It is true that many thousands visit that city annually to win
a definition of art. There they absorb their ideals of art and thus
attain abiding standards. In like manner the child may sojourn in the
school to gain an ideal of grace of manner and personal charm as
exemplified by the teacher, and no one will have the temerity to assert
that this phase of the child's education is less important than those
that are acquired through the formal processes. The boy in the story
grew into the likeness of the "Great Stone Face" because that had become
his ideal, and not because he had had formal instruction in the subject
of stone faces, or had taken measurements of or computed the dimensions
of the one stone face. He grew into its likeness because he thought of
it, dreamed of it, absorbed it, and was absorbed by it, and reacted to
it whenever it came into view.
=Pedagogy in literature.=--Hawthorne, in this story, must have been
trying to teach the lesson of unconscious education or education by
absorption, but his readers have not all been quick to catch his
meaning. Teachers often take great unction in the reflection that they
afford to the child his only means of education, and that but for them
the child would never become educated at all. We are slow to admit that
there are many sources of education besides the school, and that formal
instruction is not the only road to the acquisition of knowledge.
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