It was a consciousness of
this that led Captain Scott, in the letter written in those last hours
among the Antarctic snows, thinking of his boy at home, and the
education that he wished for him, to write: "Make the boy interested
in natural history, if you can; it is better than games: they
encourage it in some schools."
Besides health--and health, we must remember, is not only a bodily
matter, but depends on mental as well as bodily activity, and on the
enjoyment of the activity that comes from its being mainly
voluntary--the pursuits that we are considering can do much to train
skill of various kinds. The class-work represents the minimum that we
expect a boy to know; but there is much that necessarily lies outside
it of hardly less value. Many a boy learns as much from the hobby on
which he spends his free time as from the work he does in class.
Sometimes, indeed, such a free-time hobby reveals the bent that might
otherwise have gone undiscovered, and determines the choice of a
special line of work for the future career.
But the chief value of such interests lies rather in their influence
on other work, and on the general development of character. In giving
scope for many kinds of skill, they are helping the intellectual
training; and however ready we may be to pay lip-service to the
principle of learning by doing, and to admit the educational
importance of the hand in brain-development, in most of our school
work we still ignore these things, so far as any practical
application of them is concerned.
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