that it contained less than an acre. Although they could bound the
States of the Union, and give the principal exports and imports, they
knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation
to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. The
teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of
affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest
in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the
things of every-day life. But while this claim might be justified to
some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the
case. The truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link
these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'.

[Sidenote: Dead Knowledge]

Such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can
best help on the work of children in school. So long as these studies
are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books,
children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the
effort to master them. Fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some
ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is
of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his
history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that
his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and
mother may have seen, or which their books tell about--such fathers
and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same
time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. It is
dead knowledge only--knowledge wrenched from its living content--that
is difficult of digestion.

[Sidenote: The New Education]