Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for
self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their development,
neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults. But respect the joys
of the child, his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an
adult. Education will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely
harder art, than the education of the present day, with its
artificialised existence, its double entry morality, one morality for
the child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and lax for
the adult and vice versa. By treating the child every moment as one does
an adult human being we free education from that brutal arbitrariness,
from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have transformed him.
Whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit alone, or
whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the
result is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know equally little
of the feelings and needs of their children. The one class are happy
when the children are like themselves, and their highest ambition is
to produce in their children a successful copy of their own thoughts,
opinions, and ideals. Really it ought to pain them very much to see
themselves so exactly copied. What life expected from them and required
from them was just the opposite--a richer combination, a better
creation, a new type, not a reproduction of that which is already
exhausted. The other class strive to model their children not according
to themselves but according to their ideal of goodness. They show their
love by their willingness to extinguish their own personalities for
their children's sake. This they do by letting the children feel that
everything which concerns them stands in the foreground. This should be
so, but only indirectly.
The concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the home, its
habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their
sound development, must stand in the foreground. But at present, in most
cases, children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are
sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will
without possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is
spasmodic in its application.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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