ay life; that his
history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that
his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and
mother may have seen, or which their books tell about--such fathers
and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same
time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. It is
dead knowledge only--knowledge wrenched from its living content--that
is difficult of digestion.

[Sidenote: The New Education]

It is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a
healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the
food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the
organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a
signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or
not. The brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits
appetite. The object of scientific education is to discover what the
spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and
to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in
every conceivable form.

Scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely
verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means
of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. For this
reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are
commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial
schools. That is, they add to the three r's--reading, 'riting and
'rithmetic--drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical
culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory
work.

[Sidenote: Correlation of Studies]

Yet this apparently great increase of subjects in the number of
studies actually lessens the amount of work required of the child,
because all these different activities, by means of what is called
correlation, are brought to bear upon the same subject. For example,
the class which goes out for a field trip to visit a near-by brook
sees the water actually at work, cutting its way to the river, and
thence to the sea. They measure its force and note its effects; they
make a water-color sketch of some curve of it; they notice what birds
and insects are about; what flowers grow there; what indications there
may be of burrowing animals. When they get back to school they model,
perhaps, some bird that they have noticed; or in the geographical
laborator