he children with her. Every
foreign message in the daily paper revives the story of Field and the
laying of the Atlantic cable. Every mention of the President's cabinet
gives occasion for reviewing the cabinets of other Presidents with
comparisons and contrasts. At her magic touch the libraries and
galleries yield forth rich treasures for her classroom. Life is the
textbook of her study, and the life of the child is the goal of her
endeavors.

=The child's native interests.=--In brief, she is teaching children and
not books or subjects, and the interests of the children take emphatic
precedence over her own. She enters into the life of the child and makes
excursions into all life according to the dictates of his interests. The
child is the big native interest to which she attaches the work of the
school. The program is elastic enough to encompass every child in her
school. Her program is a garden in which something is growing for each
child, and she cultivates every plant with sympathetic care. She
considers it no hardship to learn the plant, the animal, the place, or
the fact in which the child finds interest. Because of the child and for
the sake of the child she invests all these things with the quality of
human interest.

=The school and the home.=--Arithmetic, language, history, and geography
touch life at a thousand points, and we have but to select the points of
contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a
vital part of the day's work and the day's life. They are not things
that are detached from the child's life. The child's errand to the shop
involves arithmetic, and the vitalized teacher makes this fact a part of
the working capital of the school. The dinner table abounds in
geography, and the teacher is quick to turn this fact to account in the
school. Her fertility of resources, coupled with her vital interest in
human beings and human affairs, soon establishes a reciprocal relation
between the home and the school. Similarly, she causes the language of
the school to flow out into the home, the factory, and the office.

=The skill of the teacher.=--History is not a school affair merely. It
is a life affair, and through all the currents of life it may be made to
flow. The languages, Latin, German, French, Spanish, are expressions and
interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really
are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach
them to t