h accidents happen in the best of attempts at education. The outcome
is disappointing. The ingredients of the educational cake are excellent,
and an immense amount of faithful work has been put into it, but
sometimes it does not rise. As the old-fashioned housekeeper would say,
it looks "sad."

It is easier to find fault with the result than to point out the remedy;
but so long as such results frequently happen, the business of the home
and the school is full of fascinating and disconcerting uncertainty. One
thing is obvious, and that is that it is no more safe for the teacher
than for the preacher to "banish Nature from his plan." Of course the
reason we tried to banish Nature in the first place was not because we
bore her any ill-will, but only because she was all the time interfering
with our plans.

The fact is that Nature is not very considerate of our grown-up
prejudices. She does not set such store by our dearly bought
acquirements as we do. She is more concerned about "the process of
becoming" than about the thing which we have already become. She is
quite capable of taking the finished product upon which we had prided
ourselves and using it as the raw material out of which to make
something else. Of course this tries our temper. We do not like to see
our careful finishing touches treated in that way.

Especially does Nature upset our adult notions about the relations
between teaching and learning. We exalt the function of teaching, and
seem to imagine that it might go on automatically. We sometimes think of
the teacher as a lawgiver, and of the learner as one who with docility
receives what is graciously given.

But the law to be understood and obeyed is the law of the learner's
mind, and not that of the teacher's. The didactic method must be
subordinated to the vital. Teaching may be developed into a very neat
and orderly system, but learning is apt to be quite disorderly. It is
likely to come by fits and starts, and when it does come it is very
exciting.

Those who have had the good fortune in mature life to learn something
have described the experience as being quite upsetting. They have found
out something that they had never known before, and the discovery was so
overpowering that they could not pay attention to what other people were
telling them.

Kepler describes his sensations when he discovered the law of planetary
motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober,
middle-aged per