on may do to the child,
there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his
mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence
may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of
circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is
that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth
of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the
growth of a fourth.

Is it intended that education should do all this? This question is
not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the
function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the
eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so
far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it
as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil,
what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition?

What is it that grows? It is time that I should ask myself this
question. My answer to it is, in brief, that it is the whole human
being that grows, the whole nature of the child,--body, mind, heart
and soul. When I use these familiar words, I am far from wishing
to suggest that human nature is divisible into four provinces or
compartments. In every stage of its development human nature is a
living and indivisible whole. Each of the four words stands for a
typical aspect of Man's being, but one of the four may also be said
to stand for the totality of Man's being,--the word _soul_. For it
is the soul which manifests as _body_, which thinks as _mind_, which
feels and loves as _heart_, and which is what it is--though not
perhaps what it really or finally is--as _soul_.

The function of education, then, is to foster the growth of the
child's whole nature, or, in a word, of his soul. I ought, perhaps,
to apologise for my temerity in using this now discredited word. In
the West Man does not believe in the soul. How can he? He does not
believe in God either as the eternal source or as the eternal end of
his own nature. It follows that he does not and cannot believe in
the unity of his own being. He has been taught that his nature is
corrupt, evil, godless; and that the "soul," which is somehow or
other attached to his fallen nature during his "earthly pilgrimage,"
was supernaturally created at the moment of his birth. He is now
beginning to reject this conception of the soul; but he cannot yet
rise to the higher conception of it as the vital es