Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III BOY LIFE AND THE RACE LIFE In all boy problems the boys themselves must first give us the cue; for after all, the Supreme Court of Boyville is the heart of the boy. The best pedagogy declares that the pupils must teach the teacher; that the children's spontaneous interests must dictate the course of study, and their voluntary attention the methods of teaching. But it was not always thus. Formerly the acme of garden beauty was the formal Italian garden, with its dinky little evergreen monstrosities, filed into weird pyramids and grim Noah's ark styles of arbor vitas. Now we see neither sense, life nor beauty in such gardens. Our foresters now follow the lines and the inclinations of nature and give us the trees in their normal symmetry, allowing each tree to work out its own salvation, according to the laws of its being, and grow up in unfettered freedom as God intended. Formerly the laws of childhood were framed by old folks who had forgotten what boyhood was like, and were trying to makeprim little old men out of healthy boy Indians. How ludicrously pathetic are the little Amish boys, dressed in long pantaloons and old men's broad-brimmed hats, as soon as they get well out of the cradle! This is about what the average pious, well-meaning father used to try to do metaphorically with his boys, before the new day of open-minded child study. It was a long step toward heaven when fathers and mothers began to take the cue from the boy and to ask themselves why he wanted what he wanted. With divine wisdom Jesus placed the child in the midst, saying, "For of such is the kingdom of heaven." "Back to the child," says the modern psychologist, "of him we must learn the ways of life." It is certainly true that one of the greatest triumphs of Christianity is the disc...