enough to make Bibles
out of, and it does seem as if a good word might occasionally be said
for it in modern times, as if some one ought to be born before long, who
will give it a certain standing, a certain moral respectability once
more in human life and in the education of human life.

It would not seem to be an overstatement that the best possible book to
give a child to read at any time is the one that makes the most cross
references at that time to his undeveloped We.

II

The Art of Being Anonymous

The main difficulty in getting a child to live in the whole of his
nature, to run the scale from the bottom to the top, from "I" to God, is
to persuade his parents and teachers, and the people who crowd around
him to educate him, that he must begin at the bottom.

The Unpopularity of the First Person Singular in current education
naturally follows from The Disgrace of the Imagination in it. Our
typical school is not satisfied with cutting off a boy's imagination
about the outer world that lies around him. It amputates his imagination
at its tap root. It stops a boy's imagination about himself, and the
issues, connections, and possibilities of his own life.

Inasmuch as the education of a child--his relation to books--must be
conducted either with reference to evading personality, or accumulating
it, the issue is one that must be squarely drawn from the first.
Beginning at the bottom is found by society at large to be such an
inconvenient and painstaking process, that the children who are allowed
to lay a foundation for personality--to say "I" in its disagreeable
stages--seem to be confined, for the most part, to either one or the
other of two classes--the Incurable or the Callous. The more thorough a
child's nature is, the more real his processes are, the more incurable
he is bound to be--secretly if he is sensitive, and offensively if he is
callous. In either case the fact is the same. The child unconsciously
acts on the principle that self-assertion is self-preservation. One of
the first things that he discovers is that self-preservation is the last
thing polite parents desire in a child. If he is to be preserved, they
will preserve him themselves.

The conspiracy begins in the earliest days. The world rolls over him.
The home and the church and the school and the printed book roll over
him. The story is the same in all. Education--originally conceived as
drawing a boy out--becomes a huge, elaborate, over