ivilisation, of ways of thinking
and acting to which we are all habituated from our earliest days,
and that these tendencies and these ways of thinking and acting
overshadow us still. The formal abrogation of the old _regime_ counts
for little so long as the examination system, with its demand for
visible and measurable results and its implicit invitation to cram
and cheat, is allowed to cast its deadly shadow on education as
such,--and so long as the whole system on which the young of all
classes and grades are educated is favourable to self-deception on
the part of the teacher and fatal to sincerity on the part of the
child. Constrained by every influence that is brought to bear upon
him to judge according to the appearance of things, the teacher can
ill afford to judge righteous judgment,--can ill afford to regard
what is outward and visible as the symbol of what is inward and
spiritual, can ill afford to think of the work done by the child
except as a thing to be weighed in an examiner's balance or measured
by an examiner's rule.

Things being as they are in the various grades of education and in
the various strata of social life, it is inevitable that the
education given in many of our elementary schools should be based,
in the main, on complete distrust of the child. In such schools,
whatever else the child may be allowed to do, he must not be allowed
to do anything by or for himself. He must not express what he really
feels and sees; for if he does, the results will probably fall short
of the standard of neatness, cleanness, and correctness which
an examiner might expect the school to reach. At any rate, the
experiment is much too risky to be tried. In the lower classes
the results produced would certainly be rough, imperfect, untidy.
Therefore self-expression must not be permitted in that part of the
school. And if not there, it must not be permitted anywhere, for the
longer it is delayed the greater will be the difficulty of starting
it and the greater the attendant risk. The child must not express
what he really perceives; and as genuine perception forces for itself
the outlet of genuine expression, he must not be allowed to exercise
his perceptive faculties. Instead of seeing things for himself, he
must see what his teacher directs him to see, he must feel what his
teacher directs him to feel, he must think what his teacher directs
him to think, and so on. But to forbid a child to use his own
perceptive fac