ther as a rule invite to haunts
(O God! O Montreal!) where you can be secure of communion with
Apollo and the Nine? Answer if the word Academy does not first
call up to the mind some place where small boys are crammed, the
word Museum some place where bigger game are stuffed?
And yet 'academy,' 'museum,' even 'education' are sound words if
only we would make the things correspond with their meanings. The
meaning of 'education' is a leading out, a drawing-forth; not an
_imposition_ of something on somebody--a catechism or an uncle--
upon the child; but an eliciting of what is within him. Now, if
you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to
be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.
I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and
sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. The boy--in
Bagehot's phrase 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we know'--
has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins,
that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on
edge, to be mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur,
has said:
If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple
were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the
conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit,
`conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,' fit only to be
consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere). But if
the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple
from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had
ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness
into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the
palate, makes the apple 'keep' better than any other fruit;
the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities,
and so on....
In other words--trench, manure, hoe and water around your young
tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own
juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but
to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as
every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to
develop, to grow from its individual root. It may be coaxed and
trained. But the main secret lies in encouraging it to grow, and,
to that end, in pouring sunshine upon it and hoeing after each
visitation of tears parentally induced.
Every child wants to grow. Every child wants to learn. During his
first year or so of life he fight
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