a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if
it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of
all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save
children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching
them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to
others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?

I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does
not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not
from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy.
Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the
dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish
soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean
collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this
imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn.
The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long
division; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk
pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have
heard the disgraceful suggestion that "educator," if applied to a Roman
schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but
only meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain
that I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as
sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the
baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature
a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing
these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or
it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the
whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the
child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel
pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and
watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out
of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the
matter.

*****

VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE

But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
authority in education;