about it, and other expressions that
would prove the children knew nothing of what they were being taught.

But again, I am glad to repeat--if instruction, _practical_
instruction, were given every day in the schools on how to form the
habit of keeping rested, it would have a wonderful effect upon the
whole country, not to mention where in many individual cases it would
actually prevent the breaking out of hereditary disease.

Nature always tends toward health; so strongly, so habitually does
nature tend toward health that it seems at times as if the working of
natural laws pushed some people into health in spite of chronic
antagonism they seem to have against