1909 Key - Education of Child

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By Ellen Key
The Century of the Child
The Education of the Child
Love and Marriage

The Education of the
Child
By
Ellen Key
Reprinted from the authorized English translation of

" The Century of the Child." With Introductory
Note by
Edward Bok
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
XTbe fcniclierbocfter press
.(KO'^
\^
Copyright, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, February, 1909
Reprinted, December, 1909 ; July, 1910
December, 1910 April, 1912
;
August, 1912
Vbe ftnfclierboclier |>reee. Itew Sorft

ED/ PSYCH
LIBRARY
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INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Edward Bok^ Editor of the *^
Ladies^ Home
Journal^'' writes:
" Nothing on the wise education of the

finer
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."
2223199
Goethe showed long ago in his Weriher a

clear understanding of the significance of in-
dividualistic and psychological training, an
appreciation which will mark the century of
the child. In this work he shows how the fu-
ture power of hidden in the character-
will lies
istics 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 wiU of their own; do we have none?
Where is our prerogative? Does it consist in
the fact that we are older and more experi-
enced? 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.
2 The Century of the Child
and they model their children after themselves."

The same criticism might be apphed to our
present educators, who constantly have on
their tongues such words as evolution, indi-
viduality, 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 edu-
cation 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 tempera-
ment 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.
The Education of the Child 3
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 arenot convinced that egoism on
still
the part of the child is justified. Just as Httle

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 reached will education begin to be a
is
science and art. We

will then give up all be-
lief in the miraculous effects of sudden inter-
ference; 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 in-
?
sight 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 im-
mediately 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 in-
fluenced by the impression of what the child
himself not to treat the child with decep-
is;
tion, 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 par-
ents 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 educa-
tion lies hidden in the maxim, " do not
educate "
Not leaving the child in peace is the great-

est 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 an-
other'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 answered with a black or a white
is
lie. The child must protect himself from an

educator who would master his thoughts and
inclinations, or rudely handle them, who with-
out consideration betrays or makes ridiculous
his most sacred feelings, who exposes faults
or praises characteristics before strangers, or
even uses an open-hearted, confidential con-
fession as an occasion for reproof at another
time.
The statement that no human being learns
to understand another, or at least to be pa-
tient with another, is true above all of the in-

timate 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, in-
terference, 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 char-
acterised 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 ex-
amples 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 lit-
tle boys there.
The child felt in its innermost consciousness
that he had a right to be naughty, a funda-
mental 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 com-
plimentary 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
hfe imposes.
It seems simple enough when we say that
we must overcome evil with good, but practi-
cally no process is more involved, or more
tedious, than to find actual means to accom-
plish 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, sly-
ness 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 per-
verse, 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 devo-
tion 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 ig-
noring 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 it-
self. 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 an
interest of
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 nar-
row 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 mak-
ing experiments with adults, seeing through
them, with marvellous shrewdness making his
own valuations and reacting sensitively to each
impression. The slightest mistrust, the small-
est unkindness, the least act of injustice or
contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last
for life in the finely strung soul of the child.
lo The Century of the Child
While on the other side unexpected friendli-

ness, 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 edu-

cation which consisted solely in keeping one-
self 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 interfer-

ence, in acting as an unforeseen, an invisible
providence through which the child obtains ex-
perience, from which he may draw his own
conclusions. The present practice is to im-
press one's own discoveries, opinions, and prin-
ciples 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
1
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 peo-
ple, 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 inherit-
ance 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 dis-
appear during the process of adaptation, all
self-determined development of energy must
be aided in every way and only indirectly in-
fluenced by the teacher, who should un-
derstand 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 must be absolutely fixed if they
it
are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that

habits are principles which have become in-
stincts, and have passed over into flesh and
blood. To change habits, he continues, means
to attack life in its very essence, for Hf e 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 im-
pulses 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 pris-
oners 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 ma-
jority, and in a number of women, modesty
the unity between body and soul in relation to
love — an incontestable provision of nature.
is
So too a minority would find it physically im-

