At home or
among companions, perhaps unknown to the teacher, a boy or girl may be
forming an habitual tendency and desire, more powerful than any other
force in his life, and yet at variance with the best influence of the
school. If possible the teacher should draw the home and school into a
closer bond so as to get a better grasp of the situation and of its
remedy. The school will fail to leave an effective impress upon such a
child unless it can get a closer hold upon the sympathies and thus
neutralize an evil tendency. It must league itself with 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.
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