comes possessed of a driving
force of his own, and moves in this direction or that of his own
volition. In this new intellectual movement through life he will not
avoid tumbles. He will feel the restraints of his environment pressing
upon him on all sides, and he will often come violently in contact
with rigid rules and conventions to which he must learn to yield. From
time to time we read in the papers of some terrible accident in a
picture-palace, or in a theatre. Although there has been no fire,
there has been a cry of fire, and in the panic which ensues lives are
lost from the crowding and crushing. Yet all the time the doors have
stood wide open, and through them an orderly exit might have been
conducted had reason not given place to unreason. It is the task of
those responsible for the children's education to guide them without
wild struggling along the paths of well-regulated conduct towards the
desired goal, influenced not by the emotions of the moment, but only
by reason and a sense of right; not ignorant of the difficulties to be
met, but practised and equipped to overcome them.

It is easy thus to state in general terms the objects of education,
and the need for discipline. To apply these principles to the
individual is a task, the immeasurable difficulty of which we are only
beginning to appreciate with the failure of thirty years of compulsory
education before us. A recent writer[2] gives it as his opinion that
the aim of education is to equip a child with ideals, and that this
task should not be difficult, because the lower savages successfully
subject all the members of their tribe to the most ruthless
discipline. Their lives, he says, "are lived in fear, in restraint, in
submission, in suffering, subject to galling, unreasoning,
unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary
duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary. They
endure painful mutilations, they submit to painful sacrifices.... How
are these wild, unstable, wayward, impulsive, passionate natures
brought to submit to such a rigorous and cruel discipline? By
education; by the inculcation from infancy of these ideals. In these
ideals they have been brought up, and to them they cling with the
utmost tenacity." One might as well contend that it was easy to teach
all men to live the self-denying life of earnest Christians because
some savage tribe was successful in maintaining among its members a
universal and