possible 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 un-
chained passions; the passions, under the pre-
vailing system of education, are really only
beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individ-
ual 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 be-
come 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 hu-
man 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 or-
dered experience, teach the child by degrees
his place in the great orderly system of exist-
ence; teachhim his responsibility towards his
environment. But in other respects, none of
the individual characteristics of the child ex-
pressive of his life will be suppressed, so long
as they do not injure the child himself, or
others. The right balance must be kept be-
tween Spencer's definition of life as an adapta-
tion 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 Hfe
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 aU 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 stUl
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, — on unknown paths,
travellers
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 feel-
ings, 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 stiQ living instincts of the
i6 The Century of the Child
ape, double, in the case of man, the effect

of heredity. Conservatism is for the present
stronger in mankind than the effort to pro-
duce new types. But this last characteristic
is the most valuable. The educator should do
anjrthing but advise the child to do what every-
body does. He should rather rejoice when he
sees in the child tendencies to deviation.
Using other people's opinion as a standard re-
sults 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
a will which could not have mastered
his will,
strong personalities. It has been justly re-
marked that individual peoples, like the Eng-
lish, 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 educa-
tion 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 feehng, 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 con-
science. means unconditionally heeding
It
the imwritten law, which I lay upon myself,
and following this inner law even when I must
stand alone against the whole world.
It a frequent phenomenon, we can al-
is
most 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 ab-
sorbed in himself, or who has an impetuous
nature. Mothers and teachers show in this
their pitiable incapacity for the most elemen-
tary part in the art of education, that is, to be
able to see with their own eyes, not with peda-
gogical doctrines in their head.
I naturally expect in the supporters of so-
ciety,with their conventional morality, no
appreciation of the significance of the child's
i8 The Century of the Child
putting into exercise his own powers. Just

as little is this to be expected of those Christ-
ian 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
them has
in
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 intelli-
gence 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 accord-
ing to the old ideal which extinguishes person-
ality, teaches humility and obedience. But
the new ideal is that man, to stand straight and
upright, must not be bent at all, only sup-
ported, and so prevented from being deformed

by weakness.
One often finds, in the modem
system of
training, the crude desire for mastery still
alive and breaking out when the child is ob-
stinate. "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. Conse-
quently for some children discipline is an in-
dispensable means of enforcing the practice
of certain habits. For other children, the
methods are entirely unnecessary even
stricter
and as soon as the child can
at this early age,
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 intona-
tion 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 ashadow 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 ca-
price disagreeable.
With a very small child, one should not
argue, but act consistently and immediately.
The be directed at an
effort of training should
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 child-
ren 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 cry-
ing child is immediately isolated, and it is
1
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 hn fh pflsp s the child is silenced by interfer-
ing with his comfort; but one type of discom-
fort 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 com-
bines it with one of the most important ex-
periences of life. The one punishment keeps
the child on the level of the animal. The other
impresses upon him the great principle of hu-
man 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 ac-
custom 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
appHcation 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 re-
marked, that empty Japanese rooms are ideal
places in which to bring up children. Our
modern crowded rooms are, so far as child-
ren 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 tem-
perament of the child as w^ll as for the develop-
ment of his powers, the best thing is a large,
light nursery, adorned with handsome litho-
graphs, 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 disobedi-
ent, 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 desir-

able that the child should really dread, we must
allow the thing have an alarming in-
itself to
fluence* When a mother strikes a child be-
cause 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 simi-
lar, 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 pun-
ishment declare that when children are too
small to repair the clothing which they have
torn there must be some other kind of punish-
ment. But at that age they should not be pun-
ished 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 him-
self. 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 be-
come 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 con-
sistent, 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 con-

sistently strict, not as at present a lax hesita-
tion 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. child A
should not be ordered about, but should be
just as courteously addressed as a grown per-
son in order that he may learn courtesy. A
child should never be pushed into notice, never
compelled to endure caresses, never over-
whelmed with kisses, which ordinarily tor-
ment 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 train-
ing 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 signifi-
cance; a deeply felt desire for pardon.
it is
But an artificial emotion is always and every-

where worthless. Are you not sorry? Does
it make no
difference to you that your mother
is your brother dead, your father away
ill,
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 peo-
ple, their easily stimulated aversions are con-
stantly 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 con-
sider 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 tender-
ness without which a child's life is a constant
torment.
As same principle holds
to presents, the
good as with emotions and marks of tender-
ness. 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 re-
placing property of their own or of others
which they may have destroyed, they should at
an early age be accustomed to perform seri-
ously certain household duties for which they
receive some small remuneration. But small

