The Education of the Child | Page 5

to accomplish this end. It is much easier to say
what one shall not do than what one must do to change self-will into
strength of character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please into
amiability, restlessness into personal initiative. It can only be brought
about by recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic or perverse,
is as natural and indispensable as the good, and that it becomes a
permanent evil only through its one-sided supremacy.
The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He
forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to
duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing
rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in
school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow
the camels of grown people.
The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children
nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is
usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of

the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the
education which is allowed to go on by itself. But educators who, day
in and day out, are consciously transforming the environment and
themselves are still a rare product. Most people live on the capital and
interest of an education, which perhaps once made them model children,
but has deprived them of the desire for educating themselves. Only by
keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant
influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a
companion half-way good enough for one's children.
To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting
one's feet on a narrow path, it means never placing ourselves in danger
of meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without
words that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. It means the humble
realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are infinite,
while the ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does the
educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age, is
making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvellous
shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each
impression. The slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least act
of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for life in
the finely strung soul of the child. While on the other side unexpected
friendliness, kind advances, just indignation, make quite as deep an
impression on those senses which people term as soft as wax but treat
as if they were made of cowhide.
Relatively most excellent was the old education which consisted solely
in keeping oneself whole, pure, and honourable. For it did not at least
depreciate personality, although it did not form it. It would be well if
but a hundredth part of the pains now taken by parents were given to
interference with the life of the child and the rest of the ninety and nine
employed in leading, without interference, in acting as an unforeseen,
an invisible providence through which the child obtains experience,
from which he may draw his own conclusions. The present practice is
to impress one's own discoveries, opinions, and principles on the child
by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be realised by the
educator is that he really has before him an entirely new soul, a real self

whose first and chief right is to think over the things with which he
comes in contact. By a new soul he understands only a new generation
of an old humanity to be treated with a fresh dose of the old remedy.
We teach the new souls not to steal, not to lie, to save their clothes, to
learn their lessons, to economise their money, to obey commands, not
to contradict older people, say their prayers, to fight occasionally in
order to be strong. But who teaches the new souls to choose for
themselves the path they must tread? Who thinks that the desire for this
path of their own can be so profound that a hard or even mild pressure
towards uniformity can make the whole of childhood a torment.
The child comes into life with the inheritance of the preceding
members of the race; and this inheritance is modified by adaptation to
the environment. But the child shows also individual variations from
the type of the species, and if his own character is not to disappear
during the process of adaptation, all self-determined development of
energy must be aided in every way and only indirectly influenced by
the teacher, who should understand how to