of the human soul with which we have to deal. The child
learns too soon to draw in and hide the frail, sensitive tendrils that
indicate that the life of the soul-plant is feeling its way toward the
light of God.

In the primary school, the teacher (and sometimes in the cradle, the
mother, who is, whether she would have it so or not, the child's first
teacher) begins the process of training by which the little one is
made to do as others do, to say what others say, and to conceal the
fact that it has any inward life or impulses that are not the same as
those of other children.

Instead of being able to read the God-given signs as to what the
infant nature really requires, we give it instead an arbitrary supply,
based upon what we think it ought to need, and then marvel that it
does not thrive upon its unnatural diet. We have not supplied what it
craved but that which, from our preconceived notion, we thought it
ought to want.

This process of applying our rule and line to the mind goes farther
and bears harder upon the student with every succeeding year, until,
long before the so-called education is completed, three quarters of
the students have lost the consciousness that they ever cared, or ever
_could_ have cared, for anything except that which the class supplied.
To be what the class is, to do what the class does, to be satisfied
with knowing what the class knows, to have lost the sense of the value
of the thing to be gained, and to measure by false standards, comes to
be the rule, until the conceit of knowledge takes the place of the
modesty of conscious ignorance, and the student becomes a drop in the
annual out-pouring stream of so-called teachers, many of whom, in the
highest sense, have never been genuine students at all.

Searching for causes of such results, we cannot fail to see that much
of this dead sameness of intellectual character is due to our habit of
educating in masses. We make an Arab feast of our knowledge. A dish is
prepared that contains something that might be strengthening for each
partaker. With hands more or less clean, students select their savory
morsels from the sop. As in the Arab family, for old and young, for
the babe in arms, and the strong man from his field of toil, the
provision is the same, so in all our class-work we have the sameness
of provision with almost as great disparity of capacity and need. If,
out of the whole mental "mess of pottage" that can be taken which
builds