How a Child sets up a New Relation

Quote from Charlotte Mason's, School Education, Volume 3 page 78

This is how a child goes to work to set up a new relation: a little girl of seven was handling an oar for the first time and remarked -- 'What a lot of crab-water there is to-day!' Then the next day -- 'There's not near so much crab-water to-day.' She was asked -- 'How do you know when it's crab-water?' 'Oh! it's so tough and you can't get your oar through, and it knocks you off your seat!' The child was all wrong, of course, but she was getting a scrap of real science and would soon get on the right track. How much better this than to learn out of a text-book, 'the particles which constitute water have no cohesion, and may be readily separated by a solid substance.'

When we consider that the setting up of relations, moral and intellectual, is our chief concern in life, and that the function of education is to put the child in the way of relations proper to him, and to offer the inspiring idea which commonly initiates a relation, we perceive that a little incident like the above may be of more importance than the passing of an examination.