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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Education of the Child, by Ellen Key
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Education of the Child
+
+Author: Ellen Key
+
+Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #988]
+Release Date: July, 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
+
+by Ellen Key
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+Edward Bok, Editor of the "Ladies' Home Journal," writes:
+
+"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought
+into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way
+straight for every parent and it should find a place in every home in
+America where there is a child."
+
+
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
+
+Goethe showed long ago in his Werther a clear understanding of
+the significance of individualistic and psychological training, an
+appreciation which will mark the century of the child. In this work he
+shows how the future power of will lies hidden in the characteristics
+of the child, and how along with every fault of the child an uncorrupted
+germ capable of producing good is enclosed. "Always," he says, "I repeat
+the golden words of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as
+one of these,' and now, good friend, those who are our equals, whom we
+should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects; they should have
+no will of their own; do we have none? Where is our prerogative? Does it
+consist in the fact that we are older and more experienced? Good God
+of Heaven! Thou seest old and young children, nothing else. And in whom
+Thou hast more joy, Thy Son announced ages ago. But people believe in
+Him and do not hear Him--that, too, is an old trouble, and they model
+their children after themselves." The same criticism might be applied to
+our present educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words
+as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed
+the new commandments in which they say they believe. They continue to
+educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in
+original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed.
+The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above,
+i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ of
+virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in education the old rule
+of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil, instead of the new
+method, the system of allowing nature quietly and slowly to help itself,
+taking care only that the surrounding conditions help the work of
+nature. This is education.
+
+Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by Carlyle
+when he said that the marks of a noble and original temperament are
+wild, strong emotions, that must be controlled by a discipline as hard
+as steel. People either strive to root out passions altogether, or they
+abstain from teaching the child to get them under control.
+
+To suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with
+another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime common to
+those who announce loudly that education should only develop the real
+individual nature of the child.
+
+They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is
+justified. Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that
+evil can be changed into good.
+
+Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned
+for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At
+the same time, there is the other certainty that through progressive
+evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may
+be transformed. Only when this stage is reached will education begin to
+be a science and art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous
+effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere
+in accordance with the principle of the indestructibility of matter. We
+shall never believe that a characteristic of the soul can be destroyed.
+There are but two possibilities. Either it can be brought into
+subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane.
+
+Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the
+people who can play with children are able to educate them. 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 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 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, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or
+bad-tempered examples of the genus man. The still living instincts
+of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity.
+Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to
+produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most valuable.
+The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what
+everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child
+tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard
+results in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part
+of the great mass, led by the Superman through the strength of his will,
+a will which could not have mastered strong personalities. It has been
+justly remarked that individual peoples, like the English, have attained
+the greatest political and social freedom, because the personal feeling
+of independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal form. Accordingly
+legal freedom has been constantly growing.
+
+For the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of society, it
+is essential that education shall awake the feeling of independence; it
+should invigorate and favour the disposition to deviate from the type
+in those cases where the rights of others are not affected, or where
+deviation is not simply the result of the desire to draw attention to
+oneself. The child should be given the chance to declare conscientiously
+his independence of a customary usage, of an ordinary feeling, for this
+is the foundation of the education of an individual, as well as the
+basis of a collective conscience, which is the only kind of conscience
+men now have. What does having an individual conscience mean? It means
+submitting voluntarily to an external law, attested and found good by
+my own conscience. It means unconditionally heeding the unwritten law,
+which I lay upon myself, and following this inner law even when I must
+stand alone against the whole world.
+
+It is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular one, that
+it is original natures, particularly talented beings, who are badly
+treated at home and in school. No one considers the sources of conduct
+in a child who shows fear or makes a noise, or who is absorbed in
+himself, or who has an impetuous nature. Mothers and teachers show in
+this their pitiable incapacity for the most elementary part in the art
+of education, that is, to be able to see with their own eyes, not with
+pedagogical doctrines in their head.
+
+I naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their conventional
+morality, no appreciation of the significance of the child's putting
+into exercise his own powers. Just as little is this to be expected of
+those Christian believers who think that human nature must be brought
+to repentance and humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast,
+must be tamed with the rod,--a theory which the Bible is brought to
+support.
+
+I am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and consequently
+should cease using old methods of education. This class may reply that
+the new ideas in education cannot be carried out. But the obstacle is
+simply that their new thoughts have not made them into new men; the old
+man in them has neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own
+soul, and that of the child, according to the new thoughts.
+
+Those who have "tried Spencer and failed," because Spencer's method
+demands intelligence and patience, contend that the child must be taught
+to obey, that truth lies in the old rule, "As the twig is bent the tree
+is inclined."
+
+BENT is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal which
+extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience. But the new
+ideal is that man, to stand straight and upright, must not be bent at
+all only supported, and so prevented from being deformed by weakness.
+
+One often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude desire for
+mastery still alive and breaking out when the child is obstinate. "You
+won't!" say father and mother; "I will teach you whether you have a
+will. I will soon drive self-will out of you." But nothing can be driven
+out of the child; on the other hand, much can be scourged into it which
+should be kept far away.
+
+Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as
+a pre-condition to a higher training. The child is then in such a high
+degree controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure
+is often the only language he fully understands. Consequently for some
+children discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice
+of certain habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely
+unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child can
+remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
+
+The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience
+must be absolute. If such obedience has become habitual from the
+tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child
+straight. The dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can
+only be made effective when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny
+atmosphere of home. And if people refrain from laying the foundations of
+obedience while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,
+Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the child is
+older and his caprice disagreeable.
+
+With a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently
+and immediately. The effort of training should be directed at an early
+period to arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions
+according to Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits
+will become impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.
+
+Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it
+has become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some
+other discomfort,--discomforts against which crying is the child's only
+weapon. Crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this does not
+master the will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea
+that older people strike small children, when small children cry.
+This is not an ethical idea. But when the crying child is immediately
+isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever
+annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation is the absolute
+result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for
+the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant
+or disagreeable. In both cases the child is silenced by interfering with
+his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on
+his will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will,
+and accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a base
+emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that combines it
+with one of the most important experiences of life. The one punishment
+keeps the child on the level of the animal. The other impresses upon him
+the great principle of human social life, that when our pleasure
+causes displeasure to others, other people hinder us from following our
+pleasures; or withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will.
+It is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to
+good behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is
+repeated, the child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn
+that whoever is disagreeable to others must remain alone. Thus a right
+application is made of a right principle. Small children, too, must
+learn not to touch what belongs to other people. If every time anything
+is touched without permission, children lose their freedom of action one
+way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free action is
+not to injure others.
+
+It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty Japanese rooms
+are ideal places in which to bring up children. Our modern crowded rooms
+are, so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. During the year
+in which the real education of the child is proceeding by touching,
+tasting, biting, feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the
+cry, "Let it alone." For the temperament of the child as well as for
+the development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery,
+adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided
+with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of
+movement. But if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient,
+a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the
+greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which
+the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn
+that every place occupied by him has its limits.
+
+If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child
+should really dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming
+influence. When a mother strikes a child because he touches the light,
+the result is that he does this again when the mother is away. But let
+him burn himself with the light, then he is certain to leave it alone.
+In riper years when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar,
+the loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment. Most
+boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their favourite
+possession. But only the loss of it will be a real education through
+experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience which
+cannot be too strongly impressed.
+
+We hear parents who have begun with Spencer and then have taken to
+corporal punishment declare that when children are too small to repair
+the clothing which they have torn there must be some other kind of
+punishment. But at that age they should not be punished at all for such
+things. They should have such simple and strong clothes that they can
+play freely in them. Later on, when they can be really careful, the
+natural punishment would be to have the child remain at home if he is
+careless, has spotted his clothes, or torn them. He must be shown that
+he must help to put his clothes in good condition again, or that he will
+be compelled to buy what he has destroyed carelessly with money earned
+by himself. If the child is not careful, he must stay at home, when
+ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat alone if he is too late for meals.
+It may be said that there are simple means by which all the important
+habits of social life may become a second nature. But it is not possible
+in all cases to apply Spencer's method. The natural consequences
+occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes are too
+slow in their action. If it seems necessary to interfere directly, such
+action must be consistent, quick, and immutable. How is it that the
+child learns very soon that fire burns? Because fire does so always.
+But the mother who at one time strikes, at another threatens, at another
+bribes the child, first forbids and then immediately after permits some
+action; who does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience,
+but constantly gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and
+just as often in another, has not learned the effective educational
+methods of the fire.
+
+The old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to the
+character a fixed type rested on its consistent qualities. It was
+consistently strict, not as at present a lax hesitation between all
+kinds of pedagogical methods and psychological opinions, in which the
+child is thrown about here and there like a ball, in the hands of grown
+people; at one time pushed forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside,
+only to be brought back again, kissed till it, is disgusted, first
+ordered about, and then coaxed. A grown man would become insane if
+joking Titans treated him for a single day as a child is treated for
+a year. A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as
+courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn
+courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to
+endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment
+him and are often the cause of sexual hyperaesthesia. The child's
+demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are
+sincere, but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special
+occasions. This is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are
+disregarded. Nor should the child be forced to express regret in begging
+pardon and the like. This is excellent training for hypocrisy. A small
+child once had been rude to his elder brother and was placed upon a
+chair to repent his fault. When the mother after a time asked if he
+was sorry, he answered, "Yes," with emphasis, but as the mother saw a
+mutinous sparkle in his eyes she felt impelled to ask, "Sorry for what?"
+and the youngster broke out, "Sorry that I did not call him a liar
+besides." The mother was wise enough on this occasion, and ever after,
+to give up insisting on repentance.
+
+Spontaneous penitence is full of significance, it is a deeply felt
+desire for pardon. But an artificial emotion is always and everywhere
+worthless. Are you not sorry? Does it make no difference to you that
+your mother is ill, your brother dead, your father away from home? Such
+expressions are often used as an appeal to the emotions of children. But
+children have a right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have
+them as undisturbed as grown people. The same holds good of their
+sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are
+constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people,
+their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But
+the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong
+to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there are few
+better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved
+unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to
+be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer
+of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and
+great,--Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child?
+If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as
+much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical
+tenderness without which a child's life is a constant torment.
+
+As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks
+of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts be provoked. Above
+all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately
+gives away. Gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital
+for work or sacrifice. In order to secure for children the pleasure of
+giving and the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments,
+as well as of replacing property of their own or of others which they
+may have destroyed, they should at an early age be accustomed to perform
+seriously certain household duties for which they receive some small
+remuneration. But small occasional services, whether volunteered or
+asked for by others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve,
+without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to
+give away something, people should not make a presence of receiving
+it. This produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of
+being generous can be had for nothing. At every step the child should be
+allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be
+plucked from his roses. This is what is least understood in present-day
+training. Thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing. People find
+themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which stand in no relation
+with the realities of life. I mean, above all, what are still called
+means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows.
+
+Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
+means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
+have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
+through association of ideas.
+
+But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
+Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has
+been superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture,
+imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to
+the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline.
+But the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up
+as an animal. Those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of
+animals. Even animals can be trained without striking them, but they can
+only be trained by men who have become men themselves.
+
+Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the
+best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road
+as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory,
+teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice
+fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development
+stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level
+which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the
+common inheritance of the race. If we have abandoned torture and painful
+punishments for adults, while they are retained for children, it is
+because we have not yet seen that their soul life so far as a greater
+and more subtle capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same
+progress as that of adult mankind. The numerous cases of child suicide
+in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal punishment;
+or have taken place after its administration. Both soul and body are
+equally affected by this practice. Where this is not the result, blows
+have even more dangerous consequences. They tend to dull still further
+the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice of the
+person punished. I once heard a child pointed out in a school as being
+so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a
+flogging. Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had
+made him what he was. If statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those
+who had been flogged would certainly be more numerous than those who had
+been pampered.
+
+Society has gradually given up employing retributive punishments because
+people have seen that they neither awaken the feeling of guilt, nor
+act as a deterrent, but on the contrary retribution applied by equal to
+equal brutalises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates
+the victim to exercise the same violence towards others that has been
+endured by himself. But other rules are applied to the psychological
+processes of the child. When a child strikes his small sister the mother
+strikes him and believes that he will see and understand the difference
+between the blows he gets and those he gives, that he will see that the
+one is a just punishment and the other vicious conduct. But the child
+is a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same, although
+the mother gives it a different name.
+
+Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by Comenius, who
+compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly
+tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands
+to put it into tune.
+
+These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating
+and confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable
+fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely
+related combinations.
+
+In order to give real training, the first thing after the second
+or third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow among the
+possibilities of education. It is best if parents, as soon as the child
+is born, agree never to strike him, for if they once begin with this
+convenient and easy method, they continue to use corporal discipline
+even contrary to their first intention, because they have failed while
+using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
+
+If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of
+education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's
+peace.
+
+But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human
+beings in other respects, I should like to request them to think over
+the development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and
+when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept
+in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times.
+Through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have
+been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to
+the great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard
+to awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same
+way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude
+methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must
+go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a
+noble and complete development.
+
+Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low
+stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the
+corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real
+preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator
+may be formed.
+
+Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible;
+what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of
+passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of
+development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the
+direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of
+lower capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may be
+impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising
+for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them.
+
+The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has
+as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for
+this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece
+of stupidity. It works against the possibility of elevating the child
+beyond the level of the beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind
+flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will
+naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of
+education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies
+the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience,
+his brutality, not his intelligence.
+
+A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first
+punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse
+reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, "Yes,
+to-night I really have something to tell God," and prayed with deep
+earnestness, "Dear God, tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me
+any more."
+
+Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than
+for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. They would then learn
+to educate with the head instead of with the hand. And as to public
+educators, the teachers, their position could be no better raised than
+by legally forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under
+penalty of final loss of position.
+
+That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue
+to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a
+very elementary conception of their work. They should constantly keep
+before them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in
+dealing with children. The most frequent as well as the most dangerous
+of the numerous mistakes made in handling children is that people do
+not remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do
+not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past
+point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments
+and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or
+nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite
+despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of
+justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
+his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. Lacking these
+beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the crime of destroying
+the childhood of the new generation,--the only time in life in which the
+guardian of education can really be a kindly providence. So strongly do
+I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well
+as ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand of a
+human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot close my
+eyes after I have heard a child in the street threatened with corporal
+punishment.
