complex household furnished to our grandparents, during their youth,
just the opportunity for the formation of habits in attending to
what needed to be done, without regard to the momentary impulse or
mood. Many of our modern homes are so devoid of such opportunities
that there is great danger that our children will have altogether
too much practice in following their whims and caprices--or in doing
nothing.

It is just because the modern home is so devoid of the opportunities
for carrying on these character-building activities that provision
must be made in that other great educational institution, the
school. All the newer activities of the school, the shop work and
the school garden, the domestic science and the sewing, the
recreation centres, the art and the music--all these so-called "fads
and frills" against which the taxpayer raises his voice in protest--
these prove to be even more important in the making of men and women
out of children than the respectable and acceptable subjects of the
old-fashioned school; for these activities are but organized and
planned substitutes for the incidental doings of the childhood of
other days. They are the formal substitutes for the activities by
means of which a past generation of men and women acquired that
will-training and that insight into relations which distinguished
their characters.

[Illustration: Habits of careful work furnish a good foundation for
the will.]

All systematic and sustained effort, whether in organizing a game or
carrying a garden through from the sowing to the harvest, whether in
making a dress or a chest of drawers, has its moral value as