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 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 ******, 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.
