which is responsible for much of
the "naughtiness" of children. The spontaneous energies of the child,
when education has blocked all their lawful outlets, must needs force
new outlets for themselves,--lawless outlets, if no others are
available. The child's instinct to live will see to that. It
sometimes happens that, when the channel of a river has been blocked
by winter's ice, the river, on its awakening in Spring, will suddenly
change its course and carve out a new channel for itself, reckless of
the destruction that it may cause, so long as an outlet can by any
means be found for its baffled current. It is the same with the river
of the child's expanding life. The naughtiest and most mischievous
boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men. The
explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current
of soul-growth, which ran stronger in him than in his school-mates,
kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to
close. Even Hooliganism--to take the most serious of the periodic
outbursts of juvenile criminality--resolves itself, when thoughtfully
considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a
boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels)
of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational
repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last
despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself,
before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence.

* * * * *

When severity and constraint have done their work, when the spirit of
the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its
barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and
moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through
mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour. In other
words, the time has come for Man to do to the child, what the God
whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,--to tell him in the
fullest and minutest detail what he is to do to be "saved," and to
stand over him with a scourge in his hand and see that he does it. In
the two great schools which God is supposed to have opened for Man's
benefit, freedom and initiative have ever been regarded (and with
good reason) as the gravest of offences. Literal obedience has
been exacted by the Law; blind obedience by the Church; passive
obedience--the obedience o