Here on one side is the home. How naturally the lines
of connection play back and forth between the home and the kitchen and
the textile room of the school! The child can carry over what he learns
in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the
school he applies at home. These are the two great things in breaking
down isolation, in getting connection—to have the child come to school
with all the experience he has got outside the school, and to leave it
with something to be immediately used in his everyday life. The child
comes to the traditional school with a healthy body and a more or less
unwilling mind, though, in fact, he does not bring both his body and mind
with him; he has to leave his mind behind, because there is no way to
use it in the school. If he had a purely abstract mind, he could bring
it to school with him, but his is a concrete one, interested in concrete
things, and unless these things get over into school life he cannot take
his mind with him. What we want is to have the child come to school with
a whole mind and a whole body, and leave school with a fuller mind and an
even healthier body. And speaking of the body suggests that, while there
is no gymnasium in these diagrams, the active life carried on in its four
corners brings with it constant physical exercise, while our gymnasium
proper will deal with the particular weaknesses of children and their
correction, and will attempt more consciously to build up the thoroughly
sound body as the abode of the sound mind.
[Illustration: Chart III.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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