ension
age. The youth should ask for nothing but opportunity. To make him
immune from work and economy is to supply him a ticket--one way--to
Matteawan.

In order to educate a boy for life, we should not lift him out of life.
The training for life should slide into life at an unknown and
unrecognizable point. The boy born into poverty, who fetches in wood for
his mother and goes after the cows, has already entered upon a career.
His brown bare feet are carrying messages, and his hands are taking on
the habit of helpfulness. He is getting under the burden; and such a one
will never be a parasite on society.

In East Aurora there used to live a noted horseman. He bred, raised,
trained and drove several trotters that made world's records. Then
behold another man comes on the scene--and a good man, too--and says,
"Go to, I will raise and train horses that will go so fast that Pa
Hamlin's horses will do only for the plow."

So he built a covered and enclosed track, a mile around. It cost nearly
a hundred thousand dollars. And here the wise one was to train his colts
all Winter, while the other man's horses ran barefoot, and with long
woolly coats plowed through snowdrifts waiting for Spring to come with
chirrup of birds and good roads.

Result--the man with the covered track had his horses "fit" in April,
but in July and August, when the races begin, they had "gone past."
Moreover, it was discovered that horses trained on a covered track could
not be raced with safety on an open course. The roofed track had shut
the horse in, giving him a feeling of protection and safety; but when he
got on an open track, the sun, the sky, the crowds, the moving vehicles,
sent him into a nervous dance. A bird flying overhead would stampede
him. He lost his head and wore out his nerve.

But the horses that had been woolly in February grew sleek in May, and
being trained in the open grew used to the sights, and for them every
day was a race-day. In August they were hard and cool and level-headed,
and always had one link left when called upon at the home-stretch.

The covered track was all right in theory, but false in practise. It
ruined a thousand colts, and never produced a single trotter. Don't
train either horses or children indoors, and out of season, and expect
a world-beater.

Next, make your teaching and training, life, not an indoor make-believe.
The school that approximates life will be the school whose pupils make
records.