still others have been solved, forever perhaps, nevertheless it is important to know that they once were questions. But no answer has been or can be given until the conditions of the problem are thoroughly understood. The clearer the insight, the more fully and intensely it is apperceived, the more simple grows the right solution. Where is this knowledge to be gotten?

And so we have come to another use which the teacher can make of the History of Education. All the problems are there and each is in its proper setting. In truth, the history of education may be looked upon as the history of the problems of education, the criteria by which men have judged them, their action and reaction on society. One of the problems which is constantly appearing in the annals of education is the education of women. The emancipation of woman, brought about by Christianity, gave new meaning to this question which, though agitated at different periods before the Christian era, could never be fairly considered in the light in which the pagan beheld woman. The Church has always been for the higher education of woman, but it has allowed a wide field of conjecture on what lines this higher education should be carried out.

As to the first point, there is sufficient proof in the lives of many women-students of the past. St. Paula and her companions were well-versed in the lore of their day, and though the limitations of their field of knowledge were much narrower than ours, what is of more consequence than the body of knowledge is the fact that they were true students. Before them the virgin Catherine had stood before the greatest pagan philosophers of the court of Alexandria and while they, ashamed, hid their scrolls in their sleeves, she, unassisted, refuted with the simple directness of the truth the labyrinthine subtleties of her opponents. It may be maintained that she spoke by miracle, but we can as reverently and as rationally hold that Catherine, naturally gifted with a high order of intelligence and of a spiritual nature, was a student. The latter point, as to what is the correct interpretation of the term "higher education of women," the history of education in our own times offers many interesting questions and decisions.

And, a little more, perhaps the problems of education are

not troubling the teacher as she goes from one plain duty to another through the day; then it is all the greater necessity that she study the history of education to find questions, difficulties. Not what knowledge a mind possesses, but what it is after, what is perplexing it, giving it no rest, that is the potential energy that makes mental power. Not the land that he knows, but the point of light of the undiscovered land which creates the inspiring fire of genius. And so the teacher will study education's past until the mind becomes alert for problems, takes a questioning attitude, growing with each new effort at solution that can be offered.

Again, in the history of education the teacher finds encouragement and instruction. The whole world of education, in all the past, is for the teacher of to-day. Once in the days of the Gospel Christ, being come into the synagogue of his childhood's home, read to the people the sayings of the ancients concerning him, then, closing the book, He said, "This day is fulfilled this scripture in your ears." The teacher who has read the sayings of the seers of education, theories looking ever futurewards, can say humbly, thinking of their great cost, and reverently considering the responsibility, "In me to-day are these things to be fulfilled."

III.

Motor training, in a general, and manual training, in a more specific sense, denote similar processes. Reasons for their place in education are obvious, nevertheless, as long as there are voices complaining that the industries are demanding too much of the school, it is well to treat the subject as an educational problem, applying to it the criteria by which such problems may be judged. From first principles, from the history of education and the industries, from the sciences, we obtain several reasons for the training of motor action and the instruments of motor action, the muscles. Education must meet the need of the child. A child's first need is self-expression. Provide the sensory stimulus that will cause the proper reaction, and the child has found an interest which will lead it on to ex

pression, growing in intensity and rapidity. The thought that prompts to action is the only one that is living. Education which teaches to think excluding action deadens the instrument of thought.

The child needs adaptation to its environment. To provide this is the duty of the school. In the outside world religion and the industries make pressing demands. All these demands the school professes to satisfy when she professes to train the pupils for God, the world, and himself.

The world now, more than ever before, wants an army of workmen whose senses are educated to that force and delicacy which science requires to manipulate its million miracles. Skill can be acquired when the training has begun in early youth. The little child is at play, nature constantly offering sensory promptings, getting rapid and varied motor reactions. Shall industry take him and pretend to train his motor faculties excluding sensory impression, or shall education train his intellect, neglecting action? They had both better leave the child to nature. But the school, keeping in mind the underlying principles of true education, perfects nature by supplying rich sense stimuli and watching over and carefully guiding the natural reactions. By thus providing the proper channels for thought's overflow, the school cultivates in the child's mind right and strong habits of thought.

Christianity in the second of its two requirements presupposes in its followers an altruistic spirit. This spirit is nourished, not by what enters the mind, but by what goes forth. Imagine an individual whose mental processes all end in the brain and you have the most selfish being the race can produce. This needs no explaining. The opposite course, that of obtaining numerous motor reactions, takes the individual from the world of self into that of men and things. But this must be begun in childhood, so that much usage may render the outflow smooth and strong. The duties of the Christian do not end with the world of men and things but with his Maker. Those who propose to tell us what these duties are all insist on action. What is religion according to St. James? "Religion clean and undefiled." And St. Paul, after bringing up images of

all that is good and holy, says, "Haec agite.' Haec agite." From this we learn that those ideas that do not give birth to action are unprofitable. The dreams, meditations, resolutions which suggest or bring about, directly or indirectly, motor reactions are those which tend towards life.

VISITATION CONVENT,

ST. PAUL, MINN.

SISTER FRANCIS DE SALES.

*

Compare the value of an education from which all scientific knowledge is excluded with the value of an education from which all religious culture is eliminated.'

"And nature, the old nurse, took

The child upon her knee,

Saying, 'Here is a story book

Thy Father has written for thee.'"

If this is true,

When a being is born into the foreign, the acquaintance of

Goethe said that genius begins in the senses. then thinking begins there too. world everything about him is this strange land can be made only through his perceptions. Any study, therefore, that will compel him to learn facts from his senses is good, because it is not possible for the mind to make for itself any new idea; the materials of all his ideas must come from without.

Through the sciences one is taught to know man and the world, physical and natural, so through them and through them only, will he acquire the keen perceptive faculties necessary for his success and for his enjoyment. To know the importance Aristotle attached to the direct study of nature, we need but recall his persuading Alexander the Great to employ two thousand, or more, men in Europe, Asia and Africa to collect all the information possible of the animal life in those countries before he himself would attempt his stupendous work. The minds of our greatest thinkers have ever been storehouses of

1Shields, Correspondence Course on the Psychology of Education, Lesson IX, Question 4.

thought material which they gathered from their first sources and then sifted, sorted and used at will.

It is absurd to fancy for a moment that one could really sympathetically interpret

"Meadows trim with daisies pied,

Shallow brooks and rivers wide,"

unless memories of similar perceptions were awakened, nor is it possible to get the clearly-cut perceptions on which all accurate thinking depends if one turns not in earnest to nature herself.

"What do you read, my Lord?
Words, words, words."

Mill put it most excellently when he said, "Words, however well constructed originally, are always tending, like coins, to have their inscriptions worn off by passing from hand to hand, and the only possible mode of reviving it is to be ever stamping it afresh by living in the habitual contemplation of the phenomena themselves, and not resting in our familiarity with the words that express them." Words without ideas: this is a common form of affectation.

If one cannot translate his concepts into definite images he cannot think clearly, his conclusions will never be real, he is unfitted to teach, to preach or to practice.

"The man of thought strikes deepest and strikes safely." Complete education implies an all-round development of the human being. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that an oversight in the training of the intellect, of the will, or of the moral nature will result in an individual imperfect in proportion to the degree in which stress was placed on one side at the expense of the others.

"There is much contention among men whether thought or feeling is the better; but feeling is the bow and thought the arrow; and every good archer must have both. Alone, one is as helpless as the other. The head gives artillery; the heart, the powder. The one aims, and the other fires." But where the arrow, intellect, is not guided by conscience the results are very often disastrous.