conform.

The forcing system has been by many given up, and precocity is
discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to
success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of
learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are substituting
principles for rules, as is exemplified in the abandonment of that
intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. But of all
the changes taking place, the most significant is the growing desire to
make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable rather than painful--a
desire based on the more or less distinct perception that at each age
the intellectual action which a child likes is a healthy one for it; and
conversely. We are on the highway towards the doctrine long ago
enunciated by Pestalozzi that alike in its order and its methods,
education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution.
Education should be a repetition of civilisation in little. Children
should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as
possible. The need for perpetual telling results from our stupidity, not
from the child's. We drag it away from the facts in which it is
interested, and which it is actively assimilating of itself. We put
before it facts far too complex for it to understand, and therefore
distasteful to it. By denying the knowledge it craves, and cramming it
with knowledge it cannot digest, we produce a morbid state of its
faculties; and a consequent disgust for knowledge in general. And having
by our method induced helplessness, we make the helplessness a reason
for our method.

Education of some kind should begin from the cradle. Whoever has watched
with any discernment the wide-eyed gaze of the infant at surrounding
objects, knows very well that education _does_ begin thus early, whether
we intend it or not; and that these fingerings and suckings of
everything it can lay hold of, these open-mouthed listenings to every
sound, are first steps in the series which ends in the discovery of
unseen planets, the invention of calculating engines, the production of
great paintings, or the composition of symphonies and operas. This
activity of the faculties from the very first, being spontaneous and
inevitable, the question is whether we shall supply in due variety the
materials on which they may exercise themselves; and to the question so
put, none but an affirmative answer can be given. Here we must take the
course