We pass from the family into the school. Here again we find laws already
laid for the will to follow. They grow out of the truth, constitutive
of the school, and this truth is made up of the relations subsisting
among the members of the school. There are teachers, whose duty it is to
control and to instruct. There are children, whose duty it is to learn
and obey. The school is an institution, the object of which is to lead
young minds into a knowledge of the earth, its continents, seas, rivers,
and mountains; into a knowledge of language, its structure, uses, and
the meaning of its terms; into a knowledge of humanity, its races,
governments, and religions. If children are to share in the benefits of
the object for which the school is established, they must observe the
laws which inhere in the very constitution of it.
They must obey the teacher, they must study the books, they must be
polite, forbearing and kind to one another. It often happens that a child
enters the school and refuses to follow the laws that reside in the
structure and purpose of the school. He is willful and conceited, and
thinks his own way better than the necessary and essential way ordained
for him. He has the same sort of experience the engineer has who attempts
to run his engine from the turntable, without reference to the railway
lines laid for it. There is friction and trouble. Various methods of
punishment are resorted to with the view to get his will to move along
the lines laid for it. If rebuke and punishment fail, then he is turned
out, to attempt the stupid and insane experiment of getting himself
through the world without reference to the laws fixed for his will to
obey. Of course he does not go far. He turns up sooner or later in the
jail, the hospital, the penitentiary, or the poorhouse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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