re not the _best_ places either for study or invention.
Home or solitude are better--home is the great teacher. In domestic
business we learn mechanical skill, the nature of those material bodies
with which we have most to deal in life--we learn labour by example and
by kindly precepts--we learn (in a prudent home) decorum, cleanliness,
order--in a virtuous home we learn more than these: we learn reverence
for the old, affection without passion, truth, piety, and justice.
These are the greatest things man can know. Having these he is well;
without them attainments of wealth or talent are of little worth. Home
is the great teacher; and its teaching passes down in honest homes from
generation to generation, and neither the generation that gives, nor
the generation that takes it, lays down plans for bringing it to pass.

Again, to come to designed learning. We learn arts and professions by
apprenticeships, that is, much after the fashion we learned walking, or
stitching, or fire-making, or love-making at home--by example, precept,
and practice combined. Apprentices at anything, from ditching,
basket-work, or watch-making, to merchant-trading, legislation, or
surgery, submit either to a nominal or an actual apprenticeship. They
see other men do these things, they desire to do the same, and they
learn to do so by watching _how_, and _when_, and asking, or guessing
_why_ each part of the business is done; and as fast as they know, or
are supposed to know, any one part, whether it be sloping the ditch, or
totting the accounts, or dressing the limb, they begin to do that, and,
being directed when they fail, they learn at last to do it well, and
are thereby prepared to attempt some other or harder part of the
business.

Thus it is by experience--or trying to do, and often doing a
thing--combined with teaching or seeing, and being told how and why
other people more experienced do that thing, that most of the practical
business of life is learned.

In some trades, formal apprenticeship and planned teaching exist as
little as in ordinary home-teaching. Few men are of set purpose taught
to dig; and just as few are taught to legislate.

Where formal teaching is usual, as in what are called learned
professions, and in delicate trades, fewer men know anything of these
businesses. Those who learn them at all do so exactly and fully, but
commonly practise them in a formal and technical way, and invent and
improve them little. In thos