There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school."
While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one
another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the
training for their future life is a bad one--a life in which the common
work and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's
ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school
for a special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in
the high sense of the word, and besides no school in which people learn
for life.
I have therefore always warmly held that the school should be no boys',
no girls' school, no elementary and no people's school, but should be a
real general or public school as in America, where both sexes, the
children of all grades of society, will learn that mutual confidence,
respect, understanding, by which their efficient co-operation in the
family and state may be made possible. The common school, so arranged,
is perhaps the most important means to solve definitely the problem of
morality, the woman question, the marriage question, the labour
question, in less one-sided and more human ways. From this point of view
the establishment of the common school is much more than a pedagogical
question; it is the vital question of our social order.
Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides
of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to
be done is to break the wall down. The school, as described above, is
the first breach in this wall.
A school like this would be like leaven. The many never reform the few;
it is the few who gradually introduce reforms for the many. Because the
few have strong enough dissatisfaction with present defects, courage
great enough to show their disgust, a belief in the new truths real
enough, they are ready to prepare the ground for the future.
Such a school must be guided by the same principle which has humanised
morality and law in other spheres. It must consider individual
peculiarities. Personal freedom will thus have as few hindrances as
possible to obstruct it. The rights of others must not be approached
too close. The limits, where the rights of others can be affected, must
be maintained, even enlarged.
This humanising process will be introduced into the schools, when
scholars are no longer regarded as classes, but each individual for
himself. The schools will then commence to fulfil one of the many
conditions necessary to give young people real nourishment and so
develop them and make them happy.
Such a school life will make its first aim to discover in early years
uncommon talent, to direct such talent to special studies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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