of social responsibility; she sees that her duty is not
to her own home alone, but to the other homes with which hers is
linked--not to her own child alone, but to all children whose lives
touch her child's life. Her own nature widens with the perception,
and she enhances her direct teaching with the force of a beautiful
example.

STUDIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

[Sidenote: Abstract Studies]

There may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments
in the life of any child. As our schools are constituted there are
certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every
day. But there are also too few studies of the right kind. In one of
our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children
who left school at the fifth grade, as 70 per cent of them do, had
actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them,
and the results were most discouraging. These city children who could
recite their tables of measurements with glibness, and who performed
with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with
units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor
contained one acre or two hundred and forty! None of them suspected
that it contained less than an acre. Although they could bound the
States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they
knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation
to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. The
teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of
affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest
in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the
things of every-day life. But while this claim might be justified to
some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the
case. The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link
these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'.

[Sidenote: Dead Knowledge]

Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can
best help on the work of children in school. So long as these studies
are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books,
children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the
effort to master them. Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some
ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is
of actual help in solving the questions of every-d