The Art of Living in Australia: Together with Three Hundred Australian Cookery Recipes and Accessory Kitchen Information by Mrs. H. Wicken

of mediaeval learning, was not to be disposed of by this one encounter. Such a result was not to be expected in the natural order of things; but as the ideas of Rousseau contained the living truth, they were bound to find advocacy in due course, and though the seed might lie quiescent for a time, yet it was sure to germinate sooner or later. After him the path of educational reform was illumined by the genius of Pestalozzi, and a few years later Froebel appeared to influence for ever the methods of education. Indeed, it was the latter who by his kindergarten system has founded the practical education of our own day. The vast change, then, along the whole line of education has been from scholastic learning towards that of education in manual training. This is the truest recognition of the fact that the purpose of education is to prepare a child for his journey through life, and not merely to get him ready for an examination; but although the meaning of education has thus become more apparent, there is still too much a tendency in the present day to burden the developing mind with a multiplicity of subjects. We do not wish to produce a living encyclopaedia, but we desire to create a being, well trained in all his senses, and thoroughly competent to take his part in the battle of life. Far be it from imagining that I decry the advantages of learning in the slightest degree, but surely there is the broadest distinction between a scholastic prodigy and a practical well-informed mortal. This exaggeration of the function of education expressed by the word multiplicity deserves a little consideration, for it would appear that our educationists overlook the fact that the organism with which they have to deal is going through the most critical period of its existence. At the very time that children are rapidly undergoing the process of physical development, there is superadded the acquirement of elaborate mental knowledge, and when bone and muscle and sinew are in the active processes of transformation and growth,