There is an opposite error to Dr. Arnold’s, far less pernicious, but still scientifically an error, and that is the belief that children are naturally virtuous, and are only corrupted by the spectacle of their elders’ vices. This view is traditionally associated with Rousseau; perhaps he held it in the abstract, but when one reads “Emile” one finds that the pupil stood in need of much moral training before he became the paragon that the system was designed to produce. The fact is that children are not naturally either “good” or “bad”. They are born with only reflexes and a few instincts; out of these, by the action of the environment, habits are produced, which may be either healthy or morbid. Which they are to be, depends chiefly upon the wisdom of mothers or nurses, the child’s nature being, at first, almost incredibly malleable. In the immense majority of children, there is the raw material of a good citizen, and also the raw material of a criminal. Scientific psychology shows that flogging on weekdays and sermons on Sundays do not constitute the ideal technique for the production of virtue. But it is not to be inferred that there is no technique for this purpose. It is difficult to resist Samuel Butler’s view that the educators of former times took a pleasure in torturing children; otherwise it is hard to see how they can have persisted so long in inflicting useless misery. It is not difficult to make a healthy child happy, and most children will be healthy if their minds and bodies are properly tended. Happiness in childhood is absolutely necessary to the production of the best type of human being. Habitual idleness, which Dr. Arnold regarded as a form of “moral evil”, will not exist if the child is made to feel that its education is teaching it something worth knowing.[2] But if the knowledge imparted is worthless, and those who impart it appear as cruel tyrants, the child will naturally behave like Chekov’s kitten. The spontaneous wish to learn, which every normal child possesses, as shown in its efforts to walk and talk, should be the driving force in education. The substitution of this driving force for the rod is one of the great advances of our time.