ways, but nature’s education must be supplemented, guided and interpreted by the growing mind, or it will have but a negative value. That fire burns we know, but how to prevent it from burning us expresses the first steps in educational processes. To cause fire to burn usefully, to the comfort of man, the manufac ture of articles, etc., are other painfully worked out steps in fire’s educational school. Nature in this sense is a mighty school room, with laws for her teachers. “ Knowledge is power ” here as everywhere, and art follows science. None realized this bet ter than old Prometheus, who stole the fire from the gods and was forever chained therefor. His discovery led to his being bound, just as the child’s experience with fire leads to respect for and later, perhaps, to triumph over. But the sphere of education includes the conquest of nature, of making its facts minister to the intellectual and moral uplift of man. So-called natural edu cation (of which we hear so much from writers like Rosseau, Spencer and Huxley) is plainly a very shallow affair, unless elaborated and made intelligent by the real master of life and reality, the self-conscious being. Lastly, in the institutional element in education, we include the social, political, moral, intellectual and religious environment. All these are educative and a part of our educational machine. Given original endowment, hereditary bent, temperament and the physi cal surroundings, man forms society and government, institutes means of intellectual development, moral and religious codes. These constitute the peculiarly human factors of every age. Society, morals and educational methods change as man changes. Each era helps to mould its own institutional environment to which, however, the tyranny of custom, tradition, etc., affixes limits. The best of us wear a strait-jacket of traditional rever ence; and the Parisian fashion plates and Delsartean models have their intellectual, moral and religious counterparts. Too many of us pray as the character in one of our recent English novels: " Lord, forbid that I should have an opinion of my own.” We are content to accept the moulding influences of things and systems as they are. To a large extent it is well that this is so, since all progress is conditioned upon a healthy conservatism of old and established lines of work and life. Either view, however, em phasizes the influence of the intellectual, social and moral status in which we live, move and have our being. Thus we have completed our analysis of education, we have The Free Lance. [May,
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers