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We are a garrulous people and too often forget, or do not know, that the heart as well as the head should receive its full share of culture. Much of our education has been that of the parrot; children’s minds are too often crowded with rules and words. Education of the intellect has its place, but is injurious, unnatural, and unbalanced unless in addition to cultivating the memory and reason we educate the heart also in the truest sense. A well balanced character should always be the object and aim of all education. A perfect system of education can never be attained because education is preparing one for the environment expected, and conditions change with time and place. There is too much striving to be consistent rather than trying to be right. We must learn that what we call character is heredity and environment in combination, and heredity being only stored environment our duty and our privilege is to make the stored environment of the best quality; in this way character is not only improved in the individual but the desired qualities are added to heredity to have their influence in guiding the slightly but surely changed heredities of succeeding generations. SUCCESS Cold mathematical intellect unaccompanied by a heart for the philosophic, idealistic, and poetic side of nature is like a locomotive well made but of no practical value without fire and steam; a good knowledge of language, history, geography, mathematics, chemistry, botany, astronomy, geology, etc., is of some importance, but far more so is the knowledge that all true success in life depends on integrity; that health, peace, happiness, and content, all come with heartily accepting and daily living by the "Golden Rule"; that dollars, though of great importance and value, do not necessarily make one wealthy; that a loving devotion to truth is a normal indication of physical and mental health; that hypocrisy and deceit are only forms of debility, mental imbecility and bodily disease, and that the knowledge and ability to perform useful, honest labor of any kind is of infinitely more importance and value than all the so-called "culture" of the schools, which too often turn out nervous pedantic victims of unbalanced education with plenty of words but with no intuitive ability to grasp, digest, assimilate and make use of the environment which they are compelled each day to meet and to conquer or be conquered. Any form of education which leaves one less able to meet every-day emergencies and occurrences is unbalanced and vicious, and will lead any people to destruction. Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education. By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome. A fragrant beehive or a plump, healthy hornet’s nest in good running order often become object lessons of some importance. The inhabitants can give the child pointed lessons in punctuation as well as caution and some of the limitations as well as the grand possibilities of life; and by even a brief experience with a good patch of healthy nettles, the same lesson will be still further impressed upon them. And thus by each new experience with homely natural objects the child learns self-respect and also to respect the objects and forces which must be met.
(This is the text version. See the photographed version.)
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