ree, natural, spontaneous, wells up from an evil
source. If educational progress is to be made, that source must be
carefully sealed. As an educator, the teacher must do his best
to reduce the child to the level of a wire-pulled puppet. As a
disciplinarian, he must overcome the child's instinctive repugnance
to being subjected to such unworthy treatment. The better the
"discipline" of the school, the easier it will be for the mechanical
education given in it to achieve its deadly work.

In making this sketch of what is still a common type of elementary
school, my object has been to provide myself with materials for
answering the question: Does elementary education, as at present
conducted in this country, tend to foster the growth of the child's
faculties? If my sketch is even approximately faithful to its
original, the answer to the question, so far at least as thousands of
schools are concerned, must be an emphatic No. For in the school, as
I have sketched it, the one end and aim of the teacher is to prevent
the child from doing anything whatever for himself; and where
independent effort is prohibited, the growth of faculty must needs be
arrested, the growth of every faculty, as of every limb and organ,
being dependent in large measure on its being duly and suitably
exercised by its owner. If this statement is true of faculty as such,
and of effort as such, still more is it true of the particular
faculties which school life is supposed to train, the faculties which
we speak of loosely as perceptive,--and of the particular effort by
which alone the growth of the perceptive faculties is effected, the
many-sided effort which we speak of loosely as self-expression. Far
perception and expression are, as I have endeavoured to prove, the
face and obverse of the same vital process; and the educational
policy which makes self-expression, or, in other words, sincere
expression, impossible, is therefore fatal to the outgrowth of the
whole range of the perceptive faculties.

The education given in thousands of our elementary schools is, then,
in the highest degree anti-educational. The end which education
ought to aim at achieving is the very end which the teacher labours
unceasingly to defeat. The teacher may, indeed, contend that his
business is not to evoke faculty but to impart knowledge. The answer
to this argument is that the type of education which impedes the
outgrowth of faculty is necessarily fatal to the acquisition