"Very well," I said cheerfully. "Let's discuss it. You make a class sit in front of you for an hour, and you threaten to whack the first child that doesn't pay attention to your lesson on nouns and pronouns." "Discipline," said Macdonald. "I don't care what you call it. I say it's stupidity." "But, hang it all, man, you can't teach if you haven't got the children's attention." "And you can't teach when you have got it," I said. "A child learns only when it is interested." "But surely, discipline makes them interested," said Mrs. Macdonald. I shook my head. "It only makes them attentive." "Same thing," said Macdonald. "No, Mac," I replied. "It is not the same thing. Attention means the applying of the conscious mind to a thing; interest means the application of both the conscious and the unconscious mind. When you force a child to attend to a lesson for fear of the tawse, you merely engage the least important part of his mind--the conscious. While he stares at the blackboard his unconscious is concerned with other things." "What sort of things?" asked Macdonald. "Very probably his unconscious is working out an elaborate plan to murder you," I said, "and I don't blame it either," I added. "And the snowballs?" queried Mrs. Macdonald. "When a boy makes a snowball, he is interested; his whole soul is in the job, that is, his unconscious and his conscious are working together. For the moment he is an artist, a creator." "So that's the new education . . . making snowballs?" said Macdonald. "It isn't really," I said; "but what I want to do is to point out that making snowballs is nearer to true education than the spoon-feeding we call education to-day." * * * * * Duncan does not like me. He is a young dominie of twenty-three or thereabouts, a friend of Macdonald, and he has just been demobilised. He was a major, and he does not seem to have recovered from the experience. He has got what the vulgar call swelled head. Last night he was dilating upon the delinquencies of the old retired teacher who ran the school while Duncan was on active service. It seems that the old man had allowed the school to run to seed. "Would you believe it," I overheard Duncan say to Macdonald, "when I came back I found that the boys and girls were playing in the same playground. Why, man, some of them were playing on the road! And the discipline! Awful!" Poor children! I see it all; I see Duncan line them up like a squad of recruits, and march them into school with never a smile on their faces or a word on their lips. Macdonald tells me that he makes them lift their slates by numbers. And the amusing thing is that Duncan thinks himself one of the more advanced teachers. He reads the educational journals, and eagerly devours the articles about new methods in teaching arithmetic and geography. His school is only a mile and a half away, and I hope that he will come over to see Mac a few times while I am here.