many a boy, having long looked forward to it, rejoiced
in his last day at school?

I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I
am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin,
against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing
with a 'fallen nature,' with a human soul 'conceived in sin,'
unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression
and more repression _must_ be the only logical way with your
Original Sinners.

Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them
in the nursery, studied them for years--ten or twelve years
intimately--in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have
acquired any knowledge, that the child is a 'child of God' rather
than a 'Child of wrath'; and here before you I proclaim that to
connect in any child's mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels,
to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father
of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any
school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty
tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true
God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.

But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a
moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to
_educate,_ rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe
what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to
eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these
merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth
in his soul, how does he proceed? I think Mr Holmes, whom I have
already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires as any
grown-up person can perceive them. The child desires

(1) to talk and to listen;
(2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
(3) to draw, paint and model;
(4) to dance and sing;
(5) to know the why of things
(6) to construct things.

Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing
preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle
would have called _mimetic._ This morning I take only the least
imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.

Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting
a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability
to _read._ When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he
can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of
knowledge. Mor