omes a time about the middle of April
when you had quite as soon die as to go to school any longer; and what
you learn there doesn't amount to a hill of beans compared with what
you can find out for yourself outdoors.

Schoolhouses are made wrong. If they must be, they should be built in
a woods pasture beside a stream, where you could wade, swim, and be
comfortable in summer, and slide and skate in winter. The windows
should be cut to the floor, and stand wide open, so the birds and
butterflies could pass through. You ought to learn your geography by
climbing a hill, walking through a valley, wading creeks, making
islands in them, and promontories, capes, and peninsulas along the
bank. You should do your arithmetic sitting under trees adding
hickory-nuts, subtracting walnuts, multiplying butternuts, and dividing
hazelnuts. You could use apples for fractions, and tin cups for liquid
measure. You could spell everything in sight and this would teach you
the words that are really used in the world. Every single one of us
could spell incompatibility, but I never heard father, or the judge, or
even the Bishop, put it in a speech.

If you simply can't have school THAT way, then you should be shut in
black cells, deep under the ground, where you couldn't see, or hear a
sound, and then if they'd give you a book and candle and Miss Amelia,
and her right-hand man, Mister Ruler, why you might learn something.
This way, if you sat and watched the windows you could see a bird cross
our woods pasture to the redbird swamp every few minutes; once in a
while one of my big hawks took your breath as he swept, soared, sailed,
and circled, watching the ground below for rabbits, snakes, or
chickens. The skinny old blue herons crossing from the Wabash to hunt
frogs in the cowslip swale in our meadow, sailed so slow and so low,
that you could see their sharp bills stuck out in front, their uneven,
ragged looking feathers, and their long legs trailing out behind. I
bet if Polly Martin wore a blue calico dress so short her
spindle-shanks showed, and flew across our farm, you couldn't tell her
from a heron.

There were so many songs you couldn't decide which was which to save
you; it was just a pouring jumble of robins, larks, doves, blackbirds,
sparrows, everything that came that early; the red and the yellow birds
had not come yet, or the catbirds or thrushes. You could hear the
thumping wings of the roosters in Sills' barnyard nea