+
+Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. As early
+as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man
+respects a word more than a blow. The exercise of physical force
+delivers the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. A child
+never believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge
+verbally, that the blows were due to love, that they were administered
+because they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that such
+a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself in a better
+way.
+
+Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal
+effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests.
+I do not now refer to the system of flogging employed by miserable
+people year in and year out at home, or, particularly in schools, that
+of beating children outrageously, or to the limits of brutality. I
+do not mean even the less brutal blows administered by undisciplined
+teachers and parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or
+fatigue or disgust,--blows which are simply the active expression of a
+tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the want of self-discipline
+and selfculture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties committed by
+monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies are stimulated
+by their disciplinary power and who use it to force their victims to
+silence, as certain criminal trials have shown.
+
+I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and teachers who,
+with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard as their duty to the
+child. These are accustomed to adduce the good effects of corporal
+discipline as a proof that it cannot be dispensed with. The child by
+being whipped is, they say, not only made good but freed from his evil
+character, and shows by his whole being that this quick and summary
+method of punishment has done more than talks, and patience, and the
+slowly working penalties of experience. Examples are adduced to prove
+that only this kind of punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the habit
+of lying and the like. Those who adopt this system do not perceive that
+they have only succeeded, through this momentarily effective means,
+in repressing the external expression of an evil will. They have
+not succeeded in transforming the will itself. It requires constant
+vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create an ever higher capacity for
+the discovery of intelligent methods. The fault that is repressed is
+certain to appear on every occasion when the child dares to show it.
+The educator who finds in corporal punishment a short way to get rid
+of trouble, leads the child a long way round, if we have the only real
+development in view, namely that which gradually strengthens the child's
+capacity for self-control.
+
+I have never heard a child over three years old threatened with corporal
+punishment without noticing that this wonderfully moral method had an
+equally bad influence on parents and children. The same can be said of
+milder kinds of folly, coaxing children by external rewards. I have seen
+some children coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. But
+in neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of will
+increased. Only when one is able to make the bath itself attractive is
+that energy of will developed that gains a victory over the feeling of
+fear or discomfort and produces a real ethical impression, viz., that
+virtue is its own reward. Wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit
+or fault by corporal punishment, a real ethical result is not reached.
+The child has only learnt to fear an unpleasant consequence, which lacks
+real connection with the thing itself, a consequence it well knows
+could have been absent. Such fear is as far removed as heaven from the
+conviction that the good is better than the bad. The child soon becomes
+convinced that the disagreeable accompaniment is no necessary result of
+the action, that by greater cleverness the punishment might have been
+avoided. Thus the physical punishment increases deception not morality.
+In the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and
+fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's
+souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. Only with the
+greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the
+superiority of the good established. The good comes to be seen as more
+productive of happiness to the individual himself and his environment.
+So the child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that
+punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the
+cause of punishment.
+
+Despite all the new talk of individuality the greatest mistake in
+training children is still that of treating the "child" as an abstract
+conception, as an inorganic or personal material to be formed and
+transformed by the hands of those who are educating him. He is beaten,
+and it is thought that the whole effect of the blow stops at the moment
+when the child is prevented from being bad. He has, it is thought, a
+powerful reminder against future bad behaviour. People no not suspect
+that this violent interference in the physical and psychical life of
+the child may have lifelong effects. As far back as forty years ago,
+a writer showed that corporal punishment had the most powerful somatic
+stimulative effects. The flagellation of the Middle Ages is known to
+have had such results; and if I could publish what I have heard from
+adults as to the effect of corporal punishment on them, or what I have
+observed in children, this alone would be decisive in doing away with
+such punishment in its crudest form. It very deeply influences the
+personal modesty of the child. This should be preserved above everything
+as the main factor in the development of the feeling of purity. The
+father who punishes his daughter in this way deserves to see her some
+day a "fallen woman." He injures her instinctive feeling of the sanctity
+of her body, an instinct which even in the case of a small child can
+be passionately profound. Only when every infringement of sanctity
+(forcible caressing is as bad as a blow) evokes an energetic,
+instinctive repulsion, is the nature of the child proud and pure.
+Children who strike back when they are punished have the most promising
+characters of all.
+
+Numerous are the cases in which bodily punishment can occasion
+irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who administers it,
+though he may triumphantly declare how the punishment in the specific
+case has helped. Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has
+injured them in one way or another, but when they take up the training
+of their own children they depend on the effect of such chastisement.
+
+What burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine fawning
+flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. It makes the lazy
+lazier, the obstinate more obstinate, the hard, harder. It strengthens
+those two emotions, the root of almost all evil in the world, hatred and
+fear. And as long as blows are made synonymous with education, both of
+these emotions will keep their mastery over men.
+
+One of the most frequent occasions for recourse to this punishment is
+obstinacy, but what is called obstinacy is only fear or incapacity.
+The child repeats a false answer, is threatened with blows, and again
+repeats it just because he is afraid not to say the right thing. He
+is struck and then answers rightly. This is a triumph of education;
+refractoriness is overcome. But what has happened? Increased fear
+has led to a strong effort of thought, to a momentary increase of
+self-control. The next day the child will very likely repeat the fault.
+Where there is real obstinacy on the part of children, I know of cases
+when corporal punishment has filled them with the lust to kill, either
+themselves or the person who strikes them. On the other hand I know of
+others, where a mother has brought an obstinate child to repentance and
+self-mastery by holding him quietly and calmly on her knees.
+
+How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how
+much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and
+stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even
+where blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute
+straightforwardness and the down-right personal courage to show oneself
+as one is. As long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no
+perfect honour will be found in children. So long as the home and the
+school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the
+child himself at the cost of humanity. The child uses on animals, on
+his young brothers and sisters, on his comrades, the methods applied to
+himself. He puts in practice the same argument, that "badness" must be
+cured with blows. Only children accustomed to be treated mildly, learn
+to see that influence can be gained without using force. To see this
+is one of man's privileges, sacrificed by man through descending to the
+methods of the brute. Only by the child seeing his teacher always and
+everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he come himself
+to despise force on all those occasions which do not involve the defence
+of a weaker person against physical superiority. The foundation of the
+desire for war is to be sought for less in the war games than in the
+teachers' rod.
+
+To defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are brought
+in evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they deserved such
+discipline in order to be made good. There is no lower example of
+hypocrisy in human nature than this. It is true the child may be sincere
+in other cases in saying that he feels that through punishment he has
+atoned for a fault which was weighing upon his conscience. But this is
+really the foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still
+continues to be preached as Christian, namely; that a fault may be
+atoned for by sufferings which are not directly connected with the
+fault. The basis of the new morality is just the opposite as I have
+already shown. It teaches that no fault can be atoned for, that no one
+can escape the results of his actions in any way.
+
+Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks he must
+most frequently punish with blows. But there is no case in which this
+method is more dangerous.
+
+When the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the
+well-known story of George Washington and the hatchet must appear in it,
+accompanied by the remark which a clever ten-year-old child added to the
+anecdote: "It is no trouble telling the truth when one has such a kind
+father."
+
+I formerly divided untruthfulness into unwilling, shameless, and
+imaginative lies. A short time ago I ran across a much better division
+of lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully conscious untruthfulness
+which must be punished, and "hot" lies; the expression of an excited
+temperament or of a vigorous fancy. I agree with the author of this
+distinction that the last should not be punished but corrected, though
+not with a pedantic rule of thumb measure, based on how much it exceeds
+or falls short of truth. It is to be cured by ridicule, a dangerous
+method of education in general, but useful when one observes that this
+type of untruthfulness threatens to develop into real untrustworthiness.
+In dealing with these faults we are very strict towards children, so
+strict that no lawyer, no politician, no journalist, no poet, could
+exercise his profession if the same standard were applied to them as to
+children.
+
+The white lie is, as a French scientist has shown, partly caused by pure
+morbidness, partly through some defect in the conception. It is due
+to an empty space, a dead point in memory, or in consciousness, that
+produces a defective idea or gives one no idea at all of what has
+happened. In the affairs of everyday life the adults are often mistaken
+as to their intentions or acts. They may have forgotten about their
+actions, and it requires a strong effort of memory to call them back
+into their minds; or they suggest to themselves that they have done, or
+not done, something. In all of these cases, if they were forced to give
+a distinct answer, they would lie. In every case of this kind, where a
+child is concerned, the lie is assumed to be a conscious one, and when
+on being submitted to a strict cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes
+confused, and blushes, it is looked upon as a proof that he knows he has
+been telling an untruth, although as a rule there has been no instance
+of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted confession from the child
+that he has lied. Yet in all these complicated psychological problems,
+corporal punishment is treated as a solution.
+
+The child who never hears lying at home, who does not see exaggerated
+weight placed on small, merely external things, who is not made cowardly
+by fear, who hears conscious lies always spoken of with contempt, will
+get out of the habit of untruthfulness simply by psychological means.
+First he will find that untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a
+repetition of it, scorn and lack of confidence. But these methods should
+not be applied to untruthfulness caused by distress or by richness of
+imagination; or to such cases as originate from the obscure mental ideas
+noted above, ideas whose connection with one another the child cannot
+make clear to himself. The cold untruth on the other hand, must be
+punished; first by going over it with the child, then letting him
+experience its effect in lack of confidence, which will only be restored
+when the child shows decided improvement in this regard. It is of the
+greatest importance to show children full and unlimited confidence,
+even though one quietly maintains an attitude of alert watchfulness; for
+continuous and undeserved mistrust is just as demoralising as blind and
+easy confidence.
+
+No one who has been beaten for lying learns by it to love truth. The
+accuracy of this principle is illustrated by adults who despise corporal
+punishment in their childhood yet continue to tell untruths by word
+and deed. Fear may keep the child from technical untruth, but fear also
+produces untrustworthiness. Those who have been beaten in childhood for
+lying have often suffered a serious injury immeasurably greater than
+the direct lie. The truest men I ever knew lie voluntarily and
+involuntarily; while others who might never be caught in a lie are
+thoroughly false.
+
+This corruption of personality begins frequently at the tenderest
+age under the influence of early training. Children are given untrue
+motives, half-true information; are threatened, admonished. The child's
+will, thought, and feeling are oppressed; against this treatment
+dishonesty is the readiest method of defence. In this way educators
+who make truth their highest aim, make children untruthful. I watched
+a child who was severely punished for denying something he had
+unconsciously done, and noted how under the influence of this senseless
+punishment he developed extreme dissimulation.
+
+Truthfulness requires above everything unbroken determination; and many
+nervous little liars need nourishing food and life in the open air, not
+blows. A great artist, one of the few who live wholly according to the
+modern principles of life, said to me on one occasion: "My son does not
+know what a lie is, nor what a blow is. His step-brother, on the other
+hand, lied when he came into our house; but lying did not work in the
+atmosphere of calm and freedom. After a year the habit disappeared by
+itself, only because it always met with deep astonishment."
+
+This makes me, in passing, note one of the other many mistakes of
+education, viz., the infinite trouble taken in trying to do away with
+a fault which disappears by itself. People take infinite pains to teach
+small children to speak distinctly who, if left to themselves, would
+learn it by themselves, provided they were always spoken to distinctly.
+This same principle holds good of numerous other things, in children's
+attitude and behaviour, that can be left simply to a good example and to
+time. One's influence should be used in impressing upon the child habits
+for which a foundation must be laid at the very beginning of his life.
+
+There is another still more unfortunate mistake, the mistake of
+correcting and judging by an external effect produced by the act, by the
+scandal it occasions in the environment. Children are struck for using
+oaths and improper words the meaning of which they do not understand; or
+if they do understand, the result of strictness is only that they go
+on keeping silence in matters in which sincerity towards those who are
+bringing them up is of the highest importance. The very thing the child
+is allowed to do uncorrected at home, is not seldom corrected if it
+happens away from home. So the child gets a false idea that it is not
+the thing that deserves punishment, but its publicity. When a mother
+is ashamed of the bad behaviour of her son she is apt to strike
+him--instead of striking her own breast! When an adventurous feat fails
+he is beaten, but he is praised when successful. These practices produce
+demoralisation. Once in a wood I saw two parents laughing while the
+ice held on which their son was sliding; when it broke suddenly they
+threatened to whip him. It required strong self-control in order not
+to say to this pair that it was not the son who deserved punishment but
+themselves.
+
+On occasions like these, parents avenge their own fright on their
+children. I saw a child become a coward because an anxious mother struck
+him every time he fell down, while the natural result inflicted on the
+child would have been more than sufficient to increase his carefulness.
+When misfortune is caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a rule,
+enough to prevent a repetition of it. If it is not sufficient blows have
+no restraining effect; they only embitter. The boy finds that adults
+have forgotten their own period of childhood; he withdraws himself
+secretly from this abuse of power, provided strict treatment does
+not succeed in totally depressing the level of the child's will and
+obstructing his energies.
+
+This is certainly a danger, but the most serious effect of corporal
+punishment is that it has established an unethical morality as its
+result. Until the human being has learnt to see that effort, striving,
+development of power, are their own reward, life remains an unbeautiful
+affair. The debasing effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great
+cruelties produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or
+success sets the value to deeds and actions.
+
+A complete revolution in this crude theory of value must come about
+before the earth can become the scene of a happy but considerate
+development of power on the part of free and fine human beings. Every
+contest decided by examinations and prizes is ultimately an immoral
+method of training. It awakens only evil passions, envy and the
+impression of injustice on the one side, arrogance on the other. After I
+had during the course of twenty years fought these school examinations,
+I read with thorough agreement a short time ago, Ruskin's views on the
+subject. He believed that all competition was a false basis of stimulus,
+and every distribution of prizes a false means. He thought that the
+real sign of talent in a boy, auspicious for his future career, was
+his desire to work for work's sake. He declared that the real aim of
+instruction should be to show him his own proper and special gifts, to
+strengthen them in him, not to spur him on to an empty competition with
+those who were plainly his superiors in capacity.
+
+Moreover it ought not to be forgotten that success and failure involve
+of themselves their own punishment and their own reward, the one bitter,
+the other sweet enough to secure in a natural way increased strength,
+care, prudence, and endurance. It is completely unnecessary for the
+educator to use, besides these, some special punishments or special
+rewards, and so pervert the conceptions of the child that failure seems
+to him to be a wrong, success on the other hand as the right.
+
+No matter where one turns one's gaze, it is notorious that the
+externally encouraging or awe-inspiring means of education, are an
+obstacle to what are the chief human characteristics, courage in oneself
+and goodness to others.
