of the ancestral
blocks. We must divorce ourselves from the idea that a child's mind, at the
beginning, is an empty space, to be filled in with knowledge according to
the ability of the teacher; or that it is like a sheet of paper, to be
written upon. Education, and the educator, is absolutely limited to
"drawing out" what heredity put there. Education frequently is given credit
which rightly belongs to nature. A child cannot do certain things until
nature intends that it should. A baby cannot possibly walk until the
nervous mechanism which controls the function of walking is developed. Many
children walk at the first attempt, simply because they did not make the
first attempt until after nature had perfected the mechanism and the innate
ability to walk was already there. Suppose we tried to teach that baby to
walk a month before nature was ready; each day we patiently coax it to
"step out," we guide it from support to support, and we protect it from
stumbling. Some day it walks, and we congratulate ourselves on the victory,
when as a matter of fact, we not only had nothing to do with it but were
impertinent meddlers, not instructors. Nature was the teacher and she was
quite capable of completing the task without our aid. It is reasonable also
to assume that any effort to force a natural function is quite likely to do
much harm. We have found this to be so in various departments of education
when the system was wrongly conceived. In physical culture this principle
has been demonstrated over and over again.

If our ancestral legacy is a good one, our picture blocks will be numerous
and it will be possible for the proper system of education, aided by a
suitable environment, to arrange them into many designs. If, on the other
hand, our heredity did not endow us abundantly the number of our picture
blocks may be limited to three or four, and they will be easily arranged so
as to form a simple picture. The one represents a child whom heredity has
richly endowed, the other one whom it has meagerly supplied with innate[32]
possibilities. Heredity therefore dictates the function of education; and
the school-master can only fashion the picture put there. If the ancestral
blocks are not there with which to make an elaborate picture he must
content himself with what is there,--he or his art cannot create others.
When he congratulates himself on achieving a wonderful result in graduating
a particularly brilliant student, he is takin