hole year round, and yet, at the end of the year, it
will have no more tendency to go than before its first trip. Not so the
boy. Going begets going. By doing a thing often, he acquires a
facility, an inclination, a tendency, a habit of doing it. If a teacher
or a parent succeeds in getting a child to do a thing once, it will be
easier to get him to do it a second time, and still easier a third time.

A teacher who is wise, when he seeks to bring about any given change in
a child, whether it be intellectual or moral, will not ordinarily
attempt to produce the change all at once, and by main force. He will
not rely upon extravagant promises on the one side, nor upon scolding,
threats, and violence on the other. Solomon hits the idea exactly, when
he speaks of "leading in the way of righteousness." We must take the
young by the hand and lead them. When we have led them over the ground
once, let us do it a second time, and then a third time, and so keep on,
until we shall have established with them a routine, which they will
continue to follow of their own accord, when the guiding hand which
first led them is withdrawn. _This is training._

The theory of it is true, not only in regard to things to be done, which
is generally admitted, but also in regard to things to be known, which
is often ignored if not denied. A boy, we will say, has a repugnance to
the study of arithmetic. Perhaps he is particularly dull of
comprehension on that subject. We shall not remove that repugnance by
railing at him. We shall never make him admire it by expatiating on its
beauties. It will not become clear to his comprehension by our pouring
upon it all at once a sudden and overpowering blaze of light in the way
of explanation. Such a process rather confounds him. Here again let us
fall back upon the method of the great Teacher, "Line upon line, precept
upon precept." We will first patiently conduct our boy through one of
the simplest operations of arithmetic, say, a sum in addition. The next
day we will conduct him again through the same process, or through
another of the same sort. The steps will gradually become familiar to
his mind, then easy, then clear. He learns first the practice of
arithmetic, then the rules, then the relations of numbers, then the
theory on which the rules and the practice are based, and finally, he
hardly knows how, he becomes an arithmetician. He has been trained into
a knowledge of the subject.

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