+
+A people whose education is carried on by gentle means only (I mean
+the people of Japan), have shown that manliness is not in danger where
+children are not hardened by corporal punishment. These gentle means are
+just as effective in calling forth selfmastery and consideration. These
+virtues are so imprinted on children, at the tenderest age, that one
+learns first in Japan what attraction considerate kindliness bestows
+upon life. In a country where blows are never seen, the first rule of
+social intercourse is not to cause discomfort to others. It is told that
+when a foreigner in Japan took up a stone to throw it at a dog, the dog
+did not run. No one had ever thrown a stone at him. Tenderness towards
+animals is the complement in that country of tenderness in human
+relationship, a tenderness whose result is observed, among other
+effects, in a relatively small number of crimes against life and
+security.
+
+War, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing more than
+different expressions of the tiger nature still alive in man. When the
+rod is thrown away, and when, as some one has said, children are
+no longer boxed on their ears but are given magnifying glasses and
+photographic cameras to increase their capacity for life and for loving
+it, instead of learning to destroy it, real education in humanity will
+begin.
+
+For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment
+can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant
+an example as Japan, I should like to mention a fact closer to us.
+Our Germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. It was
+introduced with Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into
+a religious duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were
+intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a part of
+spiritual guardianship. I once asked our great poet, Victor Rydberg, and
+he said that he had found no proof that corporal punishment was usual
+among the Germans in heathen times. I asked him whether he did not
+believe that the fact of its absence had encouraged the energetic
+individualism and manliness in the Northern peoples. He thought so, and
+agreed with me. Finally, I might note from our own time, that there
+are many families and schools, our girls' schools for example, and also
+boys' schools in some countries, where corporal punishment is never
+used. I know a family with twelve children whose activity and capacity
+are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of duty alone. Corporal
+punishment is never used in this home; a determined but mild mother
+has taught the children to obey voluntarily, and has known how to train
+their wills to self-control.
+
+By "voluntary obedience," I do not mean that the child is bound to ask
+endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them before he obeys. A
+good teacher never gives a command without there being some good reason,
+but whether the child is convinced or not, he must always obey, and if
+he asks "why" the answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as
+children, must obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided.
+The great necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood. This can
+be done without harsh means by training the child, even previous to his
+birth, by cultivating one's self-control, and after his birth by never
+giving in to a child's caprices. The rule is, in a few cases, to work
+in opposition to the action of the child, but in other cases work
+constructively; I mean provide the child with material to construct his
+own personality and then let him do this work of construction. This is,
+in brief, the art of education. The worst of all educational methods are
+threats. The only effective admonitions are short and infrequent ones.
+The greatest skill in the educator is to be silent for the moment and
+then so reprove the fault, indirectly, that the child is brought to
+correct himself or make himself the object of blame. This can be done
+by the instructor telling something that causes the child to compare his
+own conduct with the hateful or admirable types of behaviour about which
+he hears information. Or the educator may give an opinion which the
+child must take to himself although it is not applied directly to him.
+
+On many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part of the
+elder person is an excellent punishment, if the indignation is reserved
+for the right moment. I know children to whom nothing was more frightful
+than their father's scorn; this was dreaded. Children who are deluged
+with directions and religious devotions, who receive an ounce of
+morality in every cup of joy, are most certain to be those who will
+revolt against all this. Nearly every thinking person feels that the
+deepest educational influences in his life have been indirect; some good
+advice not given to him directly; a noble deed told without any direct
+reference. But when people come themselves to train others they forget
+all their own personal experience.
+
+The strongest constructive factor in the education of a human being
+is the settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its duty.
+Open-heartedness, industry, straightforwardness at home develop
+goodness, desire to work, and simplicity in the child. Examples of
+artistic work and books in the home, its customary life on ordinary
+days and holidays, its occupations and its pleasures, should give to the
+emotions and imagination of the child, periods of movement and repose,
+a sure contour and a rich colour. The pure, warm, clear atmosphere
+in which father, mother, and children live together in freedom and
+confidence; where none are kept isolated from the interests of the
+others; but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest;
+where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are willing to
+help one another when necessary,--in this atmosphere egoism, as well as
+altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality
+find its just freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to
+undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity;
+as the spiritual life of the generation becomes more manifold in
+its combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for
+observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind the
+visible, tangible, world of sense, the more will each new generation of
+children show a more refined and a more consistent mental life. It is
+impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods
+in our present home and school training. We need new homes, new schools,
+new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to
+feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can
+not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will
+have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The
+conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised
+so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be
+created in future generations. This transformation can be helped by the
+training of the present, by casting aside the withered foliage which now
+covers the budding possibilities of life.
+
+The house must once more become a home for the souls of children, not
+for their bodies alone. For such homes to be formed, that in their
+turn will mould children, the children must be given back to the home.
+Instead of the study preparation at home for the school taking up, as
+it now does, the best part of a child's life, the school must get
+the smaller part, the home the larger part. The home will have the
+responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary days as on
+holidays, that the children will really become a part of the home both
+in their work and in their pleasures. The children will be taken from
+the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the home. The
+mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life to the
+children. Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer
+will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.
+
+Such was the training of Old Scandinavia; the direct share of the child
+in the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life
+of our Scandinavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at
+twelve years of age), unity, character, and strength. Things specially
+made for children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings,
+support given to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially
+prepared for children,--these are the fundamental defects of our present
+day education. An eighteen-yearold girl said to me a short time ago,
+that she and other girls of the same age were so tired of the system of
+vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home,
+that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger,
+corporal discipline, and drudgery.
+
+One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial
+environment, the environment in which children and young people of the
+present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for
+the realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and
+responsibility, instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the
+school, the object of another's care.
+
+What is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is
+to be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do
+conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days and holidays
+without oversight, in every case where the child can help himself.
+Instead of the modern school child having a mother and servants about
+him to get him ready for school and to help him to remember things, he
+should have time every day before school to arrange his room and brush
+his clothes, and there should be no effort to make him remember what
+is connected with the school. The home and the school should combine
+together systematically to let the child suffer for the results of his
+own negligence.
+
+Just the reverse of this system rules to-day. Mothers learn their
+children's lessons, invent plays for them, read their story books to
+them, arrange their rooms after them, pick up what they have let fall,
+put in order the things they have left in confusion, and in this and
+in other ways, by protective pampering and attention, their desire for
+work, their endurance, the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities
+proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a
+preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed
+to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are
+trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return.
+Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and
+unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their
+elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in
+earlier generations were a beautiful custom among the young.
+
+To restore this custom, all the means usually adopted now to protect the
+child from physical and psychical dangers and inconveniences, will have
+to be removed. Throw the thermometer out of the window and begin with
+a sensible course of toughening; teach the child to know and to bear
+natural pain. Corporal punishment must be done away with not because
+it is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly
+unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes
+with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by
+nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do
+not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in this and in
+other matters.
+
+We must begin in doing for the child in certain ways a thousand times
+more and in others a hundred thousand times less. A beginning must be
+made in the tenderest age to establish the child's feeling for nature.
+Let him live year in and year out in the same country home; this is one
+of the most significant and profound factors in training. It can be held
+to even where it is now neglected. The same thing holds good of making
+a choice library, commencing with the first years of life; so that the
+child will have, at different periods of his life, suitable books for
+each age; not as is now often the case, get quite spoilt by the constant
+change of summer excursions, by worthless children's books, and costly
+toys. They should never have any but the simplest books; the so-called
+classical ones. They should be amply provided with means of preparing
+their own playthings. The worst feature of our system are the playthings
+which imitate the luxury of grown people. By such objects the covetous
+impulse of the child for acquisition is increased, his own capacity for
+discovery and imagination limited, or rather, it would be limited if
+children with the sound instinct of preservation, did not happily smash
+the perfect playthings, which give them no creative opportunity, and
+themselves make new playthings from fir cones, acorns, thorns, and
+fragments of pottery, and all other sorts of rubbish which can be
+transformed into objects of great price by the power of the imagination.
+
+To play with children in the right way is also a great art. It should
+never be done if children do not themselves know what they are going
+to do; it should always be a special treat for them as well as their
+elders. But the adults must always on such occasions, leave behind every
+kind of educational idea and go completely into the child's world of
+thought and imagination. No attempt should be made to teach them
+at these times anything else but the old satisfactory games. The
+experiences derived from these games about the nature of the children,
+who are stimulated in one direction or another by the game, must be kept
+for later use.
+
+Games in this way increase confidence between children and adults. They
+learn to know their elders better. But to allow children to turn all the
+rooms into places to play in, and to demand constantly that their elders
+shall interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species
+of pampering common to the present day. The children become accustomed
+to selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant educational
+effort brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. If
+children were free in their own world, the nursery, but out of it had
+to submit to the strict limits imposed by the habits, wills, work,
+and repose of parents, their requirements and their wishes, they would
+develop into a stronger and more considerate race than the youth of the
+present day. It is not so much talking about being considerate, but the
+necessity of considering others, of really helping oneself and others,
+that has an educational value. In earlier days, children were quiet
+as mice in the presence of elder persons. Instead of, as they do now,
+breaking into a guest's conversation, they learned to listen. If the
+conversation of adults is varied, this can be called one of the best
+educational methods for children. The ordinary life of children, under
+the old system, was lived in the nursery where they received their most
+important training from an old faithful servant and from one another.
+From their parents they received corporal punishment, sometimes a
+caress. In comparison with this system, the present way of parents and
+children living together would be absolute progress, if parents could
+but abstain from explaining, advising, improving, influencing every
+thought and every expression. But all spiritual, mental, and bodily
+protective rules make the child now indirectly selfish, because
+everything centres about him and therefore he is kept in a constant
+state of irritation. The six-yearold can disturb the conversation of the
+adult, but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed about eight o'clock, even
+when he, with wide open eyes, longs for a conversation that might be to
+him an inspiring stimulus for life.
+
+Certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order, nourishment
+and sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily movement, are concerned,
+can be made the foundations for the child's conceptions of morality. He
+cannot be made to learn soon enough that bodily health and beauty must
+be regarded as high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious
+to health and beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. In this sphere,
+children must be kept entirely independent of custom by allowing the
+exception to every rule to have its valid place. The present anxious
+solicitude that children should eat when the clock strikes, that they
+get certain food at fixed meals, that they be clothed according to the
+degree of temperature, that they go to bed when the clock strikes, that
+they be protected from every drop of unboiled water and every extra
+piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable slaves of habit. A
+reasonable toughening process against the inequalities, discomforts, and
+chances of life, constitutes one of the most important bases of joy of
+living and of strength of temper. In this case too, the behaviour of the
+person who gives the training, is the best means of teaching children
+to smile at small contretemps, things which would throw a cloud over the
+sun, if one got into the habit of treating them as if they were of great
+importance. If the child sees the parent doing readily an unpleasant
+duty, which he honestly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a parent
+endure trouble or an unexpected difficulty easily, he will be in honour
+bound to do the like. Just as children without many words learn to
+practice good deeds when they see good deeds practiced about them; learn
+to enjoy the beauty of nature and art when they see that adults enjoy
+them, so by living more beautifully, more nobly, more moderately, we
+speak best to children. They are just as receptive to impressions of
+this kind as they are careless of those made by force.
+
+Since this is my alpha and omega in the art of education, I repeat now
+what I said at the beginning of this book and half way through it. Try
+to leave the child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as possible;
+keep away all crude and impure impressions; but give all your care and
+energy to see that personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity
+and in its nakedness, shall all be means of training the child.
+
+Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for
+self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their development,
+neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults. But respect the joys
+of the child, his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an
+adult. Education will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely
+harder art, than the education of the present day, with its
+artificialised existence, its double entry morality, one morality for
+the child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and lax for
+the adult and vice versa. By treating the child every moment as one does
+an adult human being we free education from that brutal arbitrariness,
+from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have transformed him.
+Whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit alone, or
+whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the
+result is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know equally little
+of the feelings and needs of their children. The one class are happy
+when the children are like themselves, and their highest ambition is
+to produce in their children a successful copy of their own thoughts,
+opinions, and ideals. Really it ought to pain them very much to see
+themselves so exactly copied. What life expected from them and required
+from them was just the opposite--a richer combination, a better
+creation, a new type, not a reproduction of that which is already
+exhausted. The other class strive to model their children not according
+to themselves but according to their ideal of goodness. They show their
+love by their willingness to extinguish their own personalities for
+their children's sake. This they do by letting the children feel that
+everything which concerns them stands in the foreground. This should be
+so, but only indirectly.
+
+The concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the home, its
+habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their
+sound development, must stand in the foreground. But at present, in most
+cases, children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are
+sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will
+without possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is
+spasmodic in its application.
+
+When one daughter after another leaves home in order to make herself
+independent they are often driven to do it by want of freedom, or by
+the lack of character in family life. In both directions the girl
+sees herself forced to become something different, to hold different
+opinions, to think different thoughts, to act contrary to the dictates
+of her own being. A mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter,
+said not long ago that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented
+daughters. Such an asylum would be as necessary as a protection against
+pampering parents as against those who are overbearing. Both alike,
+torture their children though in different ways, by not understanding
+the child's right to have his own point of view, his own ideal of
+happiness, his own proper tastes and occupation. They do not see that
+children exist as little for their parent's sake as parents do for their
+children's sake. Family life would have an intelligent character if each
+one lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to do
+the same. None should tyrannise over, nor should suffer tyranny from,
+the other. Parents who give their home this character can justly
+demand that children shall accommodate themselves to the habits of the
+household as long as they live in it. Children on their part can ask
+that their own life of thought and feeling shall be left in peace at
+home, or that they be treated with the same consideration that would be
+given to a stranger. When the parents do not meet these conditions they
+themselves are the greater sufferers. It is very easy to keep one's son
+from expressing his raw views, very easy to tear a daughter away from
+her book and to bring her to a tea-party by giving her unnecessary
+occupations; very easy by a scornful word to repress some powerful
+emotion. A thousand similar things occur every day in good families
+through the whole world. But whenever we hear of young people speaking
+of their intellectual homelessness and sadness, we begin to understand
+why father and mother remain behind in homes from which the daughters
+have hastened to depart; why children take their cares, joys, and
+thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the old and the young generation
+are as mutually dependent as the roots and flowers of plants, so often
+separate with mutual repulsion.
