When education is most carefully attended to, the teacher issues
his orders and thinks himself master, but it is the child who
is really master. He uses the tasks you set him to obtain what he
wants from you, and he can always make you pay for an hour's industry
by a week's complaisance. You must always be making bargains with
him. These bargains, suggested in your fashion, but carried out
in his, always follow the direction of his own fancies, especially
when you are foolish enough to make the condition some advantage
he is almost sure to obtain, whether he fulfils his part of the
bargain or not. The child is usually much quicker to read the
master's thoughts than the master to read the child's feelings.
And that is as it should be, for all the sagacity which the child
would have devoted to self-preservation, had he been left to himself,
is now devoted to the rescue of his native freedom from the chains
of his tyrant; while the latter, who has no such pressing need to
understand the child, sometimes finds that it pays him better to
leave him in idleness or vanity.
Take the opposite course with your pupil; let him always think he
is master while you are really master. There is no subjection so
complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus
that the will itself is taken captive. Is not this poor child,
without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? Are
you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him?
Cannot you make of him what you please? His work and play, his
pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control?
No doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want
to do nothing but what you want him to do. He should never take a
step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell.
Then he can devote himself to the bodily exercises adapted to his
age without brutalising his mind; instead of developing his cunning
to evade an unwelcome control, you will then find him entirely
occupied in getting the best he can out of his environment with
a view to his present welfare, and you will be surprised by the
subtlety of the means he devises to get for himself such things as
he can obtain, and to really enjoy things without the aid of other
people's ideas. You leave him master of his own wishes, but you
do not multiply his caprices. When he only does what he wants, he
will soon only do what he ought, and although his body is constantly in
motion, so far as his sensible and present interests are concerned,
you will find him developing all the reason of which he is capable,
far better and in a manner much better fitted for him than in purely
theoretical studies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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