ed by skilful teaching. It is admitted,
in other words, that there is much in human nature, apart from what
is purely or mainly physical, which is both capable and worthy of
cultivation, and which education ought therefore to try to cultivate.

So far, so good. These admissions, with the fundamental admission
which underlies them all, might form the basis of a sound philosophy
of education, if they were not liable to be stultified and even
nullified by the counter assumption that human nature is innately
evil and corrupt. For from the latter assumption has followed, both
logically and naturally, a theory of education which is not merely
unfavourable but fatal to growth. If human nature is innately evil,
if it has no inborn capacity for goodness or truth, what is there in
it that is worth training? So far as the "great matters" of life are
concerned, the child must be educated by being told in minute detail
what to do, and by being alternately bribed and bullied into doing
it. As he can neither think, nor believe, nor desire, nor do what
is right, he must be told what to think, what to believe, what to
desire, what to do; and as it is assumed that the tasks set him by
his teacher will not be intrinsically attractive, he must be induced
to perform them by the threat of external punishments and the promise
of external rewards. In other words, in the spheres of religion and
morals, so far as these can be walled off from the rest of human
life, he must be educated, not by being helped to grow, but by being
compelled to obey; and as the spheres of religion and morals cannot
possibly be walled off from the rest of human life, the idea of
educating the child through the medium of passive and mechanical
obedience will gradually extend its influence over all the other
departments and aspects of his home and school life, his innate
sinfulness finding its equivalent, in secular matters, in his innate
helplessness and stupidity, while in the place of the creeds, codes,
and catechisms by which his spiritual welfare is provided for, he
will be fed during the hours of secular instruction on rations of
information, formulated rules, and minute directions of various
kinds. Under this _regime_ of wire-pulling on the part of the teacher
and puppet-like dancing on the part of the child, the growth of
the child's faculties,--of the whole range of his faculties, for
they will all come under the blighting influence of the current
misconceptio