on of these elementary arts ends in
themselves, then it follows that the more efficient action we seek to
realise is the more efficient manipulation of a number system or a
language system. If, however, we realise that these arts are but means
to the realisation of other ends, then we shall understand that it is
the character of the latter which mainly determines the resulting
character of the education given.

Partly to this erroneous conception of the real function of the
elementary arts, and partly to another cause which we shall mention
later, may be attributed the poor results which our Elementary School
system has attained in the establishment of interests of moral and
social worth. If, moreover, we realise how large a proportion of the
children left and still do leave school at an early age, before such
interests can be permanently established, and in some cases with
anything but an adequate knowledge of the elementary arts necessary for
all further progress, we may rather be astonished that so much has been
done than so little.

But in the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early
aims in elementary education, there is a tendency--a strong tendency--at
the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the
elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real
interests at too early a stage. This manifests itself on the one hand in
the desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the
other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real
conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of
these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier
period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout
take into account the real and practical necessities of life.

The former tendency--the tendency to make everything interesting to the
child by lessening or minimising the mechanical difficulties and by
endeavouring in every way to incite the child to become interested in
the content of the lesson--is best exemplified by the character of the
school books which we now place in the hands of our children. The latter
tendency--the tendency to the premature use of the elementary arts--is
exemplified by the craving to make our teaching of arithmetic practical
and real from the very beginning.

In the former case, instead of endeavouring to make the process of
language construction interesting in itself, we