[14] Issue of Darkest England.
CHAPTER XVI
DISCIPLINE
What part does Discipline play in your system of education? We should hail the query as manifesting a cheering degree of interest if we were not quite sure that our interlocutor uses discipline as a euphuism for punishment. That conviction puts one’s mind into the attitude of protest. In the first place, we have no system of education. We hold that great things, such as nature, life, education are “cabined, cribbed, confined” in proportion as they are systematised. We have a method of education, it is true, but method is no more than a way to an end and is free, yielding, adaptive as Nature herself. Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one’s behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. Method in education follows Nature humbly, stands aside and gives her fair play.
System leads Nature: assists, supplements, rushes in to undertake those very tasks which Nature has made her own since the world was. Does Nature endow every young thing, child or kitten, with a wonderful capacity for inventive play? Nay, but, says System, I can help here; I will invent games for the child and help his plays, and make more use of this power of his than unaided Nature knows how. So Dame System teaches the child to play, and he enjoys it; but, alas, there is no play in him, no initiative, when he is left to himself; and so on all along the lines. System is fussy and zealous and produces enormous results—in the teacher! Method pursues a “wise passiveness.” You watch the teacher and are hardly aware that he is doing anything. The children take the initiative, but, somehow, the result here is in these and not in the teacher. They develop, become daily more and more of persons, with
“The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.”
Such as these are the golden fruits which ripen under the eyes of the parent who is wise to discriminate between the rôle of nature and that of the educator, who follows sympathetically and dutifully the lead of the great mother.
“Oh, then you have no discipline. I thought not. I daresay it would answer very well to leave children to themselves and make them happy. Children are always good when they are happy, are they not?” Not so fast, dear reader. He who would follow a great leader must needs endeavour himself, Ohne Hast ohne Rast, and the divine lead which we call Nature is infinitely blessed in the following, but steep to tread and hard to find and by no means to be confounded with leisurely strolling in ways of our own devising.
The parent who would educate his children, in any large sense of the word, must lay himself out for high thinking and lowly living; the highest thinking indeed possible to the human mind and the simplest, directest living.