Only the person who by knowledge has obtained a view of the great connected system of existence, the connection between nature and man's life, between the present and the past, between peoples and ideas, cannot lose his education. Only the person who, through the mental nourishment he has received, sees more clearly, feels more ardently, has absorbed completely the wealth of life, has been really educated. This education can be gained in the most irregular way, perhaps around the hearth or in the field, on the seashore or in the wood; it can be acquired from old tattered books or from nature itself. It can be terribly incomplete, very one-sided, but how real, personal, and rich it appears to those who for the period of fifteen years in school have ground out the wheat on strange fields, like oxen with muzzled mouths! Our age cries for personality; but it will ask in vain, until we let our children live and learn as personalities, until we allow them to have their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own knowledge, form their own judgments; or, to put the matter briefly, until we cease to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping later on in life to revive it again.
CHAPTER VI THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE
I should like to set down here briefly my dreams of a future school, in which the personality may receive a free and complete self-development. I purposely say "dreams," because I do not want any one to believe that I am pretending in the following outline to give a reformed programme for the present time.
My first dream is that the kindergarten and the primary school will be everywhere replaced by instruction at home.
Undoubtedly a great influence has proceeded from that whole movement which has resulted, among other things, in the Pestalozzi-Froebel kindergartens, and in institutions modelled after them. Better teachers have been produced by it; but what I regard as a great misfortune, is the increasing inclination to look upon the crèche, the kindergarten, and the school as the ideal scheme of education. Every discussion dealing with the possibilities of women working in public life exalts the advantage of freeing the mother from the care of children, emancipating children from the improper care of their mothers, and giving women possibilities of work outside of the home. Mrs. Perkins Stetson proposes as a compromise, that every mother, pedagogically qualified, shall take care of a group of children along with her own. But what her own children will receive under such conditions is sufficiently shown in the case of those poor children who grow up in educational institutions presided over by their parents; and also by the experience of the poor parents who are not able under these conditions to look after their own children.
The crèche and the kindergarten were and continue to be a blessing undoubtedly for those innumerable mothers who work outside of their homes and are badly prepared for their duties. Some type of kindergarten will perhaps be necessary under particular circumstances as a partial substitute for the home, as, for example, when a child has no companions to play with, or when the mother herself is disinclined or not able to educate the child. This incapacity is ordinarily the result of an extremely nervous temperament, caused by weak will or depression.
Mary Wollstonecraft's remarks, made more than a hundred years ago, still call for our approval. "If children are not physically murdered by their ignorant mothers, they are ruined psychically by the inability of the mother to bring them up. Mothers, in those first six years that determine the whole development of the child's character, turn them over to the hands of servants, whose authority is often undermined by the way in which they are treated. Then children are passed on to school to control the bad behaviour which the vigilance of the mother could have prevented, and which she controls with means that become the basis for all kinds of vices." But because such cases are still frequent and because there will always be mothers incapable of bringing their children up, it would be a premature assumption to believe that the majority of women cannot be trained to become parents, if the development of the woman has this end in view. One of the tasks of the future is the creation of a generation of trained mothers, who among other things will emancipate children from the kindergarten system. Children are handled in crowds from two and three years up, they are made to appear before the public in crowds, made to work on the one plan, made to do the same petty, idiotic, and useless tasks. In this way, we believe at the present time that we are forming men, while actually we are only training units. Any one who remembers how, as a child, he played on the beach or in the wood, in a big nursery or in an old-fashioned attic, or has seen other children playing in these surroundings, will know how such unrestrained play deepens the soul, increases the capacity for invention, and stimulates the imagination a hundredfold more than children's games and occupations devised by the arrangement, and promoted by the interference, of elder persons. Adults are accustomed to amuse children in crowds, a custom which comes from intellectual vulgarity, instead of leaving them alone to amuse themselves. Besides this system encourages children to produce what they do not need, and leads them to imagine that they are working by so doing. Children should be taught to despise all the numerous unnecessary things which put life on a false level and make it artificial. They should be taught to try to simplify it, to aim for its supreme values; this should be the end of education. The kindergarten system is, on the contrary, one of the most effective means to produce the weak dilletante and the self-satisfied average man.
If there is any further need for the kindergarten in the near or distant future, let it be a place where children may have the same freedom as cats or dogs, to play by themselves, and for themselves, to think out something of their own, where they can be provided with means to carry out their own plans, where they have companions to play with them. A sensible woman may be near at hand to look on or to supervise, but only to interfere when the children are likely to hurt themselves. Let her draw something for them occasionally, tell them a story, or teach them an amusing game, but otherwise let her be apparently quite passive and yet untiringly active in the observation of the traits of character and of disposition which play of this free type reveals. In like manner the mother should observe the play of children, their treatment of their companions at play, their inclinations, and collect as much material as she can but interfere as little directly as possible. The mother finally by this constant, many-sided, strenuous, yet passive kind of observation gets a knowledge of the child that is partially exact. One being never learns to know another being entirely, not even when that being has received its life from the other, not even when that life is daily renewed by the other being, in order to reach the full happiness of spiritual motherhood. It has been well said that as people regard the birth of a child as the sign of physical maturity, the education of a child is regarded as a sign of psychical maturity. But through lack in psychological insight, most parents remain their whole life immature. They can have the best principles, the most zealous fidelity to duty, combined with absolute blindness to the nature of children, the real causes of their actions, and the different combinations of different characteristics.