Conventional womanhood will ever have its strongest support in education.
The individuality of a child is seldom repressed in the inconsiderate and brutal manner of former times. But by attrition it is effaced. In the olden times the children enjoyed a certain freedom in the nursery where the expression of life, manifestation of joy, pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy of the growing personality was not continually moderated. Now the children are continually with the parents and these accustom them to a certain exacting restraint. The children wish to be entertained; they cannot play of their own initiative, for they lose the desire that originates in the freedom of the creative phantasy. Neither children nor parents possess themselves in peace. In the continual association the children are worn out by commands so varied and numerous that obedience cannot be maintained. They do not, therefore, learn the discipline necessary for the development of their personality—to subordinate the unessential life expressions to the essential and to dominate even over these last—a culture of the fallow child ground which must begin early in order to become a second nature.
And this happens only when the educator knows clearly what he will adhere to as essential in the development of the child, and when according to that he establishes his commands and prohibitions, which must be few in number but as immutable as the laws of nature, and if violated must bring upon the child, not artificial punishment, but the inevitable results of the act itself. So can man by fixed practice form the child of nature into a man of culture, who out of consideration for himself and for others curbs his tendencies which are inimical to society, without, however, suppressing his personality. For outside the field of immutable laws, children ought not to be constrained or coerced against their nature and their disposition, against their healthy egoism and against their especial tastes.
Now many mothers by their own effacement of self develop an unjustified egoism of the child, but desire in other respects a self-control, a circumspection, a moderation and discretion such as a whole life has not ordinarily been able to inculcate in the mother herself. Out of this soft clay, which is material for an individuality, parents, servants and teachers mold a society being, sometimes a social being, but never a human being.
This modeling is called education. And a part of the earliest education must, as I have just shown, truly consist in that of molding. But after the first years of life the aim of education should be to prevent all molding and on the contrary to assure the freedom or development of the single force which, considered in the light of the whole, makes it significant for mankind that new generations succeed those which have disappeared—the force of a new personality.
Every child is a new world, a world into which not even the tenderest love can wholly penetrate. However openly the clear eyes meet ours, however confidingly the soft hand is laid in ours, this tender being will perhaps one day deplore the suffering of his childhood, because we treated him according to the assumption that children are replicas, not originals; not new, wonderful personalities. It is true the child in certain measure is a repetition of the child nature of all times, but at the same time, and this in a far higher degree, an absolutely new synthesis of soul qualities, with new possibilities for sorrow and joy, strength and weakness.
This new being will, upon his own responsibility, at his own risk, live this terrifyingly earnest life. What creative force, new inceptions, he will be able to bring to it; what elasticity he will possess under the blows of destiny, what power to give and to receive happiness—all depends, outside of nature itself, in essential degree upon the educator's method of treating this individual child nature.
Goethe long ago lamented that education aspired to make Philistines out of personalities. And this is now much worse since education has become pedagogical, without at the same time becoming psychological.
Only he who treats the feelings, will and rights of a child with quite the same consideration as those of a grown person, and who never allows the personality of a child to feel other limitations than those of nature itself, or the consideration, based upon good grounds, for the child's own welfare or that of others—only he possesses the first requisite principle of real education. Education must assuredly be a liberating of the personality from the domination of its own passions. But it must never strive to exterminate passion itself, which is the innermost power of the personality and which cannot exist without the coexisting danger of a corresponding fault. To subdue the possible fault in each spiritual inclination by eliciting through love the corresponding good in the same inclination—this alone is individual education. It is an extremely slow education, in which immediate interference signifies little, the spiritual atmosphere of the home, its mode of life and its ideals signify on the contrary almost everything. The educator must above all understand how to wait: to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.