+
+This is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple
+bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the
+first class, the latter torment their children in a naive way, while the
+former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely
+is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who
+through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character,
+makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals.
+Such artists are often simple women who have passed no examinations,
+founded no clubs, and written no books. The highly cultivated mothers
+and the socially useful mothers on the other hand are not seldom those
+who call forth criticism from their sons. It seems almost an invariable
+rule that mothers should make mistakes when they wish to act for the
+welfare of their sons. "How infinitely valuable," say their children,
+"would I have found a mother who could have kept quiet, who would have
+been patient with me, who would have given me rest, keeping the outer
+world at a distance from me, with kindly soothing hands. Oh, would that
+I had had a mother on whose breast I could have laid my head, to be
+quiet and dream."
+
+A distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her
+well-thought-out plans for her children fail--those children in whom
+she saw the material for her passion for governing, the clay that she
+desired to mould.
+
+The writer just cited says very justly that maternal unselfishness
+alone can perform the task of protecting a young being with wisdom
+and kindliness, by allowing him to grow according to his own laws. The
+unselfish mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of her life
+energy, powers of soul and spirit to a growing being and then open all
+doors to him, leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths,
+and ask for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But to
+most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son in the book
+just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she tortures another; if
+she has not this capacity by nature, why in the world should I recognise
+her as my mother at all."
+
+Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous
+system in a state of irritation. They make work hard and play joyless,
+whenever they take a part in it. At the present time, too, the school
+gets control of the child, the home loses all the means by which
+formerly it moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life.
+The school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school
+gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at
+pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs,
+sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more
+to outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for
+holiday. Young people, often, have no other impression of home than that
+it is a place where they meet society which bores them.
+
+Parents surrender their children to schools in those years in which they
+should influence their minds. When the school gives them back they
+do not know how to make a fresh start with the children, for they
+themselves have ceased to be young.
+
+But getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is very
+interesting to observe a face that is getting old. What time makes out
+of a face shows better than anything else what the man has made out
+of time. Most men in the early period of middle age are neither
+intellectually fat nor lean, they are hardened or dried up. Naturally
+young people look upon them with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that
+there is such a thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize
+for its whole work of inner development. But they look in vain for this
+second eternal youth in their elders, filled with worldly nothingnesses
+and things of temporary importance.
+
+With a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future plans and
+they go out in the world in order to choose their spiritual parents.
+
+This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man must sow a
+hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of children.
+
+When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight
+and size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on
+its young mother, I began to think about the education of my future
+children. Then as now my educational ideal was that the children
+should be happy, that they should not fear. Fear is the misfortune of
+childhood, and the sufferings of the child come from the half-realised
+opposition between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way
+in which these possibilities are actually handled. It may be said that
+life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our possibilities of
+happiness. But the difference between the sufferings of the adult
+from existence, and the sufferings of the child caused by adults, is
+tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings
+imposed upon him by adults and the more impatient the child is against
+unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more certainly will
+he some day be driven to find means to transform for himself and for
+others the hard necessities of life.
+
+A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition into
+child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence for it, wrote as
+follows: "Where we behold children we suspect there are princes, but as
+to the kings, where are they?" Not only life's tragic elements diminish
+and dam up its vital energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want
+of reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being.
+Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted
+nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only
+another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that
+it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and
+history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they
+have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as
+they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars.
+
+The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in
+the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like
+white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father
+should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with
+his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own; not to the
+right of asking others to become the plaything of his caprices but to
+the right of living his full strong personal child's life along with
+a father and a mother who themselves live a personal life, a life from
+whose sources and powers the child can take the elements he needs for
+his own individual growth. Parents should never expect their own highest
+ideals to become the ideals of their child. The free-thinking sons of
+pious parents and the Christian children of freethinkers have become
+almost proverbial.
+
+But parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their own ideals
+which is the same thing as making children idealists. This can often
+lead to a quite different system of thought from that pursued by the
+parent.
+
+As to ideals, the elders should here as elsewhere, offer with timidity
+their advice and their experience. Yes they should try to let the young
+people search for it as if they were seeking fruit hidden under the
+shadow of leaves. If their counsel is rejected, they must show neither
+surprise nor lack of self-control.
+
+The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since
+posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth
+in the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its
+forefathers. It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond
+the bounds of their daily effort. We must in the child see the new
+fate of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the
+child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the
+woof of world events. We must realise that every pebble by which one
+breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its
+influence through centuries and centuries in ever widening circles.
+Through our fathers, without our will and without choice, we are given a
+destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. Through
+our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain measure,
+as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race.
+
+By a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing the
+whole process in the light of the religion of development, the twentieth
+century will be the century of the child. This will come about in
+two ways. Adults will first come to an understanding of the child's
+character and then the simplicity of the child's character will be kept
+by adults. So the old social order will be able to renew itself.
+
+Psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. I will not go back to
+those artists in education called Socrates and Jesus, but I commence
+with the modern world. In the hours of its sunrise, in which we, who
+look back, think we see a futile Renaissance, then as now the spring
+flowers came up amid the decaying foliage. At this period there came
+a demand for the remodelling of education through the great figure of
+modern times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for
+realities. In his Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of Gurson, are
+found all of the elements for the education of the future. About the
+great German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius,
+Basedow, Pestalozzi, Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak.
+I will only mention that the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder,
+Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of natural training. In regard to
+England it is well known that John Locke in his Thoughts on Education,
+was a worthy predecessor of Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in
+its intellectual, moral, and physical relations, was the most noteworthy
+book on education in the last century.
+
+It has been noted that Spencer in educational theory is indebted to
+Rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said what the great German
+authorities, whom he certainly did not know, said before him. But this
+does not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Absolutely new thoughts
+are very rare. Truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by
+being pronounced again from the depth of the ardent personal conviction
+of a new human being.
+
+That rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other subjects,
+are constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows among other things
+that reasonable, or practically untried education has certain principles
+which are as axiomatic as those of mathematics. Every reasonable
+thinking man must as certainly discover anew these pedagogical
+principles, as he must discover anew the relation between the angles of
+a triangle. Spencer's book it is true has not laid again the foundation
+of education. It can rather be called the crown of the edifice founded
+by Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the great German specialists in
+pedagogy. What is an absolutely novel factor in our times is the study
+of the psychology of the child, and the system of education that has
+developed from it.
+
+In England, through the scientist Darwin, this new study of the
+psychology of the child was inaugurated. In Germany, Preyer contributed
+to its extension. He has done so partly by a comprehensive study of
+children's language, partly by collecting recollections of childhood on
+the part of the adult. Finally he experimented directly on the child,
+investigating his physical and psychical fatigue and endurance,
+acuteness of sensation, power, speed, and exactness in carrying out
+physical and mental tasks. He has studied his capacity of attention in
+emotions and in ideas at different periods of life. He has studied the
+speech of children, association of ideas in children, etc. During the
+study of the psychology of the child, scholars began to substitute for
+this term the expression "genetic psychology." For it was found that the
+big-genetic principle was valid for the development both of the psychic
+and the physical life. This principle means that the history of
+the species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth
+substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. The psychology
+of the child is of the same significance for general psychology as
+embryology is for anatomy. On the other hand, the description of savage
+peoples, of peoples in a natural condition, such as we find in Spencer's
+Descriptive Sociology or Weitz's Anthropology is extremely instructive
+for a right conception of the psychology of the child.
+
+It is in this kind of psychological investigation that the greatest
+progress has been made in this century. In the great publication,
+Zeitschrift fur psychologie, etc., there began in 1894 a special
+department for the psychology of children and the psychology of
+education. In 1898, there were as many as one hundred and six essays
+devoted to this subject, and they are constantly increasing.
+
+In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many
+distinguished pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and
+others. In Germany this subject has its most important organ in the
+journal mentioned above. It numbers among its collaborators some of the
+most distinguished German physiologists and psychologists. As related to
+the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's Philosophischen Studien, and
+partly the Vierteljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie. In
+France, there was founded in 1894, the Annee Psychologique, edited
+by Binet and Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de Pedagogie et de
+Psychologie, edited by Binet. In England there are the journals, Mind
+and Brain.
+
+Special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological
+apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. In Germany
+the first to be founded was that of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig.
+France has a laboratory for experimental psychology at Paris, in the
+Sorbonne, whose director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America
+experimental psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894,
+there were in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental
+psychology and four journals. There should also be mentioned the
+societies for child psychology. Recently one has been founded in
+Germany, others before this time have been at work in England and
+America.
+
+A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's laboratory
+in Heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain
+can do in the way of work and impressions.
+
+An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the
+modern school system, will be able to get along without originally
+creative men, because the receptive activities of modern man will
+absorb the cooperative powers of the brain to the disadvantage of
+the productive powers. And even if this were not a universally valid
+statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some
+day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process
+called a school curriculum.
+
+A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological
+science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal
+who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in
+the field of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called
+technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like,
+are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental
+overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue.
+All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic
+whether one regards the quantity produced or its value as an exercise.
+Rest should be nothing more than rest,--freedom to do only what one
+wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, following
+Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats,
+and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be
+rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of
+energy. He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively,
+by strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening
+the character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary
+terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear
+calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.
+
+Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won
+international recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the most
+significant material up to the present time for determining the
+influence of studies on physical development and the results of
+intellectual overstrain.
+
+It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to
+get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home
+will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the
+child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical
+and psychical maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking
+human beings in schools and in homes, education.
+
+
+By Helen Key
+
+The Century of the Child
+
+Cr. 8vo. With Frontispiece. Net, $1.50
+
+CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents, The Unborn Race
+and Woman's Work, Education, Homelessness, Soul Murder in the Schools,
+The School of the Future, Religious Instruction, Child Labor and the
+Crimes of Children. This book has gone through more than twenty German
+Editions and has been published in several European countries. "A
+powerful book."--N. Y. Times.
+
+The Education of the Child
+
+Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of "The Century of the
+Child," With Introductory Note by EDWARD BOK.
+
+Cr. 8vo. Net 75 cents
+
+"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought
+into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way
+straight for every parent, and it should find a place in every home in
+America where there is a child."--EDWARD BOK, Editor of the Ladies' Home
+Journal.
+
+Love and Marriage Cr. 8vo
+
+Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this
+country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views. In Europe and
+particularly in her own native Sweden her name holds an honored place as
+a representative of progressive thought.
+
+New York G. P. Putnam's Sons London
+
+Clever, original, and fascinating The Lost Art of Reading Mount Tom
+Edition New Edition in Two Volumes
+
+I. The Child and the Book
+
+A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in Schools and Colleges
+
+II. The Lost Art of Reading or, The Man and The Book
+
+Two Volumes, Crown 8vo. Sold separately. Each net, $1,50
+
+By Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+
+
+"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm
+I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most
+brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were
+laid aside. The title does not hint at any more than a fraction of
+the contents. It is a highly original critique of philistinism and
+gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life
+in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form
+and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely
+a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if
+furnished with long antennae of suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr.
+Lee is, but I know this--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no
+longer whine that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical
+writers of New England.
+
+"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It
+is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes
+me believe that after all we have n't a great kindergarten about us
+in authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can
+conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the
+date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long
+been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in Boston Transcript.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Education of the Child, by Ellen Key
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+The Education of the Child
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+by Ellen Key
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+July, 1997  [Etext #988]
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+The Education of the Child by Ellen Key
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+Edward Bok, Editor of the "Ladies' Home Journal," writes:
+
+"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been
+brought into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it
+points the way straight for every parent and it should find a
+place in every home in America where there is a child."
+
+
+
+
+The Education of the Child
+
+Goethe showed long ago in his Werther a clear understanding of
+the significance of individualistic and psychological training,
+an appreciation which will mark the century of the child. In
+this work he shows how the future power of will lies hidden in
+the characteristics of the child, and how along with every
+fault of the child an uncorrupted germ capable of producing
+good is enclosed. "Always," he says, "I repeat the golden words
+of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as one of
+these,' and now, good friend, those who are our equals, whom we
+should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects; they
+should have no will of their own; do we have none? Where is our
+prerogative? Does it consist in the fact that we are older and
+more experienced? Good God of Heaven! Thou seest old and young
+children, nothing else. And in whom Thou hast more joy, Thy Son
+announced ages ago. But people believe in Him and do not hear
+Him--that, too, is an old trouble, and they model their
+children after themselves." The same criticism might be applied
+to our present educators, who constantly have on their tongues
+such words as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies,
+but do not heed the new commandments in which they say they
+believe. They continue to educate as if they believed still in
+the natural depravity of man, in original sin, which may be
+bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed. The new belief is
+really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above, i.e., that
+almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ of
+virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in education the
+old rule of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil,
+instead of the new method, the system of allowing nature
+quietly and slowly to help itself, taking care only that the
+surrounding conditions help the work of nature. This is
+education.
+
+Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by
+Carlyle when he said that the marks of a noble and original
+temperament are wild, strong emotions, that must be controlled
+by a discipline as hard as steel. People either strive to root
+out passions altogether, or they abstain from teaching the
+child to get them under control.
+
+To suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant
+it with another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime
+common to those who announce loudly that education should only
+develop the real individual nature of the child.
+
+They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the
+child is justified. Just as little are they convinced of the
+possibility that evil can be changed into good.
+
+Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be
+atoned for, or blotted out, but must always have their
+consequences. At the same time, there is the other certainty
+that through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the
+conditions of environment they may be transformed. Only when
+this stage is reached will education begin to be a science and
+art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous effects
+of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological
+sphere in accordance with the principle of the
+indestructibility of matter. We shall never believe that a
+characteristic of the soul can be destroyed. There are but two
+possibilities. Either it can be brought into subjection or it
+can be raised up to a higher plane.
+
+Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that
+only the people who can play with children are able to educate
+them. 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 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 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, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or
+bad-tempered examples of the genus man. The still living
+instincts of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of
+heredity. Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind
+than the effort to produce new types. But this last
+characteristic is the most valuable. The educator should do
+anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He
+should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to
+deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard results
+in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part
+of the great mass, led by the Superman through the strength of
+his will, a will which could not have mastered strong
+personalities. It has been justly remarked that individual
+peoples, like the English, have attained the greatest political
+and social freedom, because the personal feeling of
+independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal form.
+Accordingly legal freedom has been constantly growing.
+
+For the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of
+society, it is essential that education shall awake the feeling
+of independence; it should invigorate and favour the
+disposition to deviate from the type in those cases where the
+rights of others are not affected, or where deviation is not
+simply the result of the desire to draw attention to oneself.
