hammer.  The girl who yearns to paint will somehow achieve pigments, brushes, palette, and teachers.  Appetite is the principal thing; the rest comes easy.  The hungry child lays the whole world under tribute and cheerfully appropriates whatever fits into his wishes.  If his neighbor a mile distant has a book for which he feels a craving, the two-mile walk in quest of that book is invested with supreme charm, no matter what the weather.  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.  To them it mattered not that he was unlike other boys.  What was suitable for them must be equally suitable for him.  The story goes that a certain school-master was expounding the passage “Be ye pure in heart.”  Turning to the boys he exclaimed, “Are you pure in heart?  If you’re not, I’ll flog you till you are.”  So with Sonny’s four teachers.  If he had no appetite for their kind of food, they’d feed it to him till he had.  But when the appetite failed to come as the result of their much feeding, they banished him to outer darkness with epithets expressive of their disappointment and disgust.  They washed their hands of him and were glad to be rid of him.