f renewing themselves also; men, whose
intellectual independence will be their greatest force, who will
attach themselves to nothing, always ready to accept what is best,
happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives in
one life. Society fears such men; we therefore must not hope that it
will ever want an education able to give them to us.

"We shall follow the labors of the scientists who study the child
with the greatest attention, and we shall eagerly seek for means of
applying their experience to the education which we want to build up,
in the direction of an ever fuller liberation of the individual.
But how can we attain our end? Shall it not be by putting ourselves
directly to the work favoring the foundation of new schools, which
shall be ruled as much as possible by this spirit of liberty, which
we forefeel will dominate the entire work of education in the future?

"A trial has been made, which, for the present, has already given
excellent results. We can destroy all which in the present school
answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial
surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life,
the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose
ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate
natural bent. Without fear of deceiving ourselves, we can restore
the child to the environment which entices it, the environment of
nature in which he will be in contact with all that he loves, and in
which impressions of life will replace fastidious book-learning. If
we did no more than that, we should already have prepared in great
part the deliverance of the child.

"In such conditions we might already freely apply the data of science
and labor most fruitfully.

"I know very well we could not thus realize all our hopes, that we
should often be forced, for lack of knowledge, to employ undesirable
methods; but a certitude would sustain us in our efforts--namely,
that even without reaching our aim completely we should do more and
better in our still imperfect work than the present school
accomplishes. I like the free spontaneity of a child who knows
nothing, better than the world-knowledge and intellectual deformity
of a child who has been subjected to our present education."[5]

Had Ferrer actually organized the riots, had he fought on the
barricades, had he hurled a hundred bombs, he could not have been so
dangerous to the Catholic Church an