occasional whether volunteered or
services,
asked for by others, should never be rewarded.
Only readiness to serve, without payment, de-
velops the joy of generosity. When the child
wants to give away something, people should
not make a pretence 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 tor-
ture, — ^blows.
Manypeople of to-day defend blows, main-
taining that they are milder means of punish-
ment 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 The
forms.
movement to abohsh torture, imprisonment,
and corporal punishment failed for a long time
owing to the conviction that they were indis-
pensable 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 with-
out 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 practise fetish worship. If
the child is to reproduce all the lower de-
velopment stages of the race, he would be
practically depressed beneath the level which
he has reached physiologically and psycho-
logically 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 suffer-

ing 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 was generally agreed he would be bene-
it
fited 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 brutal-
ises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and
same vio-
stimulates the victim to exercise the
lence 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 admir-
ably 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 sen-
sitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them.
They have no educative power on all the in-
numerable fine processes in the life of the
child's soul, on their obscurely related com-
binations.
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 possi-
bilities of education. It is best if parents, as
soon as the child is born, agree never to strike
him, for they once begin with this con-

if
venient 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 in-
telligence.
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 re-
them to think
spects, I should like to request
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 modem
times. Through a thousand daily secret in-
fluences, 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 convic-
tion 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 civilisa-
tion as beating a woman, or a servant, or as
the corporal punishment of soldiers and crimi-
begin of the
nals, will the first real preparation
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 ad-
ministers; in a certain stage of development
blows are the natural expression of moral in-
dignation, 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 demoraHsing
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 concep-
tions 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 possibiHty of elevating the
child beyond the level of the beast or the sav-

age. The educator whose mind flogging
to
never presents itself, even as an occasional re-
source, will naturally direct his whole thought
to finding psychological methods of education.
Administering corporal punishment demor-
alises and stupefies the educator, for it in-
creases 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;
happilyit was his only one. As his nurse re-
minded him in the evening to say his prayers
he broke out, " Yes, to-night I really have
something to God," and prayed with deep
tell
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 educa-
tors, 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 in-
telligent and sensitive continue to defend
Tlie Education of the Child 35
flogging, is due to the fact that most educa-

tors 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 danger-
ous of the numerous mistakes made in hand-
ling children is that people do not remember
how they felt themselves at a similar age, that
they do not regard and comprehend the feel-
ings of the child from their own past point of
view. The adult laughs or smiles in remem-
bering the punishments and other things
which caused him in his childhood anxious
days or nights, which produced the silent tor-
ture 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 unsatis-
fied thirst for joy,freedom, and tenderness.
Lacking these beneficent memories, adults con-
stantly repeat the crime of destroying the
childhood of the new generation,
only —the
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 hon-
ourable 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 un-
disciplined 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 self-
culture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties
committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose
brutal tendencies are stimulated by their dis-
ciplinary 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 them-
selves, 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 con-

stant vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create
an ever higher capacity for the discovery of
intelligent methods. The fault that is re-
pressed 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 develop-
ment in view, namely that which gradually
strengthens the child's capacity for self-con-
trol.
I have never heard a child over three years

old threatened with corporal punishment with-
out 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 cour-
age, or self-control, or strength of will in-
creased. Only when one is able to make the
bath itself attractive is that energy of will de-
veloped that gains a victory over the feeling
of fear or discomfort and produces a real ethi-
cal impression, viz., that virtue is its own re-
ward. 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 conse-
quence, which lacks real connection with the
thing itself, a consequence knows could
it well
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 accompani-
ment is no necessary result of the action, that
by greater cleverness the punishment might
have been avoided. Thus the physical pun-
ishment increases deception not morality. In
the history of humanity the effect of the teach-
ing about hell and fear of hell illustrates the
sort of morality produced in children's souls
by corporal punishment, that inferno of child-
hood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly
and unconsciously, is the conviction of the su-
periority of the good established. The good
comes to be seen as more productive of happi-
ness to the individual himself and his environ-
ment. 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 ma-
terial tobe formed and transformed by the
hands of those who are educating him. He
is beaten, and it is thought that the whole ef-
fect of the blow stops at the moment when the
child is prevented from being bad. He has,
it is thought, a powerful reminder against fu-
ture 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 Middle Ages is known
flagellation of the
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 daugh-
ter in this way deserves to see her some day
a " fallen woman." He injures her instinc-
tive feeling of the sanctity of her body, an in-
stinct which even in the case of a small child

