If one man is working at
the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither
this man nor society is at its best. And a large measure of the
responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at
the door of the school because of its inability to discover native
tendencies.
=Common interests.=--There are many interests that all children have in
common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests
may well become the starting points in the day's work. The conversations
at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of
these interests and the school does violence to the children, the
community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests. Its work
is to rectify and not to suppress. When the children return to their
homes in the evening they should have clearer and larger conceptions of
the things that animated them in the morning. If they come into the
school all aglow with interest in the great snowstorm of the night
before, the teacher does well to hold the lesson in decimals in abeyance
until she has led around to the subject by means of readings or stories
that have to do with snowstorms. The paramount and common interest of
the children in the morning is snow and, therefore, the day should hold
snow in the foreground in their thinking, so that, at the close of the
day, their horizon in the snow-world may be extended, and so that they
may thus be able to make contributions to the home on the subject of
snow.
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