The Education of the Child | Page 4

For
success in training children the first condition is to become as a child
oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending
baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors.
What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the
child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. It means to treat the
child as really one's equal, that is, to show him the same consideration,
the same kind confidence one shows to an adult. It means not to
influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him to become but to
be influenced by the impression of what the child himself is; not to
treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with the
seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character. Somewhere
Rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature does not
fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of education.
What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions
of nature, and recognised that the great secret of education lies hidden
in the maxim, "do not educate"?
Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day
methods of training children. Education is determined to create a
beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow.

To let him move about freely in this world until he comes into contact
with the permanent boundaries of another's right will be the end of the
education of the future. Only then will adults really obtain a deep
insight into the souls of children, now an almost inaccessible kingdom.
For it is a natural instinct of self-preservation which causes the child to
bar the educator from his innermost nature. There is the person who
asks rude questions; for example, what is the child thinking about? a
question which almost invariably is answered with a black or a white
lie. The child must protect himself from an educator who would master
his thoughts and inclinations, or rudely handle them, who without
consideration betrays or makes ridiculous his most sacred feelings, who
exposes faults or praises characteristics before strangers, or even uses
an open-hearted, confidential confession as an occasion for reproof at
another time.
The statement that no human being learns to understand another, or at
least to be patient with another, is true above all of the intimate relation
of child and parent in which, understanding, the deepest characteristic
of love, is almost always absent.
Parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace is never
greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace under all external
unrest. The child has to enter into relations with his own infinite world,
to conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams. But what does he
experience? Obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole livelong day.
The child is always required to leave something alone, or to do
something different, to find something different, or want something
different from what he does, or finds, or wants. He is always shunted
off in another direction from that towards which his own character is
leading him. All of this is caused by our tenderness, vigilance, and zeal,
in directing, advising, and helping the small specimen of humanity to
become a complete example in a model series.
I have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying" because he
wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished to drag
him into the city. Another child of six years was disciplined because
she had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,--a

natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical
examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a
spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an
account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she
did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he
might be allowed to go to hell on Saturday evening to play with the bad
little boys there.
The child felt in its innermost consciousness that he had a right to be
naughty, a fundamental right which is accorded to adults; and not only
to be naughty, but to be naughty in peace, to be left to the dangers and
joys of naughtiness.
To call forth from this "unvirtue" the complimentary virtue is to
overcome evil with good. Otherwise we overcome natural strength by
weak means and obtain artificial virtues which will not stand the tests
which life imposes.
It seems simple enough when we say that we must overcome evil with
good, but practically no process is more involved, or more tedious, than
to find actual means