or beaten, and that these barbarous methods
might be "perhaps the best preparation such children can have for the
barbarous society in which they are presently to play a part." He hoped,
however, that the civilised members of society would by and by
spontaneously use milder measures; and this hope has been realised in
good degree, with the result that happiness in childhood is much
commoner and more constant than it used to be. Parents and teachers are
beginning to realise that self-control is a prime object in moral
education, and that this self-control cannot be practised under a regime
of constant supervision, unexplained commands, and painful punishments,
but must be gained in freedom. Some large-scale experience with American
secondary schools which prepare boys for admission to college has been
edifying in this respect. The American colleges, as a rule, do not
undertake to exercise much supervision over their students, but leave
them free to regulate their own lives in regard to both work and play.
Now it is the boys who come from the secondary schools where the
closest supervision is maintained that are in most danger of falling
into evil ways when they first go to college.

Spencer put very forcibly a valuable doctrine for which many earlier
writers on the theory of education had failed to get a hearing--the
doctrine, namely, that all instruction should be pleasurable and
interesting. Fifty years ago almost all teachers believed that it was
impossible to make school-work interesting, or life-work either; so that
the child must be forced to grind without pleasure, in preparation for
life's grind; and the forcing was to be done by experience of the
teacher's displeasure and the infliction of pain. Through the slow
effects of Spencer's teaching and of the experience of practical
teachers who have demonstrated that instruction can be made pleasurable,
and that the very hardest work is done by interested pupils because they
are interested, it has gradually come to pass that his heresy has become
the prevailing judgment among sensible and humane teachers. The
experience of many adults, hard at work in the modern industrial,
commercial, and financial world, has taught them that human beings can
make their intensest application only to problems in which they are
personally interested for one reason or another, and that freemen work
much harder than slaves, because they feel within themselves strong
motives for exertion