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We have brought this volume to an end with the third book of "Émile." The fourth and fifth books which follow are not within the domain of pedagogy.

Pedagogy need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development, greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were their vitality to decay like the faith in the Greek or German mythology, we should still have to teach God and a future life as the most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall to teaching the Bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its view of life.

In good time, if the boy is kept growing, he will have outgrown his stone-bruises, his chapped hands, his freckles, his warts, and his physical and spiritual awkwardness. The weeds will have disappeared. The potato-patch is your true pedagogical laboratory and conservatory. If one cannot learn pedagogy there it is no fault of the potato-patch.

If the entire public-school system of the State had been delegated to Peter Cooper in Eighteen Hundred Fifty, he as sole commissioner could and would have set the world a pace in pedagogy. Disraeli's contention that democracy means the rule of the worst has in it a basis of truth. Peter Cooper's appeals to his colleagues on the School Board fell on idle ears.

"Our usual pedagogy," said Claparède, "oppresses children with a mass of information which can never help them to direct their conduct; we make them listen when they have no desire to hear; speak, write, narrate, compose and discourse when they have nothing to say; we make them observe when they have no curiosity, reason when they have no desire to discover anything.

So is the College de France, founded by Francis I. And, indeed, whichever way one turns, there are schools, schools, schools of fine arts and applied arts; of medicine in all its branches; of mining and engineering; of war; of theology; of languages; of commerce in its higher developments; of pedagogy; and what-not.

The ideal of the average pedagogist is not a complete, well-rounded, original being; rather does he seek that the result of his art of pedagogy shall be automatons of flesh and blood, to best fit into the treadmill of society and the emptiness and dulness of our lives.

And even if this were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process called a school curriculum. A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof.

I shall certainly mention sheep, the hen, and the white rag in my book on farm pedagogy. I take unction to myself, sometimes, in the reflection that I have a soul to save, and in certain moments of uplift it seems to me to be worth saving. Some folks probably call me a sinner, if not a dreadful sinner, and I admit the fact without controversy.

Professional pedagogy knows nothing of it, the systems of education are being arranged into files, classified and numbered. They lack the strong fertile seed which, falling on rich soil, enables them to grow to great heights, they are worn and incapable of awakening spontaneity of character. Instructors and teachers, with dead souls, operate with dead values.