What a wonderful difference it would eventually make in the wholesomeness of the manners and customs of this entire nation.

And that difference would come from giving the children now a half hour's instruction in the plain common sense of keeping well rested, and in seeing that such instruction was entirely and only practical.
It has often seemed to me that the tendency of education in the present day is more toward giving information than it is in preparing the mind to receive and use interesting and useful information of all kinds: that is, in helping the mind to attract what it needs; to absorb what it attracts, and digest what it absorbs as thoroughly as any good healthy stomach ever digested the food it needed to supply the body with strength.

The root of such cultivation, it seems to me, is in teaching the practical use and application of all that is studied.

To be sure, there is much more of that than there was fifty years ago, but you have only to put to the test the minds of young graduates to see how much more of such work is needed, and how much more intelligent the training of the young mind may be, even now.
Take, for instance, the subject of ethics.

How many boys and girls go home and are more useful in their families, more thoughtful and considerate for all about them, for their study of ethics in school?
And yet the study of ethics has no other use than this.