can be passionately profound. Only when
every infringement of sanctity (forcible ca-
ressing is as bad as a blow) êvokes an ener-
getic, 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 re-

course to this punishment is obstinacy, but
what is called obstinacy is only fear or in-
capacity. 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? In-
creased fear has led to a strong effort of
thought, to a momentary increase of self-con-
trol. 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. Onhand I know
the other
of others, where a mother has brought an ob-
stinate 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. puts in He
" "
practice the same argument, that badness
must be cured with blows. Only children ac-
customed to be treated mildly, learn to see
that influence can be gained without using
force. To see this is one of man's privileges,
sacrificedby man through descending to the
methods of the brute. Only by the child see-
ing his teacher always and everywhere ab-
staining from the use of actual force, will he
come himself to despise force on all those oc-
casions 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 de-
served such discipline in order to be made
good. There is no lower example of hy-

pocrisy in human nature than this. It is true
the child may be sincere in other cases in say-
ing 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 con-
nected 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 par-
ents is published, the well-known story of
George Washington and the hatchet must ap-
pear in it, accompanied by the remark which
a clever ten-year-old child added to the anec-
dote :" It is no trouble telling the truth when
one has such a kind father."
I formerly divided untruthfulness into un-
willing, shameless, and imaginative lies. A
short time ago I ran across a much better divi-

sion 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 un-
truthfulness threatens to develop into real un-
trustworthiness. 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 due to an empty space, a dead point in
is
memory, or in consciousness, that produces a

defective idea or gives one no idea at all of
what has happened. In the aifairs of every-
day life the adults are often mistaken as to
their intentions or acts. They may have for-
gotten about their actions, and it requires a
strong effort ofmemory 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 v^êre forced to
give a distinct answer, they would lie. In
every case of this kind, where a child is con-
cerned, the lie is assumed to be a conscious
one, and when on being submitted to a strict
cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes con-
fused, 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 prob-
lems, 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
liesalways 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 rich-
ness of imagination; or to such cases as origi-

nate 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 pun-
ished; 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 un-
deserved mistrust is just as demoraHsing 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 untrustworthi-
ness. Those who have been beaten in child-
hood for lying have often suffered a serious
injury immeasurably greater than the direct
lie. The truest men I ever knew lie voluntar-
ily and involuntarily; while others who might
never be caught in a lie are thoroughly false.
This corruption of personality begins fre-

quently 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 un-
truthful. I watched a child who was severely
punished for denying something he had un-
consciously done, and noted how under the
influence of this senseless punishment he de-
veloped extreme dissimulation.
Truthfulness requires above everything un-
broken determination; and many nervous little
liars need nourishing food and life in the open
air, not blows. Agreat artist, one of the few
who livewholly according to the modern prin-
me on one occasion: " My
ciples of life, said to
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 troubletaken 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
fife.
There is another still more unfortunate mis-

take, 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 im-
proper words the meaning of which they do not
understand; or if they do understand, the re-
sult of strictness is only that they go on keep-
ing 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. iSo the child gets a false idea that it
is not the thing that deserves punishment, but

its pubHcity. 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 prac-
tices produce demoralisation. Once in a
wood I saw two parents laughing while the
ice held on which their son was sliding; when
itbroke 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
deservêd punishment but themselves.
On occasions like these, parents avenge
their ownfright 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 in-
crease 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 suflicient blows have no restraining
effect ; they only embitter. The boj'' finds that

adults have forgotten their own period of
childhood; he withdraws himself secretly from
this abuse of power, provided strict treat-
ment 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 seri-
ous 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, development of
striving,
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 valuemust 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 examina-
tions, 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 work for work's sake.
his desire to
He declared that the real aim of instruction
should be to show him his oypti 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 re-
wards, 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 ob-
stacle to what are the chief human character-
istics, 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 self-mast-
ery and consideration. These virtues are so
imprinted on children, at the tenderest age,
that one learns first in Japan what attraction
considerate kindhness bestows upon life. In
a country where blows are never seen, the first
rule of social intercourse is not to cause dis-
comfort 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 to-
wards animals is the complement in that coun-
try 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 disci-
pline, are nothing more than different expres-
sions 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 fife and for loving it, instead of
54 The Centuty of the Child
learning to destroy it, real education in hu-

