The
apple may be hanging on the topmost bough, but the boy who is apple-hungry
recks not of height nor of the labyrinth of hostile branches. He gets the
apple. As some one has said, "The soul reaches out for the cloak that fits
it."
There is nothing more pathetic in the whole realm of school procedure than
the frantic efforts of some teachers to feed their pupils instead of
striving to create spiritual hunger. They require pupils to "take" so many
problems, con so many words of spelling, turn so many pages of a book on
history, and then have them try to repeat in an agony of effort words from
a book that they neither understand nor feel an interest in. The teacher
would feed them whether they have any craving for food or not. Such
teachers seem to be immune to the teachings of psychology and pedagogy;
they continue to travel the way their grandparents trod, spurning the
practices of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Francis Parker. They seem not to
know that their pupils are predatory beings who are quite capable of
ransacking creation to get the food for which they feel a craving. Not
appreciating the nature of their pupils, they continue the process of
feeding and stuffing them and thus fall into the fatal blunder of
mistaking distention for education.
Ruth McEnery Stuart has set out this whole matter most lucidly and
cogently in her volume entitled _Sonny_. In this story the boy had four
teachers who took no account of his aspirations and natural tendencies,
but insisted upon feeding him traditional food by traditional methods.
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