il as best he
can. He puts in the seed; he keeps down the weeds; he keeps out things and
living beings which will injure the crop as far as he can; then he leaves
it alone to God and Nature to make that corn grow, and in time he gets a
bountiful harvest.

I believe that education some day will be somewhat like raising a crop of
corn. We shall learn to keep the child under the best condition possible.
We shall learn to keep down harmful and injurious surroundings or forces so
far as they can interfere with him. We shall stimulate growth in every
possible way; that I grant you; and when we have done that, we shall leave
the rest calmly to Nature and to the good Lord who made that child for some
good purpose.

It is a grand thing to have the child learn to see for himself the glories
of this magnificent world. I verily believe that when you and I go home,
while the good Lord will be very merciful with us because of our sins, I
don't see how he can forgive many of us for not having had a great deal
better time in this glorious world in which He has put us. When you open
the child's eyes to the beauties and the glories of Nature you have done a
great thing for it. But, after all, that is not the grandest thing to my
mind. The grandest part is that every wave of vibration that goes in
through the eyes as the child looks at Nature, and pours into the brain,
stimulates that brain to a larger growth than it would otherwise possibly
have attained, and the child is a larger and a grander child for that
Nature study.

We believe in manual training because it gives us skilled fingers and
enables us to do deftly and well a great many things which we otherwise
could not do at all, and which most of us men have to go to our wives and
ask them to do for us. But that is not the grandest part of manual
training; the grandest part is the reaction from the finger upon the brain,
stimulating the brain to realize all its ideals, and stimulating it so
that whenever it sees good work of any kind in this world it shall
appreciate it heartily and enjoy it with the joy of the artist.

We speak of physical training and physical training is brain training in
the end, it is training in growth. It is very evident, however, that the
growth and development of a baby is something different from the growth and
development of a child; and the growth in the child is very different from
that in the youth and that of the youth from that of the adult. In th