one may ever delegate to
another is the business of growing. To watch another person eating
will not nourish one's own body. To watch another person using his
limbs will not strengthen one's own. The forces that make for the
child's growth come from within himself; and it is for him, and him
alone, to feed them, use them, evolve them.

All this is--

"As true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."

But it sometimes happens that what is most palpable is least
perceptible; and perhaps it is because the truth of what I say is
self-evident and indisputable, that in many Elementary Schools in
this country the education given seems to be based on the assumption
that my "truisms" are absolutely false. In such schools the one end
and aim of the teacher is to do everything for the child;--to feed
him with semi-digested food; to hold him by the hand, or rather by
both shoulders, when he tries to walk or run; to keep him under close
and constant supervision; to tell him in precise detail what he is to
think, to feel, to say, to wish, to do; to show him in precise detail
how he is to do whatever may have to be done; to lay thin veneers of
information on the surface of his mind; never to allow him a minute
for independent study; never to trust him with a handbook, a
note-book, or a sketch-book; in fine, to do all that lies in his
power to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself.
The result is that the various vital faculties which education might
be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the
over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him
to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he
is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless,
resourceless, without a single interest, without a single purpose in
life.

The contrast between elementary education as it too often is, and as
it ought to be if the truth of my "truisms" were widely accepted, is
so startling that in my desire to account for it I have had recourse
to a paradox. "Trop de verite," says Pascal, "nous etonne: les
premiers principes ont trop d'evidence pour nous." I have suggested
that the inability of so many teachers to live up to the spirit, or
even to the letter, of my primary "truism," may be due to its having
too much evidence for them, to their being blinded by the naked light
of its truth.

But there may be another explanation of the si