better home
influences so as to implant its own impulses in home life. How to
unify home and school influences is one of those true and abiding
problems of education that appeals strongly and sympathetically to
parents and teachers.

Concentration evidently involves a solution of the question as to the
relative value of studies. All the light that the discussion of
_relative values_ can furnish will be needed in selecting the different
lines of appropriate study and in properly adjusting them to one
another. The theory of _interest_ will also aid us in this field of
investigation.

Accepting therefore the results of the two preceding chapters, that
history (in the broad sense) is the study which best cultivates moral
dispositions; secondly, that natural science furnishes the
indispensable insight into the external world, man's physical
environment; and, thirdly, that language, mathematics, and drawing are
but the formal side and expression of the two realms of real knowledge,
we have the _broad outlines_ of any true course of education. In more
definitely laying out the parts of this course the natural interests
and capacities of children in their successive periods of growth must
be taken into the reckoning. When a course of study has been laid out
on this basis, bringing the three great threads or cables of human
knowledge into proper juxtaposition at the various points, we shall be
ready to speak of the manner of really executing the plan of
concentration.

Even after the general plan is complete and the studies arranged, the
real work of concentration consists in _fixing the relations_ as the
facts are learned. Concentration takes for granted that the facts of
knowledge will be acquired. It is but half the problem to learn the
facts. The other half consists in understanding the facts by fixing
the relations. Most teachers will admit that each lesson should be a
collection of connected facts and that every science should consist of
a series of derivative and mutually dependent lessons. And yet the
study and mastery of arithmetic as a connection of closely related
principles is not generally appreciated. With proper reflection it is
not difficult to see that the facts of a single study like grammar or
botany should stand in close serial or causal relation. If they are
seen and fixed with a clear insight into these connections, by touching
the chain of associations at any point one may easily bring the