rk
the greater their joy.

When work is made a privilege by the expert teacher, school procedure
becomes well-nigh automatic and there is never any occasion for nagging,
hectoring, or badgering. Such things are abnormal in life and no less so
in the vitalized school. They are a confession on the part of the
teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources. She admits that
she cannot do what Tom Sawyer did so well, and so proclaims her
inability to articulate life and work effectively.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Read that chapter of "Tom Sawyer" which deals with the whitewashing
episode.

2. What principles of teaching did Tom Sawyer apply?

3. Discuss, from the pupils' viewpoint, how the study of different
subjects may be made a privilege.

4. In accordance with Tom Sawyer pedagogy, discuss plans for the
formation of the reading habit in pupils. How direct the pupils' choice
of reading matter?

5. How would you demonstrate to pupils that mental work is more
exhausting than manual labor?

6. Why is work a blessing? How convince an indolent pupil of this truth?

7. State the chief problem of the teacher.

8. Show that the pedagogical doctrines of this chapter are not to be
classified under the head of "soft pedagogy."

CHAPTER X

WORDS AND THEIR CONTENT

=Initial statement.=--Life and words are so closely interwoven that we
have only to study words with care in order to achieve an apprehension
of life. Indeed, education may be defined as the process of enlarging
the content of words. No two of us speak the same language even though
we use the same words. The schoolboy and the savant speak of education,
using the same word, but the boy has only the faintest conception of the
meaning of the word as used by the savant. We must know the content of
the words that are used before we can understand one another, either in
speaking or in writing. For one man, a word is big with meaning; for
another, the same word is so small as to be well-nigh meaningless. To
the ignorant boor, the word "education" means far less than the three
R's, while to the scholar the word includes languages, ancient and
modern, mathematics through many volumes, sciences that analyze the
dewdrop, determine the weight of the earth and the distances and
movements of the planets, history from the Rosetta Stone to the latest
presidential election, and philosophy from Plato to the scholar of
to-day.

=The word "education."=-