manity will begin.
For the benefit of those who are not con-
vinced that corporal punishment can be dis-
pensed 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 Ger-
manic 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 ener-
getic individualism and manliness in the North-
ern peoples. He thought so, and agreed with
me. Finally, I might note from our own
time, that there are many and schools,
families
our girls' schools for example, and also boys*
schools in some countries, where corporal pun-
ishment 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 volun-

tarily, 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 com-
mand 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 avofded. The great
necessity in life must be imprinted in child-
hood. 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 op-
position to the action of the child, but in other
cases work constructively; I mean provide the
child with material to construct his own per-
sonality 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 ad-

monitions 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 in-
formation. 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 in-
dignation 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 them-
selves 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 occupa-
tions and its pleasures, should give to the emo-
tions and imagination of the child, periods of
movement and repose, a sure contour and a
rich colour. The pure, warm, clear atmos-
phere 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 fullfreedom 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 at- —
mosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can
attain their richest development, and individu-
ality find its just freedom. As the evolution
of man's soul advances to undreamed-of pos-
sibilities of refinement, of capacity, of pro-
fundity; 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 con-
mental life. It is impossible to attain
sistent
this under the torture of the crude
result
methods in our present home and school train-
ing. 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 un-
derstand 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 trans-
formation 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 tak-

ing 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 child-
ren 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 Rous-
seau and Spencer will be realised; a training
for Hfe, by life at home.
Such was the training of Old Scandanavia;
the direct share of the child in the work of the
adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the
life of our Scandanavian forefathers (with
whom boy began to be a man at twelve
the
years of age), imity, character, and strength.
Things specially made for children, the anxi-
ous watching over all their undertakings, sup-
port given to all their steps, courses of work
and pleasure specially prepared for children,
—these ar« the fundamental defects of our
present day education. An eighteen-year-
old girl said to me a short time ago, that she
6o The Century of the Child
and other girls of the same age were so tired

of the system of vigilance, protection, amuse-
ment, 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 re-
action against an artificial environment; the
environment in which children and young peo-
ple 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 consci-
entiously, habits of work arranged for week
days and holidays without oversight, in every
case where the child can help himself. In-
stead 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 be-
fore school to arrange his room and brush his
clothes, and there should be no effort to make
him remember what is connected with the
The Education of the Child 6i
school. The home and the school should com-

bine 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 re-
ceptive instead of giving something in return.
Then people ftre surprised at a youthful gen-
eration, and unrestrained, pressing
selfish
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 usu-
ally adopted now to protect the child from
physical and psychical dangers and incon-
veniences, 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 pro-
foundly 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 be-
ginning 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 coun-
try 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 system are the playthings
our
which imitate the luxury of grown people.
By such objects the covetous impulse of the
child for acquisition is increased, his own ca-
pacity 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 them-
selves make new playthings from fir cones,
acorns, thorns, and fragments of pottery, and
all other sorts of rubbish which can be trans-
formed 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 ex-
periences 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 be-
tween children and adults. They learn to
know their elders better. But to allow child-
ren 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 ac-
customed to selfishness and mental depend-
ence. Besides this constant educational effort
brings with it the dulHng of the child's per-
sonality. If children were free in their own
world, the nursery, but out of had to sub-
it
mit to the strict limits imposed by the habits,

wills, work, and repose of parents, their re-
quirements and their wishes, they would de-
velop 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 per-

sons. 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 im-
portant training from an old faithful servant
and from one another. Prom 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 par-
ents could but abstain from explaining, ad-
vising, improving, influencing every thought
and every expression. But all spiritual, men-
tal, 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-year-
old can disturb the conversation of the adult,
but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed about
eight o'clock, even when wide open
he, with
eyes, longs for a conversation that might be
to him an inspiring stimulus for life.
Certainly some simple habits so far as con-
duct and order, nourishment and sleep, air and
water, clothing and bodily movement, are con-

cerned, 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 hate-
ful 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 tempera-
ture, 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, most
constitutes one of the
important bases of joy of living and of
strength of temper. In this case too, the be-
haviour 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, ifone got into the
habit of treating them as if they were of greai
importance. If the child sees the parent do-

