ligion and philosophy, as
well as unwise to attempt it, by no means proves that all serious
teaching is impossible in childhood. On the imaginative and spiritual
side, it is true, the child is re-born and transformed during
adolescence, but on the practical and concrete side his life and thought
are for the most part but the regular and orderly development of the
habits he has already acquired. The elements of ethics on the one hand,
as well as of natural science on the other, may alike be taught to
children, and indeed they become a necessary part of early education, if
the imaginative side of training is to be duly balanced and
complemented. The child as much as the adult can be taught, and is
indeed apt to learn, the meaning and value of truth and honesty, of
justice and pity, of kindness and courtesy; we have wrangled and worried
for so long concerning the teaching of religion in schools that we have
failed altogether to realize that these fundamental notions of morality
are a far more essential part of school training. It must, however,
always be remembered that they cannot be adequately treated merely as an
isolated subject of instruction, and possibly ought not to be so treated
at all. As Harriet Finlay-Johnson wisely says in her _Dramatic Method of
Instruction_: "It is impossible to shut away moral teaching into a
compartment of the mind. It should be firmly and openly diffused
throughout the thoughts, to 'leaven the whole of the lump.'" She adds
the fruitful suggestion: "There is real need for some lessons in which
the emotions shall not be ignored. Nature study, properly treated, can
touch both senses and emotions."[180]

The child is indeed quite apt to acquire a precise knowledge of the
natural objects around him, of flowers and plants and to some extent of
animals, objects which to the savage also are of absorbing interest. In
this way, under wise guidance, the caprices of his imagination may be
indirectly restrained and the lessons of life taught, while at the same
time he is thus being directly prepared for the serious studies which
must occupy so much of his later youth.

The child, we thus have to realize, is, from the educational point of
view of social hygiene, a being of dual nature, who needs ministering to
on both sides. On the one hand he demands the key to an imaginative
paradise which one day he must leave, bearing away with him, at the
best, only a dim and haunting memory of its beauty. On the