With age the mind becomes specialized and degraded in quality. Unless checked by a good education and by a persistent course of mental activity, intellectual and other mental interests, the adult mind is apt to deteriorate. Unless controlled by a good education and by intense mental interests, free from service to animal needs, the emotions of self-regard, the impulse of self-preservation with its fear instinct gradually gain in man the upper hand. In the child, on the contrary, the personal interests are relatively weak, and fluctuating, hence the possibility of pure disinterestedness, pure curiosity, love of learning, the root of all originality present both in genius and the child. The child presents the innocence and gentleness of human genius, the adult philistine is the embodiment of the force and cunning of the brute.

We should not be scared by the bug-bear of precocity. We should awaken man’s genius by giving the child an early, a “precocious” education. We should bear in mind that the knowledge of our schoolboys and schoolgirls far surpasses that of the ancient sages or of the mediæval doctors. We should learn to understand and to utilize the process of progressive foreshortening of race acquisitions in the history of the individual.

The great biologist, Professor C. S. Minot, comes to a similar conclusion, as the result of his profound biological investigations: “I believe,” says Minot, “that this principle of psychological development, paralleling the career of physical development, needs to be more considered in arranging our educational plans. For if it be true that the decline in the power of learning is most rapid at first, it is evident that we want to make as much use of the early years as possible—that the tendency, for instance, which has existed in many of our universities, to postpone the period of entrance into college, is biologically an erroneous tendency. It would be better to have the young man get to college earlier, graduate earlier, get into practical life or into professional schools earlier, while the power of learning is greater.”

I may say that within my experience children who had the advantage of an early education and training manifested a higher grade of intellectual and moral life, a far better state of physical health than children brought up under the present retarding and crippling system of education. In conclusion I may add that in order to gain access to man’s Reserve Energy we must have recourse to early child education, to the much maligned, and greatly feared “Precocity in Children.”

[1] Reproduced in part, with the kind permission of the publishers, from my contribution to the forthcoming Encyclopædia of Education, published by Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, London, England.
[2] “The cheapest form of pride,” says Schopenhauer, “is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation it follows that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with his fellow-men.... Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies, tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.... National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity, and baseness of mankind take in every country.”... “Narrowness, prejudice, vanity, and self-interest are the main elements of patriotism.”... “Does not all history show that whenever a king is firmly established on the throne, and the people reach some degree of prosperity, he uses it to lead an army, like a band of robbers, against adjoining countries? Are not almost all wars ultimately undertaken for purpose of plunder?”... Schopenhauer prophetically warns his countrymen: “All war is a matter of robbery, and the Germans should take that as a warning.”