n of the bent of his nature and the consequent
under-estimate of his powers,--far from being fostered, will be
systematically thwarted and starved. This is the fate which might be
expected to befall the child if the doctrine of his innate sinfulness
were allowed to dominate his education; and this is the fate which
has befallen and is befalling him in all grades of society and in all
the countries of the West.

It is the doctrine of original sin, of the congenital depravity of
man's nature, which blocks the way to the reform of education,--blocks
the way to it by compelling education to become the destroying angel
instead of the foster-nurse of the child's expanding life. In
criticising the defects of our educational system, we have too long
mistaken symptoms for causes, and believed that we were removing the
latter when we were only palliating or at best excising the former.
To pinch off a withered bud, to lop off a withered limb, of the
diseased tree of education, to train in this or that direction a
branch which is as yet unaffected, is but lost labour so long as
the tree is being slowly poisoned at its roots by a fundamental
misconception of the character and capacity of the child. It is time
that we should reconsider our whole attitude towards human nature.
The widespread belief that sundry faculties, physical, mental, and
moral, admit of being cultivated and ought to be cultivated in the
schoolroom--a belief which is ever affirming itself against the
educational systems and practices that are ever giving it the
lie--may surely be construed into an admission that my primary truism
is at least a truth. If this is so, if the business of the teacher
is, as I contend, to help the child to grow, healthily, vigorously,
and symmetrically, on all the planes of his being, the inference is
irresistible that education will achieve nothing but failure until
its foundations have been entirely relaid. For faith in the inherent
soundness, in the natural goodness, of the seed or sapling, or
whatever else he may undertake to rear, is the first condition of
success on the part of the grower. And to ask education to bring to
sane and healthy maturity the plant which we call human nature, and
in the same breath to tell it that human nature is intrinsically
corrupt and evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One
might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and
poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of