In this educational work, Tolstoy showed the qualities and limitations which in later years marked all his propagandist activity. There was the same characteristic selection of a task of great importance; the same readiness to sweep aside and condemn nearly all that civilised humanity had accomplished up to then; the same assurance that he could untie the Gordian knot; and the same power of devoted genius enabling him really to achieve much more than one would have supposed possible, though not a tithe of what he set himself to do. In later life Tolstoy laid no particular emphasis on what he wrote in these educational articles: in fact, we shall find him sometimes speaking very scornfully of them; but they throw so much light on his then state of mind, and often come so near to the views he strongly advocated twenty or thirty years later, that it will be worth devoting a good deal of attention to them. Tolstoy, then, defines Education as: _a human activity, aving for its basis a desire for equality, and the constant tendency to advance in knowledge_. This he illustrates by saying that the aim of a teacher of arithmetic should be to enable his pupil to grasp all the laws of mathematical reasoning he himself is master of; the aim of a teacher of French, or chemistry, or philosophy, should be similar; and as soon as that aim is attained, the activity will naturally cease. Everywhere and always, teaching which makes the pupil the master's equal, has been considered good. The more nearly and rapidly this is accomplished, the better; the less nearly and more slowly it is accomplished, the worse. Similarly in literature (an indirect method of teaching) those books are written best, in which the author succeeds in transmitting his whole message most easily to the reader. By 'the constant tendency to advance in knowledge,' Tolstoy meant that the equality aimed at in education can only be obtained on the higher, and not on the lower, level: that is to say, not by the teacher forgetting what he knows, but by the pupil acquiring the teacher's knowledge. Much tuition however is based not on the desire to equalise knowledge, but on quite false foundations. These are: (1) First and commonest, the child learns in order not to be punished; (2) the child learns in order to earn a reward; (3) the child learns in order to be better than others; (4) the child, or young man, learns in order to obtain an advantageous position in the world.... With reference to the practice of sending boys to school, not for their natural development, but that they may be moulded into a set form, Tolstoy declares that 'Education, as a deliberate moulding of people into certain forms, is _sterile, illegitimate, and impossible_.' Of examinations he strongly disapproves, as tending to arbitrariness on the side of the examiners, and deception on the side of the pupils.