WORKS means to take pains in the accomplishment of a task. Though man’s labors are innumerable and varied, there are a few maxims which should be common to all workers. One must choose among the possible vocations.

There is of course an art of teaching; it is a difficult one; and it requires long experience. We realize this the moment we try to control our children. A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows thing and finds his knowledge to be very slight or he knows but explains badly, or he is top severe an impatient because teaching bores him, or he dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. 

There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted; the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school systems. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but is makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places readymade and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen of sixteen. For boys between the age of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal. 

To amuse is not to teach. The object of teaching is to erect a framework of knowledge in a child’s mind and gradually to bring the child as near as may be to the average level of intelligence. Later in life the facts taught by experience and new discovers will add themselves to this framework. It is wrong to attempt to upset this natural order and to appeal to a child’s mind by diverting it with the spectacle of modern life. Teaching by means of pictures, T.V. computers &cinema is in itself ineffective; these methods must not be used unless involve (and this is possible) some effort or special enthusiasm. That which is learned without difficulty is soon forgotten and for the same reason, oral instruction which does not require the pupil’s personal participation is almost always rather useless. Eloquence slides in and out of young mind. To listen is not to work. (Naturally this does not apply to the teaching of modern languages.

Elementary teaching is the most important. Parents are apt not to attach sufficient importance to elementary studies. “My boy doesn’t know how to work,” they say, “but he is so young.” The fact is that everything depends upon a few subjects being well thought in the beginning. A perfect knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic is an enormous advantage. The majority of people do not posses this elementary knowledge. Many men read badly, laboriously; words do not evoke for them at once the ideas they represent. Mathematics is found to be very difficult or very easy, according to the manner in which the elements have been taught. Imperfect knowledge of the first principles of geometry and the rudiment of algebra make it impossible to understand anything of what comes next.

It is better to teach a few thing perfectly than many thing indifferently, and an overloaded curriculum is useless.

The object of instruction is not to produce technicians, but good active minds. For that a certain discipline is necessary. “Latin and Geometry shall be taught chiefly,” said napoleon. Add a little history, a little physics, and naturally a great deal of the language of the country. That will be enough. In history and the science it is not important for the pupil to the most recent discoveries and the most up-to-date theories, but he must understand what the historical and scientific methods are. 

The relatively simple works of the early scholars are clearer and more useful for him than the minute exactness of modern physicists. “Teaching,” wrote Alain, “must be determinedly slow in pace,” This phrase is full of meaning for some modern education with a dangerous tendency towards neglecting the ancient culture of the race, a necessary foundation for all education, and towards stressing recent doctrines happening. Information is not culture, and young men need culture much more than they need information. 
