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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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