The Education of the Child | Page 6

combine and emphasise the
results of this development.
Interference on the part of the educator, whether by force or persuasion,
weakens this development if it does not destroy it altogether.
The habits of the household, and the child's habits in it must be
absolutely fixed if they are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that
habits are principles which have become instincts, and have passed
over into flesh and blood. To change habits, he continues, means to
attack life in its very essence, for life is only a web of habits.
Why does everything remain essentially the same from generation to
generation? Why do highly civilised Christian people continue to
plunder one another and call it exchange, to murder one another en
masse, and call it nationalism, to oppress one another and call it
statesmanship?
Because in every new generation the impulses supposed to have been
rooted out by discipline in the child, break forth again, when the
struggle for existence--of the individual in society, of the society in the

life of the state--begins. These passions are not transformed by the
prevalent education of the day, but only repressed. Practically this is
the reason why not a single savage passion has been overcome in
humanity. Perhaps man-eating may be mentioned as an exception. But
what is told of European ship companies or Siberian prisoners shows
that even this impulse, under conditions favourable to it, may be
revived, although in the majority of people a deep physical antipathy to
man-eating is innate. Conscious incest, despite similar deviations, must
also be physically contrary to the majority, and in a number of women,
modesty--the unity between body and soul in relation to love--is an
incontestable provision of nature. So too a minority would find it
physically impossible to murder or steal. With this list I have exhausted
everything which mankind, since its conscious history began, has really
so intimately acquired that the achievement is passed on in its flesh and
blood. Only this kind of conquest can really stand up against temptation
in every form.
A deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one
speaks of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system
of education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individual development, children
are treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they
were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents;
and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every
one else, people usually begin by attempting to make them respectable
and useful members of society.
But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in
becoming a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such,
while strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual
human being.
The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child
by degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him
his responsibility towards his environment. But in other respects, none
of the individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life will
be suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or others.

The right balance must be kept between Spencer's definition of life as
an adaptation to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's definition of it
as the will to secure power.
In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but individual
exercise of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains a
fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors.
Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about
personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in
their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so
they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts
which will have freedom when they are grown. People still hardly
realise how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types
constantly repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men,
the sweet girls, the respectable officials, and so on. And new types with
higher ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought
thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such
types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up.
Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. But she also
constantly makes small deviations. In this way different species, even
of the human race, have come into existence. But man himself does not
yet see the significance of this natural law in his own higher
development. He wants the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already
stamped with approval to be reproduced by each new generation. So we
get no new individuals,