Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign
tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of
geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden
hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired
later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These
necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well
as for morals; and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into
them betimes as intensely and as quickly as possible with minimal
strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for
natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. This is not
teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive,
authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very
apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows
or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters
of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. The
greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant
insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon interest, reason or
work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding
principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child,
contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply
distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational
factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty,
content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method,
spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly
somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from
play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a
phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which
excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the
tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.