+The child should be given the chance to declare conscientiously
+his independence of a customary usage, of an ordinary feeling,
+for this is the foundation of the education of an individual,
+as well as the basis of a collective conscience, which is the
+only kind of conscience men now have. What does having an
+individual conscience mean? It means submitting voluntarily to
+an external law, attested and found good by my own conscience.
+It means unconditionally heeding the unwritten law, which I lay
+upon myself, and following this inner law even when I must
+stand alone against the whole world.
+
+It is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular
+one, that it is original natures, particularly talented beings,
+who are badly treated at home and in school. No one considers
+the sources of conduct in a child who shows fear or makes a
+noise, or who is absorbed in himself, or who has an impetuous
+nature. Mothers and teachers show in this their pitiable
+incapacity for the most elementary part in the art of
+education, that is, to be able to see with their own eyes, not
+with pedagogical doctrines in their head.
+
+I naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their
+conventional morality, no appreciation of the significance of
+the child's putting into exercise his own powers. Just as
+little is this to be expected of those Christian believers who
+think that human nature must be brought to repentance and
+humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast, must be
+tamed with the rod,--a theory which the Bible is brought to
+support.
+
+I am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and
+consequently should cease using old methods of education. This
+class may reply that the new ideas in education cannot be
+carried out. But the obstacle is simply that their new thoughts
+have not made them into new men; the old man in them has
+neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own soul,
+and that of the child, according to the new thoughts.
+
+Those who have "tried Spencer and failed," because Spencer's
+method demands intelligence and patience, contend that the
+child must be taught to obey, that truth lies in the old rule,
+"As the twig is bent the tree is inclined."
+
+BENT is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal
+which extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience.
+But the new ideal is that man, to stand straight and upright,
+must not be bent at all only supported, and so prevented from
+being deformed by weakness.
+
+One often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude
+desire for mastery still alive and breaking out when the child
+is obstinate. "You won't!" say father and mother; "I will teach
+you whether you have a will. I will soon drive self-will out of
+you." But nothing can be driven out of the child; on the other
+hand, much can be scourged into it which should be kept far
+away.
+
+Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill
+necessary, as a pre-condition to a higher training. The child
+is then in such a high degree controlled by sensation, that a
+slight physical pain or pleasure is often the only language he
+fully understands. Consequently for some children discipline is
+an indispensable means of enforcing the practice of certain
+habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely
+unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child
+can remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
+
+The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this
+obedience must be absolute. If such obedience has become
+habitual from the tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation
+is enough to keep the child straight. The dissatisfaction of
+those who are bringing him up can only be made effective when
+it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny atmosphere of home. And
+if people refrain from laying the foundations of obedience
+while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,
+Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the
+child is older and his caprice disagreeable.
+
+With a very small child, one should not argue, but act
+consistently and immediately. The effort of training should be
+directed at an early period to arrange the experiences in a
+consistent whole of impressions according to Rousseau and
+Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits will become
+impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.
+
+Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected
+when it has become clear that the crying is not caused by
+illness or some other discomfort,--discomforts against which
+crying is the child's only weapon. Crying is now ordinarily
+corrected by blows. But this does not master the will of the
+child, and only produces in his soul the idea that older people
+strike small children, when small children cry. This is not an
+ethical idea. But when the crying child is immediately
+isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that
+whoever annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation
+is the absolute result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's
+mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone
+when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable. In both
+cases the child is silenced by interfering with his comfort;
+but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on his
+will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will,
+and accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a
+base emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that
+combines it with one of the most important experiences of life.
+The one punishment keeps the child on the level of the animal.
+The other impresses upon him the great principle of human
+social life, that when our pleasure causes displeasure to
+others, other people hinder us from following our pleasures; or
+withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will. It is
+necessary that small children should accustom themselves to
+good behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of
+naughtiness is repeated, the child is immediately taken away,
+he will soon learn that whoever is disagreeable to others must
+remain alone. Thus a right application is made of a right
+principle. Small children, too, must learn not to touch what
+belongs to other people. If every time anything is touched
+without permission, children lose their freedom of action one
+way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free
+action is not to injure others.
+
+It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty
+Japanese rooms are ideal places in which to bring up children.
+Our modern crowded rooms are, so far as children are concerned,
+to be condemned. During the year in which the real education of
+the child is proceeding by touching, tasting, biting, feeling,
+and so on, every moment he is hearing the cry, "Let it alone."
+For the temperament of the child as well as for the development
+of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery,
+adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on,
+provided with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the
+fullest freedom of movement. But if the child is there with his
+parents and is disobedient, a momentary reprimand is the best
+means to teach him to reverence the greater world in which the
+will of others prevails, the world in which the child certainly
+can make a place for himself but must also learn that every
+place occupied by him has its limits.
+
+If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the
+child should really dread, we must allow the thing itself to
+have an alarming influence. When a mother strikes a child
+because he touches the light, the result is that he does this
+again when the mother is away. But let him burn himself with
+the light, then he is certain to leave it alone. In riper years
+when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar, the
+loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment.
+Most boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their
+favourite possession. But only the loss of it will be a real
+education through experience of one of the inevitable rules of
+life, an experience which cannot be too strongly impressed.
+
+We hear parents who have begun with Spencer and then have taken
+to corporal punishment declare that when children are too small
+to repair the clothing which they have torn there must be some
+other kind of punishment. But at that age they should not be
+punished at all for such things. They should have such simple
+and strong clothes that they can play freely in them. Later on,
+when they can be really careful, the natural punishment would
+be to have the child remain at home if he is careless, has
+spotted his clothes, or torn them. He must be shown that he
+must help to put his clothes in good condition again, or that
+he will be compelled to buy what he has destroyed carelessly
+with money earned by himself. If the child is not careful, he
+must stay at home, when ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat
+alone if he is too late for meals. It may be said that there
+are simple means by which all the important habits of social
+life may become a second nature. But it is not possible in all
+cases to apply Spencer's method. The natural consequences
+occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes are
+too slow in their action. If it seems necessary to interfere
+directly, such action must be consistent, quick, and immutable.
+How is it that the child learns very soon that fire burns?
+Because fire does so always. But the mother who at one time
+strikes, at another threatens, at another bribes the child,
+first forbids and then immediately after permits some action;
+who does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience,
+but constantly gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one
+way and just as often in another, has not learned the effective
+educational methods of the fire.
+
+The old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to
+the character a fixed type rested on its consistent qualities.
+It was consistently strict, not as at present a lax hesitation
+between all kinds of pedagogical methods and psychological
+opinions, in which the child is thrown about here and there
+like a ball, in the hands of grown people; at one time pushed
+forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside, only to be brought
+back again, kissed till it, is disgusted, first ordered about,
+and then coaxed. A grown man would become insane if joking
+Titans treated him for a single day as a child is treated for a
+year. A child should not be ordered about, but should be just
+as courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may
+learn courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice,
+never compelled to endure caresses, never overwhelmed with
+kisses, which ordinarily torment him and are often the cause of
+sexual hyperaesthesia. The child's demonstrations of affection
+should be reciprocated when they are sincere, but one's own
+demonstrations should be reserved for special occasions. This
+is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are
+disregarded. Nor should the child be forced to express regret
+in begging pardon and the like. This is excellent training for
+hypocrisy. A small child once had been rude to his elder
+brother and was placed upon a chair to repent his fault. When
+the mother after a time asked if he was sorry, he answered,
+"Yes," with emphasis, but as the mother saw a mutinous sparkle
+in his eyes she felt impelled to ask, "Sorry for what?" and the
+youngster broke out, "Sorry that I did not call him a liar
+besides." The mother was wise enough on this occasion, and ever
+after, to give up insisting on repentance.
+
+Spontaneous penitence is full of significance, it is a deeply
+felt desire for pardon. But an artificial emotion is always and
+everywhere worthless. Are you not sorry? Does it make no
+difference to you that your mother is ill, your brother dead,
+your father away from home? Such expressions are often used as
+an appeal to the emotions of children. But children have a
+right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have them as
+undisturbed as grown people. The same holds good of their
+sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children
+are constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of
+grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly
+being brought out. But the sufferings of children through the
+crudeness of their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of
+child psychology. Just as there are few better methods of
+training than to ask children, when they have behaved unjustly
+to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to
+be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for
+the trainer of children than the habit of asking oneself, in
+question small and great,--Would I consent to be treated as I
+have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the
+child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents
+would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without
+which a child's life is a constant torment.
+
+As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions
+and marks of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts
+be provoked. Above all the child should not be allowed to have
+things which he immediately gives away. Gifts to a child should
+always imply a personal requital for work or sacrifice. In
+order to secure for children the pleasure of giving and the
+opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments, as
+well as of replacing property of their own or of others which
+they may have destroyed, they should at an early age be
+accustomed to perform seriously certain household duties for
+which they receive some small remuneration. But small
+occasional services, whether volunteered or asked for by
+others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve,
+without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child
+wants to give away something, people should not make a presence
+of receiving it. This produces the false conception in his mind
+that the pleasure of being generous can be had for nothing. At
+every step the child should be allowed to meet the real
+experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from
+his roses. This is what is least understood in present-day
+training. Thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing.
+People find themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which
+stand in no relation with the realities of life. I mean, above
+all, what are still called means of education, instead of means
+of torture,--blows.
+
+Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are
+milder means of punishment than the natural consequences of an
+act; that blows have the strongest effect on the memory, which
+effect becomes permanent through association of ideas.
+
+But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and
+shame? Gradually, step by step, this method of training and
+discipline has been superseded in all its forms. The movement
+to abolish torture, imprisonment, and corporal punishment
+failed for a long time owing to the conviction that they were
+indispensable as methods of discipline. But the child, people
+answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up as an animal.
+Those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of
+animals. Even animals can be trained without striking them, but
+they can only be trained by men who have become men themselves.
+
+Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have
+been the best means of educating mankind, so the child must
+pursue the same road as humanity. This is an utter absurdity.
+We should also, on this theory, teach our children, as a
+natural introduction to religion, to practice fetish worship.
+If the child is to reproduce all the lower development stages
+of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the
+level which he has reached physiologically and psychologically
+through the common inheritance of the race. If we have
+abandoned torture and painful punishments for adults, while
+they are retained for children, it is because we have not yet
+seen that their soul life so far as a greater and more subtle
+capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same progress
+as that of adult mankind. The numerous cases of child suicide
+in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal
+punishment; or have taken place after its administration. Both
+soul and body are equally affected by this practice. Where this
+is not the result, blows have even more dangerous consequences.
+They tend to dull still further the feeling of shame, to
+increase the brutality or cowardice of the person punished. I
+once heard a child pointed out in a school as being so unruly
+that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a
+flogging. Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at
+home had made him what he was. If statistics were prepared of
+ruined sons, those who had been flogged would certainly be more
+numerous than those who had been pampered.
+
+Society has gradually given up employing retributive
+punishments because people have seen that they neither awaken
+the feeling of guilt, nor act as a deterrent, but on the
+contrary retribution applied by equal to equal brutalises the
+ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates the victim
+to exercise the same violence towards others that has been
+endured by himself. But other rules are applied to the
+psychological processes of the child. When a child strikes his
+small sister the mother strikes him and believes that he will
+see and understand the difference between the blows he gets and
+those he gives, that he will see that the one is a just
+punishment and the other vicious conduct. But the child is a
+sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same,
+although the mother gives it a different name.
+
+Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by
+Comenius, who compared an educator using this method with a
+musician striking a badly tuned instrument with his fist,
+instead of using his ears and his hands to put it into tune.
+
+These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings,
+lacerating and confusing them. They have no educative power on
+all the innumerable fine processes in the life of the child's
+soul, on their obscurely related combinations.
+
+In order to give real training, the first thing after the
+second or third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow
+among the possibilities of education. It is best if parents, as
+soon as the child is born, agree never to strike him, for if
+they once begin with this convenient and easy method, they
+continue to use corporal discipline even contrary to their
+first intention, because they have failed while using such
+punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
+
+If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of
+education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the
+world's peace.
+
+But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised
+human beings in other respects, I should like to request them
+to think over the development of marriage from the time when
+man wooed with a club and when woman was regarded as the
+soulless property of man, only to be kept in order by blows, a
+view which continued to be held until modern times. Through a
+thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have
+been so transformed that these crude conceptions have
+disappeared, to the great advantage of society and the
+individual. But it may be hard to awaken a pedagogical savage
+to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a thousand new
+secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods of
+education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must
+go through the same transformation as marriage, before it
+attains to a noble and complete development.
+
+Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same
+low stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or
+as the corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the
+first real preparation begin of the material from which perhaps
+later an educator may be formed.
+
+Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is
+tangible; what affects it has an immediate and perceptible
+result. The heat of passion is cooled by the blows it
+administers; in a certain stage of development blows are the
+natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by
+which the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower
+capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may
+be impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as
+demoralising for the one who gives them as for the one who
+receives them.
+
+The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many
+cases has as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage.
+To punish for this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal
+methods is a piece of stupidity. It works against the
+possibility of elevating the child beyond the level of the
+beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind flogging never
+presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will naturally
+direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of
+education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and
+stupefies the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness,
+not his patience, his brutality, not his intelligence.
+
+A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his
+first punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As
+his nurse reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he
+broke out, "Yes, to-night I really have something to tell God,"
+and prayed with deep earnestness, "Dear God, tear mamma's arms
+out so that she cannot beat me any more."
+
+Nothing would more effectively further the development of
+education than for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate.
+They would then learn to educate with the head instead of with
+the hand. And as to public educators, the teachers, their
+position could be no better raised than by legally forbidding a
+blow to be administered in any school under penalty of final
+loss of position.
+
+That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive
+continue to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most
+educators have only a very elementary conception of their work.
+They should constantly keep before them the feelings and
+impressions of their own childhood in dealing with children.
+The most frequent as well as the most dangerous of the numerous
+mistakes made in handling children is that people do not
+remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they
+do not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from
+their own past point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in
+remembering the punishments and other things which caused him
+in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced the
+silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency,
+burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice,
+the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
+his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness.
+Lacking these beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the
+crime of destroying the childhood of the new generation,--the
+only time in life in which the guardian of education can really
+be a kindly providence. So strongly do I feel that the
+unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well as
+ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand
+of a human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot
+close my eyes after I have heard a child in the street
+threatened with corporal punishment.
+
+Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen.
