ct to their own
advantage. It might not be a simple thing to convince some taxpayers of
the truth of the superintendent's statement, but this fact only proves
that they have not yet come into a realization of the fact that there
can be education by absorption.

=The Great Stone Face.=--The people of Florence maintain that they need
not travel abroad to see the world, for the reason that the world comes
to them. It is true that many thousands visit that city annually to win
a definition of art. There they absorb their ideals of art and thus
attain abiding standards. In like manner the child may sojourn in the
school to gain an ideal of grace of manner and personal charm as
exemplified by the teacher, and no one will have the temerity to assert
that this phase of the child's education is less important than those
that are acquired through the formal processes. The boy in the story
grew into the likeness of the "Great Stone Face" because that had become
his ideal, and not because he had had formal instruction in the subject
of stone faces, or had taken measurements of or computed the dimensions
of the one stone face. He grew into its likeness because he thought of
it, dreamed of it, absorbed it, and was absorbed by it, and reacted to
it whenever it came into view.

=Pedagogy in literature.=--Hawthorne, in this story, must have been
trying to teach the lesson of unconscious education or education by
absorption, but his readers have not all been quick to catch his
meaning. Teachers often take great unction in the reflection that they
afford to the child his only means of education, and that but for them
the child would never become educated at all. We are slow to admit that
there are many sources of education besides the school, and that formal
instruction is not the only road to the acquisition of knowledge.
Tennyson knew and expressed this conception in the quotation already
given, but we have not acquired the habit of consulting the poets and
novelists for our pedagogy. When we learn to consult these, we shall
find them expressing many tenets of pedagogy that are basic.

=The testimony of experience.=--But we need not go beyond our own
experiences to realize that much of our education has been unconsciously
gained, that we have absorbed much of it, and, possibly, what we now
regard as the most vital part of it. We have but to explore our own
experiences to discover some person whose standards have been effective
in lur