ronment through appropriate training to
fashion the normal child, just as he could a plant, into a most delightful
and beautiful specimen of its kind. He says: "Pick out any trait you want
in your child, granted that he is a normal child, be it honesty, fairness,
purity, lovableness, industry, thrift, what not. By surrounding this child
with sunshine from the sky and your own heart, by giving the closest
communion with nature, by feeding this child well-balanced, nutritious
food, by giving it all that is implied in healthful environmental
influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus cultivate in the child
and fix there for all its life all of these traits, and on the other side,
give him foul air to breathe, keep him in a dusty factory or an unwholesome
school-room or a crowded tenement up under the hot roof; keep him away from
the sunshine, take away from him music and laughter and happy faces; cram
his little brains with so-called knowledge; let him have vicious associates
in his hours out of school, and at the age of ten you have fixed in him the
opposite traits. You have, perhaps, seen a prairie fire sweep through the
tall grass across a plain. Nothing can stand before it, it must burn itself
out. That is what happens when you let weeds grow up in your child's life,
and then set fire to them by wrong environment."

Mr. Burbank is probably over-enthusiastic in his belief that natural
education can do everything for the child; but it is certain that
environment does exercise a powerful influence, during the plastic age, in
determining his character.

LESSON IV

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Compare the helplessness of the infant at birth with the ability of the
young of other animals.

2. At one year of age, what is the comparison?

3. What is the significance of prolonged infancy respecting (a) possibility
of adjustment to environment, (b) possibility of training and education,
(c) possibility of profiting from experience, (d) the relation to heredity?

4. What advantage is it that man is born with the germs of many capacities
instead of with a few activities that are perfectly developed?

5. What is the chief function of education?

6. What does Burbank say respecting the possibilities of training?

7. What common-sense training should every child be given during this
period?

Good books, for further study on these points, are: "The Care and Training
of the Child," by Kerr, and "Fundamentals