+As early as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the
+honourable man respects a word more than a blow. The exercise
+of physical force delivers the weak and unprotected into the
+hands of the strong. A child never believes in his heart,
+though he may be brought to acknowledge verbally, that the
+blows were due to love, that they were administered because
+they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that
+such a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself
+in a better way.
+
+Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of
+personal effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal
+punishment rests. I do not now refer to the system of flogging
+employed by miserable people year in and year out at home, or,
+particularly in schools, that of beating children outrageously,
+or to the limits of brutality. I do not mean even the less
+brutal blows administered by undisciplined teachers and
+parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or
+fatigue or disgust,--blows which are simply the active
+expression of a tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the
+want of self-discipline and selfculture. Still less do I refer
+to the cruelties committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose
+brutal tendencies are stimulated by their disciplinary power
+and who use it to force their victims to silence, as certain
+criminal trials have shown.
+
+I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and
+teachers who, with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard
+as their duty to the child. These are accustomed to adduce the
+good effects of corporal discipline as a proof that it cannot
+be dispensed with. The child by being whipped is, they say, not
+only made good but freed from his evil character, and shows by
+his whole being that this quick and summary method of
+punishment has done more than talks, and patience, and the
+slowly working penalties of experience. Examples are adduced to
+prove that only this kind of punishment breaks down obstinacy,
+cures the habit of lying and the like. Those who adopt this
+system do not perceive that they have only succeeded, through
+this momentarily effective means, in repressing the external
+expression of an evil will. They have not succeeded in
+transforming the will itself. It requires constant vigilance,
+daily self-discipline, to create an ever higher capacity for
+the discovery of intelligent methods. The fault that is
+repressed is certain to appear on every occasion when the child
+dares to show it. The educator who finds in corporal punishment
+a short way to get rid of trouble, leads the child a long way
+round, if we have the only real development in view, namely
+that which gradually strengthens the child's capacity for
+self-control.
+
+I have never heard a child over three years old threatened with
+corporal punishment without noticing that this wonderfully
+moral method had an equally bad influence on parents and
+children. The same can be said of milder kinds of folly,
+coaxing children by external rewards. I have seen some children
+coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. But in
+neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of
+will increased. Only when one is able to make the bath itself
+attractive is that energy of will developed that gains a
+victory over the feeling of fear or discomfort and produces a
+real ethical impression, viz., that virtue is its own reward.
+Wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit or fault by
+corporal punishment, a real ethical result is not reached. The
+child has only learnt to fear an unpleasant consequence, which
+lacks real connection with the thing itself, a consequence it
+well knows could have been absent. Such fear is as far removed
+as heaven from the conviction that the good is better than the
+bad. The child soon becomes convinced that the disagreeable
+accompaniment is no necessary result of the action, that by
+greater cleverness the punishment might have been avoided. Thus
+the physical punishment increases deception not morality. In
+the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell
+and fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in
+children's souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of
+childhood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly and
+unconsciously, is the conviction of the superiority of the good
+established. The good comes to be seen as more productive of
+happiness to the individual himself and his environment. So the
+child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that
+punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to
+avoid the cause of punishment.
+
+Despite all the new talk of individuality the greatest mistake
+in training children is still that of treating the "child" as
+an abstract conception, as an inorganic or personal material to
+be formed and transformed by the hands of those who are
+educating him. He is beaten, and it is thought that the whole
+effect of the blow stops at the moment when the child is
+prevented from being bad. He has, it is thought, a powerful
+reminder against future bad behaviour. People no not suspect
+that this violent interference in the physical and psychical
+life of the child may have lifelong effects. As far back as
+forty years ago, a writer showed that corporal punishment had
+the most powerful somatic stimulative effects. The flagellation
+of the Middle Ages is known to have had such results; and if I
+could publish what I have heard from adults as to the effect of
+corporal punishment on them, or what I have observed in
+children, this alone would be decisive in doing away with such
+punishment in its crudest form. It very deeply influences the
+personal modesty of the child. This should be preserved above
+everything as the main factor in the development of the feeling
+of purity. The father who punishes his daughter in this way
+deserves to see her some day a "fallen woman." He injures her
+instinctive feeling of the sanctity of her body, an instinct
+which even in the case of a small child can be passionately
+profound. Only when every infringement of sanctity (forcible
+caressing is as bad as a blow) evokes an energetic, instinctive
+repulsion, is the nature of the child proud and pure. Children
+who strike back when they are punished have the most promising
+characters of all.
+
+Numerous are the cases in which bodily punishment can occasion
+irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who
+administers it, though he may triumphantly declare how the
+punishment in the specific case has helped. Most adults feel
+free to tell how a whipping has injured them in one way or
+another, but when they take up the training of their own
+children they depend on the effect of such chastisement.
+
+What burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine
+fawning flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. It
+makes the lazy lazier, the obstinate more obstinate, the hard,
+harder. It strengthens those two emotions, the root of almost
+all evil in the world, hatred and fear. And as long as blows
+are made synonymous with education, both of these emotions will
+keep their mastery over men.
+
+One of the most frequent occasions for recourse to this
+punishment is obstinacy, but what is called obstinacy is only
+fear or incapacity. The child repeats a false answer, is
+threatened with blows, and again repeats it just because he is
+afraid not to say the right thing. He is struck and then
+answers rightly. This is a triumph of education; refractoriness
+is overcome. But what has happened? Increased fear has led to a
+strong effort of thought, to a momentary increase of
+self-control. The next day the child will very likely repeat
+the fault. Where there is real obstinacy on the part of
+children, I know of cases when corporal punishment has filled
+them with the lust to kill, either themselves or the person who
+strikes them. On the other hand I know of others, where a
+mother has brought an obstinate child to repentance and
+self-mastery by holding him quietly and calmly on her knees.
+
+How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows;
+how much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play
+of fancy, and stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this
+same fear. Even where blows do not cause lying, they always
+hinder absolute straightforwardness and the down-right personal
+courage to show oneself as one is. As long as the word "blow"
+is used at all in a home, no perfect honour will be found in
+children. So long as the home and the school use this method of
+education, brutality will be developed in the child himself at
+the cost of humanity. The child uses on animals, on his young
+brothers and sisters, on his comrades, the methods applied to
+himself. He puts in practice the same argument, that "badness"
+must be cured with blows. Only children accustomed to be
+treated mildly, learn to see that influence can be gained
+without using force. To see this is one of man's privileges,
+sacrificed by man through descending to the methods of the
+brute. Only by the child seeing his teacher always and
+everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he
+come himself to despise force on all those occasions which do
+not involve the defence of a weaker person against physical
+superiority. The foundation of the desire for war is to be
+sought for less in the war games than in the teachers' rod.
+
+To defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are
+brought in evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they
+deserved such discipline in order to be made good. There is no
+lower example of hypocrisy in human nature than this. It is
+true the child may be sincere in other cases in saying that he
+feels that through punishment he has atoned for a fault which
+was weighing upon his conscience. But this is really the
+foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still
+continues to be preached as Christian, namely; that a fault may
+be atoned for by sufferings which are not directly connected
+with the fault. The basis of the new morality is just the
+opposite as I have already shown. It teaches that no fault can
+be atoned for, that no one can escape the results of his
+actions in any way.
+
+Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks
+he must most frequently punish with blows. But there is no case
+in which this method is more dangerous.
+
+When the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the
+well-known story of George Washington and the hatchet must
+appear in it, accompanied by the remark which a clever
+ten-year-old child added to the anecdote: "It is no trouble
+telling the truth when one has such a kind father."
+
+I formerly divided untruthfulness into unwilling, shameless,
+and imaginative lies. A short time ago I ran across a much
+better division of lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully
+conscious untruthfulness which must be punished, and "hot"
+lies; the expression of an excited temperament or of a vigorous
+fancy. I agree with the author of this distinction that the
+last should not be punished but corrected, though not with a
+pedantic rule of thumb measure, based on how much it exceeds or
+falls short of truth. It is to be cured by ridicule, a
+dangerous method of education in general, but useful when one
+observes that this type of untruthfulness threatens to develop
+into real untrustworthiness. In dealing with these faults we
+are very strict towards children, so strict that no lawyer, no
+politician, no journalist, no poet, could exercise his
+profession if the same standard were applied to them as to
+children.
+
+The white lie is, as a French scientist has shown, partly
+caused by pure morbidness, partly through some defect in the
+conception. It is due to an empty space, a dead point in
+memory, or in consciousness, that produces a defective idea or
+gives one no idea at all of what has happened. In the affairs
+of everyday life the adults are often mistaken as to their
+intentions or acts. They may have forgotten about their
+actions, and it requires a strong effort of memory to call them
+back into their minds; or they suggest to themselves that they
+have done, or not done, something. In all of these cases, if
+they were forced to give a distinct answer, they would lie. In
+every case of this kind, where a child is concerned, the lie is
+assumed to be a conscious one, and when on being submitted to a
+strict cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes confused, and
+blushes, it is looked upon as a proof that he knows he has been
+telling an untruth, although as a rule there has been no
+instance of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted
+confession from the child that he has lied. Yet in all these
+complicated psychological problems, corporal punishment is
+treated as a solution.
+
+The child who never hears lying at home, who does not see
+exaggerated weight placed on small, merely external things, who
+is not made cowardly by fear, who hears conscious lies always
+spoken of with contempt, will get out of the habit of
+untruthfulness simply by psychological means. First he will
+find that untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a repetition
+of it, scorn and lack of confidence. But these methods should
+not be applied to untruthfulness caused by distress or by
+richness of imagination; or to such cases as originate from the
+obscure mental ideas noted above, ideas whose connection with
+one another the child cannot make clear to himself. The cold
+untruth on the other hand, must be punished; first by going
+over it with the child, then letting him experience its effect
+in lack  of confidence, which will only be restored when the
+child shows decided improvement in this regard. It is of the
+greatest importance to show children full and unlimited
+confidence, even though one quietly maintains an attitude of
+alert watchfulness; for continuous and undeserved mistrust is
+just as demoralising as blind and easy confidence.
+
+No one who has been beaten for lying learns by it to love
+truth. The accuracy of this principle is illustrated by adults
+who despise corporal punishment in their childhood yet continue
+to tell untruths by word and deed. Fear may keep the child from
+technical untruth, but fear also produces untrustworthiness.
+Those who have been beaten in childhood for lying have often
+suffered a serious injury immeasurably greater than the direct
+lie. The truest men I ever knew lie voluntarily and
+involuntarily; while others who might never be caught in a lie
+are thoroughly false.
+
+This corruption of personality begins frequently at the
+tenderest age under the influence of early training. Children
+are given untrue motives, half-true information; are
+threatened, admonished. The child's will, thought, and feeling
+are oppressed; against this treatment dishonesty is the
+readiest method of defence. In this way educators who make
+truth their highest aim, make children untruthful. I watched a
+child who was severely punished for denying something he had
+unconsciously done, and noted how under the influence of this
+senseless punishment he developed extreme dissimulation.
+
+Truthfulness requires above everything unbroken determination;
+and many nervous little liars need nourishing food and life in
+the open air, not blows. A great artist, one of the few who
+live wholly according to the modern principles of life, said to
+me on one occasion: "My son does not know what a lie is, nor
+what a blow is. His step-brother, on the other hand, lied when
+he came into our house; but lying did not work in the
+atmosphere of calm and freedom. After a year the habit
+disappeared by itself, only because it always met with deep
+astonishment."
+
+This makes me, in passing, note one of the other many mistakes
+of education, viz., the infinite trouble taken in trying to do
+away with a fault which disappears by itself. People take
+infinite pains to teach small children to speak distinctly who,
+if left to themselves, would learn it by themselves, provided
+they were always spoken to distinctly. This same principle
+holds good of numerous other things, in children's attitude and
+behaviour, that can be left simply to a good example and to
+time. One's influence should be used in impressing upon the
+child habits for which a foundation must be laid at the very
+beginning of his life.
+
+There is another still more unfortunate mistake, the mistake of
+correcting and judging by an external effect produced by the
+act, by the scandal it occasions in the environment. Children
+are struck for using oaths and improper words the meaning of
+which they do not understand; or if they do understand, the
+result of strictness is only that they go on keeping silence in
+matters in which sincerity towards those who are bringing them
+up is of the highest importance. The very thing the child is
+allowed to do uncorrected at home, is not seldom corrected if
+it happens away from home. So the child gets a false idea that
+it is not the thing that deserves punishment, but its
+publicity. When a mother is ashamed of the bad behaviour of her
+son she is apt to strike him--instead of striking her own
+breast! When an adventurous feat fails he is beaten, but he is
+praised when successful. These practices produce
+demoralisation. Once in a wood I saw two parents laughing while
+the ice held on which their son was sliding; when it broke
+suddenly they threatened to whip him. It required strong
+self-control in order not to say to this pair that it was not
+the son who deserved punishment but themselves.
+
+On occasions like these, parents avenge their own fright on
+their children. I saw a child become a coward because an
+anxious mother struck him every time he fell down, while the
+natural result inflicted on the child would have been more than
+sufficient to increase his carefulness. When misfortune is
+caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a rule, enough to
+prevent a repetition of it. If it is not sufficient blows have
+no restraining effect; they only embitter. The boy finds that
+adults have forgotten their own period of childhood; he
+withdraws himself secretly from this abuse of power, provided
+strict treatment does not succeed in totally depressing the
+level of the child's will and obstructing his energies.
+
+This is certainly a danger, but the most serious effect of
+corporal punishment is that it has established an unethical
+morality as its result. Until the human being has learnt to see
+that effort, striving, development of power, are their own
+reward, life remains an unbeautiful affair. The debasing
+effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great cruelties
+produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or
+success sets the value to deeds and actions.
+
+A complete revolution in this crude theory of value must come
+about before the earth can become the scene of a happy but
+considerate development of power on the part of free and fine
+human beings. Every contest decided by examinations and prizes
+is ultimately an immoral method of training. It awakens only
+evil passions, envy and the impression of injustice on the one
+side, arrogance on the other. After I had during the course of
+twenty years fought these school examinations, I read with
+thorough agreement a short time ago, Ruskin's views on the
+subject. He believed that all competition was a false basis of
+stimulus, and every distribution of prizes a false means. He
+thought that the real sign of talent in a boy, auspicious for
+his future career, was his desire to work for work's sake. He
+declared that the real aim of instruction should be to show him
+his own proper and special gifts, to strengthen them in him,
+not to spur him on to an empty competition with those who were
+plainly his superiors in capacity.
