guished by a badge: most
questions of punishment should be referred to them. This means a
constant appeal to the law that is behind both teacher and children and
which they learn to reach apart from the teacher's control.

"Where 'thou shalt' of the law becomes 'I will' of the doer, then we are
free."

III. CONSIDERATION OF THE ASPECTS OF EXPERIENCE

The aim of the following chapters is to show how principles may be
applied to what are usually known as subjects of the curriculum, and
what place these subjects take in the acquisition of experience. An
exhaustive or detailed treatment of method is not intended, but merely
the establishment of a point of view and method of application.

CHAPTER XXI

EXPERIENCES OF HUMAN CONDUCT

It is always difficult to see the beginnings of things: we know that
stories form the raw material of morality, it is not easy to trace
morality in _Little Black Sambo, The Three Bears, Alice in Wonderland,_
or _The Sleeping Beauty,_ but nevertheless morality is there if we
recognise morality in everyday things. It is not too much to say that
everybody should have an ideal, even a burglar: his ideal is to be a
good and thorough burglar, and probably if he is a burglar of the finer
sort, it is to play fair to the whole gang. It is better to be a burglar
with an ideal than a blameless person with very little soul or
personality, who just slides through life accepting things: it is better
to have a coster's ideal of a holiday than to be too indifferent or
stupid to care or to know what you want.

Now ideals are supposed to be the essence of morality and morality comes
to us through experience, and only experience tests its truth. The
story with a moral is generally neither literature nor morality, except
such unique examples as _The Pilgrim's Progress _or _Everyman_. The kind
of experience with which morality is concerned is experience of human
life in various circumstances, and the way people behave under those
circumstances. The beginning of such experience is our own behaviour and
the behaviour of other people we know, but this is too limited an
experience to produce a satisfactory ideal; so we crave for something
wider. It is curious how strong is the craving for this kind of
experience in all normal children, in whom one would suppose sense
experiences and especially muscular experiences to be enough. The need
to know about people other than ourselves, and yet not too unli