A BOOK FOR TEACHERS BY HENRY C. KREBS SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SOMERSET COUNTY WITH INTRODUCTION BY CALVIN N. KENDALL, LL.D. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF NEW JERSEY K NEW YORK AND CHICAGO THE A. S. BARNES COMPANY INTRODUCTION "TRAIN up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it" was said long ago. This counsel is a constant reminder of the duty of teachers and parents. The present century has been aptly called the children's century. Increasing reverence for childhood is one of its dominant characteristics. This reverence is both the cause and the effect of a better understanding of children. Never before were so many earnest men and women giving their best thought and effort to a study of children as at present. They profoundly realize that children are the greatest of the potential assets of a community or of a state. The practice of good schools and of well ordered homes in training children has been modified as a result of the better understanding of children. So far as the school is concerned, there is a growing conviction that the child does not exist for the school but that the school exists for the child; a conviction that the child has his own way of feeling, thinking, and doing, which is not the way of men and women of forty. As Saint Paul said, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things." There is also a conviction that the individual child is becoming more and more the center |