+
+Moreover it ought not to be forgotten that success and failure
+involve of themselves their own punishment and their own
+reward, the one bitter, the other sweet enough to secure in a
+natural way increased strength, care, prudence, and endurance.
+It is completely unnecessary for the educator to use, besides
+these, some special punishments or special rewards, and so
+pervert the conceptions of the child that failure seems to him
+to be a wrong, success on the other hand as the right.
+
+No matter where one turns one's gaze, it is notorious that the
+externally encouraging or awe-inspiring means of education, are
+an obstacle to what are the chief human characteristics,
+courage in oneself and goodness to others.
+
+A people whose education is carried on by gentle means only (I
+mean the people of Japan), have shown that manliness is not in
+danger where children are not hardened by corporal punishment.
+These gentle means are just as effective in calling forth
+selfmastery and consideration. These virtues are so imprinted
+on children, at the tenderest age, that one learns first in
+Japan what attraction considerate kindliness bestows upon life.
+In a country where blows are never seen, the first rule of
+social intercourse is not to cause discomfort to others. It is
+told that when a foreigner in Japan took up a stone to throw it
+at a dog, the dog did not run. No one had ever thrown a stone
+at him. Tenderness towards animals is the complement in that
+country of tenderness in human relationship, a tenderness whose
+result is observed, among other effects, in a relatively small
+number of crimes against life and security.
+
+War, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing
+more than different expressions of the tiger nature still alive
+in man. When the rod is thrown away, and when, as some one has
+said, children are no longer boxed on their ears but are given
+magnifying glasses and photographic cameras to increase their
+capacity for life and for loving it, instead of learning to
+destroy it, real education in humanity will begin.
+
+For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal
+punishment can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so
+remote and so distant an example as Japan, I should like to
+mention a fact closer to us. Our Germanic forefathers did not
+have this method of education. It was introduced with
+Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into a religious
+duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were
+intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a
+part of spiritual guardianship. I once asked our great poet,
+Victor Rydberg, and he said that he had found no proof that
+corporal punishment was usual among the Germans in heathen
+times. I asked him whether he did not believe that the fact of
+its absence had encouraged the energetic individualism and
+manliness in the Northern peoples. He thought so, and agreed
+with me. Finally, I might note from our own time, that there
+are many families and schools, our girls' schools for example,
+and also boys' schools in some countries, where corporal
+punishment is never used. I know a family with twelve children
+whose activity and capacity are not damaged by bringing them
+under the rule of duty alone. Corporal punishment is never used
+in this home; a determined but mild mother has taught the
+children to obey voluntarily, and has known how to train their
+wills to self-control.
+
+By "voluntary obedience," I do not mean that the child is bound
+to ask endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them
+before he obeys. A good teacher never gives a command without
+there being some good reason, but whether the child is
+convinced or not, he must always obey, and if he asks "why" the
+answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as children,
+must obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided.
+The great necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood.
+This can be done without harsh means by training the child,
+even previous to his birth, by cultivating one's self-control,
+and after his birth by never giving in to a child's caprices.
+The rule is, in a few cases, to work in opposition to the
+action of the child, but in other cases work constructively; I
+mean provide the child with material to construct his own
+personality and then let him do this work of construction. This
+is, in brief, the art of education. The worst of all
+educational methods are threats. The only effective admonitions
+are short and infrequent ones. The greatest skill in the
+educator is to be silent for the moment and then so reprove the
+fault, indirectly, that the child is brought to correct himself
+or make himself the object of blame. This can be done by the
+instructor telling something that causes the child to compare
+his own conduct with the hateful or admirable types of
+behaviour about which he hears information. Or the educator may
+give an opinion which the child must take to himself although
+it is not applied directly to him.
+
+On many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part
+of the elder person is an excellent punishment, if the
+indignation is reserved for the right moment. I know children
+to whom nothing was more frightful than their father's scorn;
+this was dreaded. Children who are deluged with directions and
+religious devotions, who receive an ounce of morality in every
+cup of joy, are most certain to be those who will revolt
+against all this. Nearly every thinking person feels that the
+deepest educational influences in his life have been indirect;
+some good advice not given to him directly; a noble deed told
+without any direct reference. But when people come themselves
+to train others they forget all their own personal experience.
+
+The strongest constructive factor in the education of a human
+being is the settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its
+duty. Open-heartedness, industry, straightforwardness at home
+develop goodness, desire to work, and simplicity in the child.
+Examples of artistic work and books in the home, its customary
+life on ordinary days and holidays, its occupations and its
+pleasures, should give to the emotions and imagination of the
+child, periods of movement and repose, a sure contour and a
+rich colour. The pure, warm, clear atmosphere in which father,
+mother, and children live together in freedom and confidence;
+where none are kept isolated from the interests of the others;
+but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest;
+where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are
+willing to help one another when necessary,--in this atmosphere
+egoism, as well as altruism, can attain their richest
+development, and individuality find its just freedom. As the
+evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities
+of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual
+life of the generation becomes more manifold in its
+combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for
+observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind
+the visible, tangible, world of sense, the more will each new
+generation of children show a more refined and a more
+consistent mental life. It is impossible to attain this result
+under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and
+school training. We need new homes, new schools, new marriages,
+new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel,
+love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can
+not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they
+will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will
+pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these
+must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only
+surmise what new forms will be created in future generations.
+This transformation can be helped by the training of the
+present, by casting aside the withered foliage which now covers
+the budding possibilities of life.
+
+The house must once more become a home for the souls of
+children, not for their bodies alone. For such homes to be
+formed, that in their turn will mould children, the children
+must be given back to the home. Instead of the study
+preparation at home for the school taking up, as it now does,
+the best part of a child's life, the school must get the
+smaller part, the home the larger part. The home will have the
+responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary
+days as on holidays, that the children will really become a
+part of the home both in their work and in their pleasures. The
+children will be taken from the school, the street, the
+factory, and restored to the home. The mother will be given
+back from work outside, or from social life to the children.
+Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer
+will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.
+
+Such was the training of Old Scandanavia; the direct share of
+the child in the work of the adult, in real labours and
+dangers, gave to the life of our Scandanavian forefathers (with
+whom the boy began to be a man at twelve years of age), unity,
+character, and strength. Things specially made for children,
+the anxious watching over all their undertakings, support given
+to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially
+prepared for children,--these are the fundamental defects of
+our present day education. An eighteen-yearold girl said to me
+a short time ago, that she and other girls of the same age were
+so tired of the system of vigilance, protection, amusement, and
+pampering at school and at home, that they were determined to
+bring up their own children in hunger, corporal discipline, and
+drudgery.
+
+One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an
+artificial environment, the environment in which children and
+young people of the present grow up; an existence that evokes a
+passionate desire for the realities of life, for individual
+action at one's own risk and responsibility, instead of being,
+as is now the case, at home and in the school, the object of
+another's care.
+
+What is required, above all, for the children of the present
+day, is to be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they
+must do conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days
+and holidays without oversight, in every case where the child
+can help himself. Instead of the modern school child having a
+mother and servants about him to get him ready for school and
+to help him to remember things, he should have time every day
+before school to arrange his room and brush his clothes, and
+there should be no effort to make him remember what is
+connected with the school. The home and the school should
+combine together systematically to let the child suffer for the
+results of his own negligence.
+
+Just the reverse of this system rules to-day. Mothers learn
+their children's lessons, invent plays for them, read their
+story books to them, arrange their rooms after them, pick up
+what they have let fall, put in order the things they have left
+in confusion, and in this and in other ways, by protective
+pampering and attention, their desire for work, their
+endurance, the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities
+proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is
+only a preparation for school. In it, young people growing up,
+are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on
+their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of
+giving something in return. Then people are surprised at a
+youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward
+shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely
+unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in earlier
+generations were a beautiful custom among the young.
+
+To restore this custom, all the means usually adopted now to
+protect the child from physical and psychical dangers and
+inconveniences, will have to be removed. Throw the thermometer
+out of the window and begin with a sensible course of
+toughening; teach the child to know and to bear natural pain.
+Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is
+painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly
+unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he
+interferes with the work or rest of others; never let him
+either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of grown
+people; take care that the servants do not work against what
+the parents are trying to insist on in this and in other
+matters.
+
+We must begin in doing for the child in certain ways a thousand
+times more and in others a hundred thousand times less. A
+beginning must be made in the tenderest age to establish the
+child's feeling for nature. Let him live year in and year out
+in the same country home; this is one of the most significant
+and profound factors in training. It can be held to even where
+it is now neglected. The same thing holds good of making a
+choice library, commencing with the first years of life; so
+that the child will have, at different periods of his life,
+suitable books for each age; not as is now often the case, get
+quite spoilt by the constant change of summer excursions, by
+worthless children's books, and costly toys. They should never
+have any but the simplest books; the so-called classical ones.
+They should be amply provided with means of preparing their own
+playthings. The worst feature of our system are the playthings
+which imitate the luxury of grown people. By such objects the
+covetous impulse of the child for acquisition is increased, his
+own capacity for discovery and imagination limited, or rather,
+it would be limited if children with the sound instinct of
+preservation, did not happily smash the perfect playthings,
+which give them no creative opportunity, and themselves make
+new playthings from fir cones, acorns, thorns, and fragments of
+pottery, and all other sorts of rubbish which can be
+transformed into objects of great price by the power of the
+imagination.
+
+To play with children in the right way is also a great art. It
+should never be done if children do not themselves know what
+they are going to do; it should always be a special treat for
+them as well as their elders. But the adults must always on
+such occasions, leave behind every kind of educational idea and
+go completely into the child's world of thought and
+imagination. No attempt should be made to teach them at these
+times anything else but the old satisfactory games. The
+experiences derived from these games about the nature of the
+children, who are stimulated in one direction or another by the
+game, must be kept for later use.
+
+Games in this way increase confidence between children and
+adults. They learn to know their elders better. But to allow
+children to turn all the rooms into places to play in, and to
+demand constantly that their elders shall interest themselves
+in them, is one of the most dangerous species of pampering
+common to the present day. The children become accustomed to
+selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant
+educational effort brings with it the dulling of the child's
+personality. If children were free in their own world, the
+nursery, but out of it had to submit to the strict limits
+imposed by the habits, wills, work, and repose of parents,
+their requirements and their wishes, they would develop into a
+stronger and more considerate race than the youth of the
+present day. It is not so much talking about being considerate,
+but the necessity of considering others, of really helping
+oneself and others, that has an educational value. In earlier
+days, children were quiet as mice in the presence of elder
+persons. Instead of, as they do now, breaking into a guest's
+conversation, they learned to listen. If the conversation of
+adults is varied, this can be called one of the best
+educational methods for children. The ordinary life of
+children, under the old system, was lived in the nursery where
+they received their most important training from an old
+faithful servant and from one another. From their parents they
+received corporal punishment, sometimes a caress. In comparison
+with this system, the present way of parents and children
+living together would be absolute progress, if parents could
+but abstain from explaining, advising, improving, influencing
+every thought and every expression. But all spiritual, mental,
+and bodily protective rules make the child now indirectly
+selfish, because everything centres about him and therefore he
+is kept in a constant state of irritation. The six-yearold can
+disturb the conversation of the adult, but the twelve-year-old
+is sent to bed about eight o'clock, even when he, with wide
+open eyes, longs for a conversation that might be to him an
+inspiring stimulus for life.
+
+Certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order,
+nourishment and sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily
+movement, are concerned, can be made the foundations for the
+child's conceptions of morality. He cannot be made to learn
+soon enough that bodily health and beauty must be regarded as
+high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious to
+health and beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. In this
+sphere, children must be kept entirely independent of custom by
+allowing the exception to every rule to have its valid place.
+The present anxious solicitude that children should eat when
+the clock strikes, that they get certain food at fixed meals,
+that they be clothed according to the degree of temperature,
+that they go to bed when the clock strikes, that they be
+protected from every drop of unboiled water and every extra
+piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable slaves of
+habit. A reasonable toughening process against the
+inequalities, discomforts, and chances of life, constitutes one
+of the most important bases of joy of living and of strength of
+temper. In this case too, the behaviour of the person who gives
+the training, is the best means of teaching children to smile
+at small contretemps, things which would throw a cloud over the
+sun, if one got into the habit of treating them as if they were
+of great importance. If the child sees the parent doing readily
+an unpleasant duty, which he honestly recognises as unpleasant;
+if he sees a parent endure trouble or an unexpected difficulty
+easily, he will be in honour bound to do the like. Just as
+children without many words learn to practice good deeds when
+they see good deeds practiced about them; learn to enjoy the
+beauty of nature and art when they see that adults enjoy them,
+so by living more beautifully, more nobly, more moderately, we
+speak best to children. They are just as receptive to
+impressions of this kind as they are careless of those made by
+force.
+
+Since this is my alpha and omega in the art of education, I
+repeat now what I said at the beginning of this book and half
+way through it. Try to leave the child in peace; interfere
+directly as seldom as possible; keep away all crude and impure
+impressions; but give all your care and energy to see that
+personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity and in its
+nakedness, shall all be means of training the child.
+
+Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity
+for self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their
+development, neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults.
+But respect the joys of the child, his tastes, work, and time,
+just as you would those of an adult. Education will thus become
+an infinitely simple and infinitely harder art, than the
+education of the present day, with its artificialised
+existence, its double entry morality, one morality for the
+child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and
+lax for the adult and vice versa. By treating the child every
+moment as one does an adult human being we free education from
+that brutal arbitrariness, from those over-indulgent protective
+rules, which have transformed him. Whether parents act as if
+children existed for their benefit alone, or whether the
+parents give up their whole lives to their children, the result
+is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know equally little
+of the feelings and needs of their children. The one class are
+happy when the children are like themselves, and their highest
+ambition is to produce in their children a successful copy of
+their own thoughts, opinions, and ideals. Really it ought to
+pain them very much to see themselves so exactly copied. What
+life expected from them and required from them was just the
+opposite--a richer combination, a better creation, a new type,
+not a reproduction of that which is already exhausted. The
+other class strive to model their chilrden not according to
+themselves but according to their ideal of goodness. They show
+their love by their willingness to extinguish their own
+personalities for their children's sake. This they do by
+letting the children feel that everything which concerns them
+stands in the foreground. This should be so, but only
+indirectly.