ing readily an unpleasant duty, which he hon-
estly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a
parent endure trouble or an unexpected diffi-
culty 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 practised about them; learn to en-
joy 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, propor-
tionate to the special stage of their develop-
ment, 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 be-
come 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-indul-
gent protective rules, which have transformed
him. Whether parents act as if children existed
for their benefit alone, or whether the parents
give up whole lives to their children, the
their
result is ahke deplorable. As a rule both
classes know equally little uf the feelings and
needs of their children. The one class are
happy when the children are like themselves,
and is to produce in their
their highest ambition
children a copy of their own
successful
thoughts, opinions, and ideals. Really it
ought to pain them very much to see them-
selves 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 childen not
according to themselves but according to their
ideal of goodness. They show their love by
their willingness to extinguish their own per-
sonalities 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 con-
dition of the home. They learn self-will with-
out possessing real freedom; they hve under a
disciphne 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 occupa-
tion. 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 feel-
ing 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 par-
ents do not meet these conditions they them-
selves 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 pow-
erful emotion. A thousand similar things oc-
cur every day in good families through the
whole world. But whenever we hear of young
people speaking of their intellectual homeless-
ness 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 fife who through the blitheness,
the goodness, and joyousness of her character,
makes the rhythm of everj^day life a dance, and
holidays into festivals. Such artists are often
simple women who have passed no examina-
tions, founded no clubs, and written no books.
The highly cultivated mothers and the socially

useful mothers on the other hand are not sel-
dom 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 ac-
cording to his own laws. The unselfish
mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of
her fife 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 ownpaths, and ask for nothing, neither

thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But
to most mothers may be applied the bit-
ter exclamation of a son in the book just men-
tioned, " 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 ac-
custom 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 tEose 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 peo-
ple 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 nothing-
nesses 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, forif 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 weight and size really
its
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 pos-
sibilities 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 happi-
ness. But the difference between the suffer-
ings of the adult from existence, and the
sufferings of the child caused by adults, is
tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign
himsdf to the sufferings imposed upon him by
adults and the more impatient the child is
against unnecessary suffering, the better; for
so much more certainly will he some day
the
be driven to find means to transform for him-
self 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 Hfe'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 moth-
ers must bow their heads in the dust before the
exalted nature of the child. Until they see
that theword " child " is only another expres-
sion 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 pre-
scribe 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 whiteblossoms 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 and then the child
best powers,
will come own; not to the right of asking
to his
others to become the plaything of his caprices
but to the right of living his full strong per-
sonal 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 in-

dividual growth. Parents should never ex-
pect 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 ac-
cordance 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 else-
where, 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 imder 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 forefath-
ers. It had given them an infinite horizon for
the future beyond the bounds of their daily
effort. We must in the chUd 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 wiU 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 an-
cestry. I will not go back to those artists in
education called Socrates and Jesus, but I
commence Mdth 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 foHage. At this period there
came a demand for the remodelling of educa-
tion 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
Chirsortj 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 great-
est 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
moral, and physical relations,
its intellectual,
was the most noteworthy book on education

in the last century.
It has been noted that Spencer in educa-
tional 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
8o The Century of the Child
not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Ab-

solutely new thoughts are very rare. Truths
which were once new must be constantly re-
newed 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 con-
stantly expressed and re-expressed, shows
among other things that reasonable, or prac-
tically untried educationhas certain principles
which are as axiomatic as those of mathema-
tics. Every reasonable thinking man must as
certainly discover anew these pedagogical
principles, as he must discover anew the rela-
tion between the angles of a triangle. Spen-
cer'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 con-
The Education of the Child 8i
tributed to its extension. He has done so

partly by a comprehensive study of child-
ren's language, partly by collecting recollec-
tions of childhood on the part of the adult.
Finally he experimented directly on the child,
investigating his physical and psychical fa-
tigue 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 " gene-
tic psychology." For
it was found that the
was valid for the develop-

bio-genetic principle
ment both of the psychic and the physical Hfe.
This principle means that the history of the
species is repeated in the history of the indi-
vidual; a truth substantiated in other spheres;
in philology for example. The psychology of
the child is of the same significance for gen-
eral 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 So-
ciology or Weitz's Anthropology is extremely
6
tGilr
instructive for a right conception of the psy-

