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.

His next teacher, however, was different. She sensed his unlikeness to
other boys and knew, instinctively, that his case demanded and deserved