+
+The concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the
+home, its habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of
+children, and their sound development, must stand in the
+foreground. But at present, in most cases, children of tender
+years, as well as those who are older, are sacrificed to the
+chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will without
+possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is
+spasmodic in its application.
+
+When one daughter after another leaves home in order to make
+herself independent they are often driven to do it by want of
+freedom, or by the lack of character in family life. In both
+directions the girl sees herself forced to become something
+different, to hold different opinions, to think different
+thoughts, to act contrary to the dictates of her own being. A
+mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter, said not
+long ago that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented
+daughters. Such an asylum would be as necessary as a protection
+against pampering parents as against those who are overbearing.
+Both alike, torture their children though in different ways, by
+not understanding the child's right to have his own point of
+view, his own ideal of happiness, his own proper tastes and
+occupation. They do not see that children exist as little for
+their parent's sake as parents do for their children's sake.
+Family life would have an intelligent character if each one
+lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to
+do the same. None should tyrannise over, nor should suffer
+tyranny from, the other. Parents who give their home this
+character can justly demand that children shall accommodate
+themselves to the habits of the household as long as they live
+in it. Children on their part can ask that their own life of
+thought and feeling shall be left in peace at home, or that
+they be treated with the same consideration that would be given
+to a stranger. When the parents do not meet these conditions
+they themselves are the greater sufferers. It is very easy to
+keep one's son from expressing his raw views, very easy to tear
+a daughter away from her book and to bring her to a tea-party
+by giving her unnecessary occupations; very easy by a scornful
+word to repress some powerful emotion. A thousand similar
+things occur every day in good families through the whole
+world. But whenever we hear of young people speaking of their
+intellectual homelessness and sadness, we begin to understand
+why father and mother remain behind in homes from which the
+daughters have hastened to depart; why children take their
+cares, joys, and thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the old
+and the young generation are as mutually dependent as the roots
+and flowers of plants, so often separate with mutual repulsion.
+
+This is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of
+simple bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be
+truer of the first class, the latter torment their children in
+a naive way, while the former are infinitely wise and
+methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is a mother of the upper
+class one of those artists of home life who through the
+blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character,
+makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into
+festivals. Such artists are often simple women who have passed
+no examinations, founded no clubs, and written no books. The
+highly cultivated mothers and the socially useful mothers on
+the other hand are not seldom those who call forth criticism
+from their sons. It seems almost an invariable rule that
+mothers should make mistakes when they wish to act for the
+welfare of their sons. "How infinitely valuable," say their
+children, "would I have found a mother who could have kept
+quiet, who would have been patient with me, who would have
+given me rest, keeping the outer world at a distance from me,
+with kindly soothing hands. Oh, would that I had had a mother
+on whose breast I could have laid my head, to be quiet and
+dream."
+
+A distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her
+well-thought-out plans for her children fail--those children in
+whom she saw the material for her passion for governing, the
+clay that she desired to mould.
+
+The writer just cited says very justly that maternal
+unselfishness alone can perform the task of protecting a young
+being with wisdom and kindliness, by allowing him to grow
+according to his own laws. The unselfish mother, she says, will
+joyfully give the best of her life energy, powers of soul and
+spirit to a growing being and then open all doors to him,
+leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths, and ask
+for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But
+to most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son
+in the book just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she
+tortures another; if she has not this capacity by nature, why
+in the world should I recognise her as my mother at all."
+
+Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's
+nervous system in a state of irritation. They make work hard
+and play joyless, whenever they take a part in it. At the
+present time, too, the school gets control of the child, the
+home loses all the means by which formerly it moulded the
+child's soul life and ennobled family life. The school, not
+father and mother, teaches children to play, the school gives
+them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look
+at pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors;
+schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the
+cities more and more to outside life, and a daily recreation
+that kills the true feeling for holiday. Young people, often,
+have no other impression of home than that it is a place where
+they meet society which bores them.
+
+Parents surrender their children to schools in those years in
+which they should influence their minds. When the school gives
+them back they do not know how to make a fresh start with the
+children, for they themselves have ceased to be young.
+
+But getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is
+very interesting to observe a face that is getting old. What
+time makes out of a face shows better than anything else what
+the man has made out of time. Most men in the early period of
+middle age are neither intellectually fat nor lean, they are
+hardened or dried up. Naturally young people look upon them
+with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that there is such a
+thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize for its
+whole work of inner development. But they look in vain for this
+second eternal youth in their elders, filled with worldly
+nothingnesses and things of temporary importance.
+
+With a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future
+plans and they go out in the world in order to choose their
+spiritual parents.
+
+This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man
+must sow a hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the
+souls of children.
+
+When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by
+its weight and size really gave the illusion of reality and
+bestowed much joy on its young mother, I began to think about
+the education of my future children. Then as now my educational
+ideal was that the children should be happy, that they should
+not fear. Fear is the misfortune of childhood, and the
+sufferings of the child come from the half-realised opposition
+between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way in
+which these possibilities are actually handled. It may be said
+that life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our
+possibilities of happiness. But the difference between the
+sufferings of the adult from existence, and the sufferings of
+the child caused by adults, is tremendous. The child is
+unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings imposed upon him
+by adults and the more impatient the child is against
+unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more
+certainly will he some day be driven to find means to transform
+for himself and for others the hard necessities of life.
+
+A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition
+into child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence
+for it, wrote as follows: "Where we behold children we suspect
+there are princes, but as to the kings, where are they?" Not
+only life's tragic elements diminish and dam up its vital
+energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence
+for the sources of life which meet them in a new being. Fathers
+and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted
+nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is
+only another expression for the conception of majesty; until
+they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child
+sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet,
+they will not understand that they have as little power or
+right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the
+power or might to lay down paths for the stars.
+
+The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown
+worlds in the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the
+worlds which like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue
+orb of heaven; the father should see in his child the king's
+son whom he must serve humbly with his own best powers, and
+then the child will come to his own; not to the right of asking
+others to become the plaything of his caprices but to the right
+of living his full strong personal child's life along with a
+father and a mother who themselves live a personal life, a life
+from whose sources and powers the child can take the elements
+he needs for his own individual growth. Parents should never
+expect their own highest ideals to become the ideals of their
+child. The free-thinking sons of pious parents and the
+Christian children of freethinkers have become almost
+proverbial.
+
+But parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their
+own ideals which is the same thing as making children
+idealists. This can often lead to a quite different system of
+thought from that pursued by the parent.
+
+As to ideals, the elders should here as elsewhere, offer with
+timidity their advice and their experience. Yes they should try
+to let the young people search for it as if they were seeking
+fruit hidden under the shadow of leaves. If their counsel is
+rejected, they must show neither surprise nor lack of
+self-control.
+
+The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for
+posterity since posterity had done nothing for him, set me to
+thinking in my early youth in the most serious way. I felt that
+posterity had done much for its forefathers. It had given them
+an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of their
+daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate of the
+human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the
+child's soul because these are the threads that one day will
+form the woof of world events. We must realise that every
+pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the
+child's soul will extend its influence through centuries and
+centuries in ever widening circles. Through our fathers,
+without our will and without choice, we are given a destiny
+which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. Through
+our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain
+measure, as free beings, determine the future destiny of the
+human race.
+
+By a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing
+the whole process in the light of the religion of development,
+the twentieth century will be the century of the child. This
+will come about in two ways. Adults will first come to an
+understanding of the child's character and then the simplicity
+of the child's character will be kept by adults. So the old
+social order will be able to renew itself.
+
+Psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. I will not go
+back to those artists in education called Socrates and Jesus,
+but I commence with the modern world. In the hours of its
+sunrise, in which we, who look back, think we see a futile
+Renaissance, then as now the spring flowers came up amid the
+decaying foliage. At this period there came a demand for the
+remodelling of education through the great figure of modern
+times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for
+realities. In his Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of
+Gurson, are found all of the elements for the education of the
+future. About the great German and Swiss specialists in
+pedagogy and psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi,
+Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak. I will only
+mention that the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder,
+Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of natural training. In
+regard to England it is well known that John Locke in his
+Thoughts on Education, was a worthy predecessor of Herbert
+Spencer, whose book on education in its intellectual, moral,
+and physical relations, was the most noteworthy book on
+education in the last century.
+
+It has been noted that Spencer in educational theory is
+indebted to Rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said
+what the great German authorities, whom he certainly did not
+know, said before him. But this does not diminish Spencer's
+merit in the least. Absolutely new thoughts are very rare.
+Truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by being
+pronounced again from the depth of the ardent personal
+conviction of a new human being.
+
+That rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other
+subjects, are constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows
+among other things that reasonable, or practically untried
+education has certain principles which are as axiomatic as
+those of mathematics. Every reasonable thinking man must as
+certainly discover anew these pedagogical principles, as he
+must discover anew the relation between the angles of a
+triangle. Spencer's book it is true has not laid again the
+foundation of education. It can rather be called the crown of
+the edifice founded by Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the
+great German specialists in pedagogy. What is an absolutely
+novel factor in our times is the study of the psychology of the
+child, and the system of education that has developed from it.
+
+In England, through the scientist Darwin, this new study of the
+psychology of the child was inaugurated. In Germany, Preyer
+contributed to its extension. He has done so partly by a
+comprehensive study of children's language, partly by
+collecting recollections of childhood on the part of the adult.
+Finally he experimented directly on the child, investigating
+his physical and psychical fatigue and endurance, acuteness of
+sensation, power, speed, and exactness in carrying out physical
+and mental tasks. He has studied his capacity of attention in
+emotions and in ideas at different periods of life. He has
+studied the speech of children, association of ideas in
+children, etc. During the study of the psychology of the child,
+scholars began to substitute for this term the expression
+"genetic psychology." For it was found that the big-genetic
+principle was valid for the development both of the psychic and
+the physical life. This principle means that the history of the
+species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth
+substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. The
+psychology of the child is of the same significance for general
+psychology as embryology is for anatomy. On the other hand, the
+description of savage peoples, of peoples in a natural
+condition, such as we find in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology
+or Weitz's Anthropology is extremely instructive for a right
+conception of the psychology of the child.
+
+It is in this kind of psychological investigation that the
+greatest progress has been made in this century. In the great
+publication, Zeitschrift fur psychologie, etc., there began in
+1894 a special department for the psychology of children and
+the psychology of education. In 1898, there were as many as one
+hundred and six essays devoted to this subject, and they are
+constantly increasing.
+
+In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many
+distinguished pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot,
+and others. In Germany this subject has its most important
+organ in the journal mentioned above. It numbers among its
+collaborators some of the most distinguished German
+physiologists and psychologists. As related to the same subject
+must be mentioned Wundt's Philosophischen Studien, and partly
+the Vierteljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie. In
+France, there was founded in 1894, the Annee Psychologique,
+edited by Binet and Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de
+Pedagogie et de Psychologie, edited by Binet. In England there
+are the journals, Mind and Brain.
+
+Special laboratories for experimental psychology with
+psychological apparatus and methods of research are found in
+many places. In Germany the first to be founded was that of
+Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig. France has a laboratory for
+experimental psychology at Paris, in the Sorbonne, whose
+director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America experimental
+psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894, there were
+in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental
+psychology and four journals. There should also be mentioned
+the societies for child psychology. Recently one has been
+founded in Germany, others before this time have been at work
+in England and America.
+
+A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's
+laboratory in Heidelberg are of the greatest value for
+determining what the brain can do in the way of work and
+impressions.
+
+An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to
+the modern school system, will be able to get along without
+originally creative men, because the receptive activities of
+modern man will absorb the cooperative powers of the brain to
+the disadvantage of the productive powers. And even if this
+were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a
+physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease
+filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process called a
+school curriculum.
+
+A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a
+psycho-physiological science is to be found in Sweden in the
+person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal who has discussed in his essays
+native and foreign discoveries in the field of psychology. One
+of his conclusions is that the so-called technical exercises,
+gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like, are not, as
+they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental
+overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain
+fatigue. All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue
+is uneconomic whether one regards the quantity produced or its
+value as an exercise. Rest should be nothing more than
+rest,--freedom to do only what one wants to, or to do nothing
+at all. As to fear, he proves, following Binet's investigation
+in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats, and ridicule
+lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be rejected
+because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy.
+He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by
+strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening
+the character. This result comes about partly when all
+unnecessary terrorising is avoided, partly when children are
+accustomed to bear calmly and quietly the inevitable
+unpleasantnesses of danger.
+
+Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won
+international recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the
+most significant material up to the present time for
+determining the influence of studies on physical development
+and the results of intellectual overstrain.
+
+It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we
+begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the
+school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the
+character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which
+now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment,
+still called by conscientious and thinking human beings in
+schools and in homes, education.
+
+
+
+By Helen Key
+
+The Century of the Child
+
+Cr. 8vo. With Frontispiece. Net, $1.50
+
+CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents, The
+Unborn Race and Woman's Work, Education, Homelessness, Soul
+Murder in the Schools, The School of the Future, Religious
+Instruction, Child Labor and the Crimes of Children. This book
+has gone through more than twenty German Editions and has been
+published in several European countries.
+"A powerful book."--N. Y. Times.
+
+The Education of the Child
+
+Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of "The Century
+of the Child," With Introductory Note by EDWARD BOK.
+
+Cr. 8vo. Net 75 cents
+
+"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been
+brought into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it
+points the way straight for every parent, and it should find a
+place in every home in America where there is a child."--EDWARD
+BOK, Editor of the Ladies' Home Journal.
+
+Love and Marriage Cr. 8vo
+
+Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of
+this country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views.
+In Europe and particularly in her own native Sweden her name
+holds an honored place as a representative of progressive
+thought.
+
+New York G. P. Putnam's Sons London
+
+Clever, original, and fascinating The Lost Art of Reading Mount
+Tom Edition New Edition in Two Volumes
+
+I. The Child and the Book
+
+A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in Schools and Colleges
+
+II. The Lost Art of Reading or, The Man and The Book
+
+Two Volumes, Crown 8vo. Sold separately. Each net, $1,50
+
+By Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+
+
+"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the
+enthusiasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I
+believe is the most brilliant book of any season since
+Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. The title does
+not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. It is a
+highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism in
+education, library science, science in general, and life in
+general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in
+form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is
+not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly
+alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of
+suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but I know this
+--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine
+that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical
+writers of New England.
+
+"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud
+cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken
+just now. It makes me believe that after all we have n't a
+great kindergarten about us in authorship, but that there is
+virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the date of
+the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral
+and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been
+scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in Boston Transcript.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Education of the Child by Key
+
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