=Relations and Interests.=—I have throughout spoken of ‘_Relations_,’ and not of ‘_Interests_,’ because interests may be casual, unworthy, and passing. Everyone, even the most ignorant, has interests of a sort; while to make valid any one relation, implies that knowledge has begun in, at any rate, that one direction. But the defect in our educational thought is that we have ceased to realise that knowledge is vital; and, as children and adults, we suffer from underfed minds. This intellectual inanition is, no doubt, partly due to the fact that educational theorists systematically depreciate knowledge. Such theorists are, I think, inclined to attach more importance to the working of the intellectual machinery than to the output of the product; that is, they feel it to be more important that a child should _think_ than that he should _know_. My contention is rather that he cannot _know_ without having _thought_; and also that he cannot think without an abundant, varied, and regular supply of the material of knowledge. We all know how the reading of a passage may stimulate in us thought, inquiry, inference, and thus get for us in the end some added knowledge. The depreciation of which I speak is by no means of set purpose, nor is it even realised; but the more education presents itself as a series of psychological problems, the greater will be the tendency to doctor, modify, and practically eliminate _knowledge_;—that knowledge, which is as the air, and the food, and the exercise, the whole life of the mind of man. In giving ‘education’ without abundant knowledge, we are as persons who should aim at physical development by giving the maximum of exercise with the minimum of food. The getting of knowledge and the getting of delight in knowledge are the ends of a child’s education; and well has said one of our prophets, “that there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.” To sum up, I believe that our efforts at intellectual education commonly fail from six causes:— =Causes of Failure.=—(_a_) The oral lesson, which at its worst is very poor twaddle, and at its best is far below the ordered treatment of the same subject by an original mind in the right book. (The right books exist, old and new, in countless numbers, but very great care is necessary in the choice, as well as much experience of the rather whimsical tastes and distastes of children.)