What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in ParticularHolmes, Edmond
Philosophy
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular
Holmes, Edmond
Education
But not only does the Utopian child, with his eyes always fixed on
desirable ends, find a pleasure in doing things which other children
are wont to regard as drudgery, but he has the further advantage of
being able to master with comparative facility what other children
find difficult as well as distasteful. From first to last, the
training given in Utopia makes, as we have seen, for the development
of faculty. In my last chapter I set forth in detail some of the ways
and means by which Egeria tries to cultivate the expansive instincts
of her pupils. Behind all these ways and means stands the master
method--or shall I say the master principle?--of self-expression.
Recognising, as she does, that each of the expansive instincts is a
definite expression of the soul's spontaneous effort to grow, and a
clear indication of a particular direction in which Nature wishes the
soul to grow,--and recognising, as she also does, that the business
of growing must be done by the growing organism and cannot be
delegated to any one else,--Egeria entrusts the work of
self-realisation to the child himself, and makes no attempt to
relieve him of an obligation which no one but himself can discharge.
Now self-realisation is a twofold process. In the absence of a fitter
and more adequate word, I have applied the term _perceptive_ to those
faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds
us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own. And I have
contended that this group of faculties has, as its counterpart
and correlate, another group of faculties which I have called
_expressive_,--the faculties by means of which we go out of ourselves
into the world that surrounds us, and give ourselves to it and try to
identify ourselves with it,--and that the relation between these two
groups is so vital and so intimate that each in turn may be regarded
as the very life and soul of the other. In words which I have already
used, the perceptive faculties, at any rate in childhood, grow
through the interpretation which expression gives them, and in no
other way, and the expressive faculties grow by interpreting
perception, and in no other way. That these two groups of faculties
are, as it were, the reciprocating engines by means of which the
vital movement which we call self-realisation is effected, is the
conviction on which Egeria's whole scheme of education may be said to
be pivoted. In Utopia self-expression is the medium through which the
expansive instincts are encouraged to unfold themselves. And this
life of self-expression has as its necessary counterpart the
continuous development of the perceptive faculties along the whole
range of the child's nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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