a suggester of good
things. He is an educational hypnotist. The longer I continue to teach
the more am I impressed with the fact that suggestion is the great art
of the teacher. Hence the true teacher is the leader and not the driver.

=Untying Knots.=--A man once said that the best lesson he ever learned
in school was the lesson of "untying knots." He meant, of course, that
every problem that was thrown to the school by the teacher was "tackled"
in the right spirit by the pupils. They investigated it and analyzed it;
they peered into it and through it to find all the strands of
relationship existing in it. It would be easier, of course, for the
teacher under these circumstances merely to cut the knot and have it all
done with, but this would be poor teaching. This would be _telling_, not
teaching. This would lead to passivity and not to activity on the part
of the pupils. And it may be said here that constant and too much
_telling_ is probably the greatest and most widespread mistake in
teaching. Teachers are constantly cutting the knots for children who
should be left to untie them for themselves. To untie a knot is to see
through and through a subject, to see all around it, to see the various
relations of its parts and, consequently, to understand it. This is
solving a problem; it is _dissolving_ it; that is, the problem becomes
a part of the pupil's own mind, and, having made it a part of himself,
he understands it and never forgets it.

This is the difference between not being able to remember and not being
able to forget. In the former case the so-called knowledge is not a part
of oneself; it is not vital. The roots do not penetrate beneath the
surface of our minds; they are, as it were, merely stuck on; the mental
sap does not circulate. In the latter case the knowledge is real; it is
alive and growing; there is a vital connection between it and ourselves.
It would be as difficult to tear it from us as it would to have our
hearts torn out and still live.

=Too Much Kindness.=--An illustration of the same point appears in the
following incident. A boy who owned a pet squirrel thought it a kindness
to the squirrel to crack all the nuts for it. The consequence was that
the squirrel's incisors, above and below, grew so long that they
overlapped and the animal could not eat anything. Too many teachers are
so kind to their pupils that they crack all the educational nuts for
them, with the consequence that the childre