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and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and
experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs
help.

The world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that
he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual,
emotional and moral freedom. In the school with the rigidly organised
time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly
repeated reproach: "We are not talking of that just now," where the
apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home
life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor
picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily
answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is
sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are
doing, there is no intellectual freedom.

Where passion and excitement are instantly arrested, where appreciation
for strong colours, fierce punishments, loud noises, is killed, where
fear is ridiculed, where primitive likes and dislikes are interpreted as
coarseness, there is no emotional freedom. A child must have these
experiences if he is to come to his own later: this is not the time to
stamp out but only to deflect and guide; otherwise he becomes a weak and
pale reflection of his elders, with little resource or enthusiasm.

Where it is almost impossible to be openly naughty, where there is no
opportunity for choice or for making mistakes, where control is all from
the teacher and self-control has no place, there is no moral freedom.
The school is not for the righteous but for the so-called sinner, who is
only a child learning self-control by experience.

Self-control is a habit gained through habits; a child must acquire the
habit of arresting desire, of holding the physical side in check, the
habit of reflection, of choice, and most of all the habit of either
acting or holding back, as a result of all this. If in the earliest
years his will is in the hands of others, and he has the habit of
obedience to the exclusion of all other habits, then his development as
a self-reliant individual is arrested, and may be permanently weakened.
There is no other way to learn life, and build up an ideal from the raw
material he has gained in other ways. In the rehearsal of life at school
he can do this without serious harm; but every time a mode of conduct is
imposed upon him when he might have chosen, e