chology of the child.
It is in this kind of psychological investiga-
tion that the greatest progress has been made
in this In the great publication,
century.
Zeitschrift fur psychologies etc., there began
in 1894 a special department for the psycho-
logy of children and the psychology of educa-
tion. In 1898, there were as many as one
hundred and six essays devoted to this sub-
ject, and they are constantly increasing.
In the chief civilised countries this investi-
gation 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 phy-
siologists and psychologists. As related to
the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's
PhilosopJiischen Studien, and partly the Vier-
teljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philoso-
phie. In France, there was founded in 1894,
the Annee Psychologique, edited by Binet and
Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de Pedago-
gic et de Psychologies edited by Binet. In
England there are the journals, Mind and
Brain,
Special laboratories for experimental psy-

chology with psychological apparatus and
methods of research are f oimd 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 zeal-
ously 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 EngUsh specialist has maintained that
the future, thanks to the modern school sys-
tem, will be able to get along without ori-
ginally creative men, because the receptive
activities of modem man wiU absorb the co-
operative powers of the brain to the disadvant-
age of the productive powers. And even if
thiswere not a universally valid statement but

only expressed a physiological certainty, peo-
ple will some day perhaps cease filing down
man's brain by that sandpapering process
called a school curriculum.
A champion of the transformation of peda-
gogy 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, gym-
nastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like,
are not, as they are erroneousl}^ called, a relax-

ation 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, free-—
dom to do only what one wants to, or to do
nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, follow-
ing 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 progres-
sively, by strengthening the nervous system

and in that way strengthening the character.
This result comes about partly when all un-
necessary terrorisingis avoided, partly when
children are accustomed to bear calmly and

quietly the inevitable impleasantnesses of
danger.
Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school
children have won international recognition.
In Sweden they have supplied the most sig-
nificant material up to the present time for
determining the influence of studies on physi-
cal development and the results of intellectual
overstrain.
It is to be hoped that when through em-
pirical investigationwe 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 hu-
man beings in schools and in homes, education.

—
By Ellen IQey
The Century of the Child

Cr. 8vo. With Frontispiece, Net, $1.30. By mail, $i.6s
Contents: The Right of the Child to Choose His Par-

ents, 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."—iV. V. rimes.

Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of
'•
The Century of the Child." With Introductory Note by
Edward Bok.
Cr. 8vo. Net, 75 cents. By mail, 8s cents
*'
Nothing 6ner 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
youmal.
Love and Marriage

Cr. Si>o. Net, $i.S0. By mail, $z,6iS
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 io
Sctiools and Colleges
li. The Lost Art of Reading

The Man and The Book
or.
Two Volumes, Crown 8vo. Sold separately.

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" 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 tin-
glingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of sug-
gestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but 1 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,
New York— G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS— London

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The Century of the Child

The Education of the Child

Love and Marriage

Reprinted from the authorized English translation of

Vbe ftnfclierboclier |>reee. Itew Sorft

" Nothing on the wise education of the

Goethe showed long ago in his Weriher a

fault of the child an uncorrupted germ capable

and they model their children after themselves."

To suppress the real personality of the child,

the part of the child is justified. Just as Httle

science and art. We

4 The Century of the Child

sight when she says that only the people who

but this means no assumed childishness, no

tion, or by the exercise of force, but with the

Not leaving the child in peace is the great-

is a natural instinct of self-preservation which

lie. The child must protect himself from an

tient with another, is true above all of the in-

naughty to a playmate and had called her a

plish this end. It is much easier to say what

vigilance to the control of the environment in

and themselves are still a rare product. Most

While on the other side unexpected friendli-

Relatively most excellent was the old edu-

nine employed in leading, without interfer-

The Education of the Child 1

old remedy. We teach the new souls not to

The habits of the household, and the child's

are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that

nationalism, to oppress one another and call it

conditions favourable to it, may be revived,

So too a minority would find it physically im-

by attempting to make them respectable and

when they cannot show in their offspring all

young men, the sweet girls, the respectable

ape, double, in the case of man, the effect

to deviate from the type in those cases where

be given the chance to declare conscientiously

most call it a regular one, that it is original

putting into exercise his own powers. Just

gence and patience, contend that the child

ported, and so prevented from being deformed

dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him

as ashadow in the usual sunny atmosphere of

small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,

The Education of the Child 2

explained to him at the same time that whoever

Small children, too, must learn not to touch

If it is a case of a danger, which it is desir-

will be a real education through experience of

them. He must be shown that he must help

come a second nature. But it is not possible

The old-fashioned strict training that in its

crude way gave to the character a fixed type

rested on its consistent qualities. It was con-

the hands of grown people at one time pushed