Thus work teaches the pupil the lesson of self-sacrifice (the right of superiority which the general interest possesses over the particular), while play develops his personal idiosyncrasy.
§ 27. Without play, the child would become more and more a machine, and lose all freshness and spontaneity—all originality. Without work, he would develop into a monster of caprice and arbitrariness.
From the fact that man must learn to combine with man, in order that the individual may avail himself of the experience and labors of his fellow-men, self-sacrifice for the sake of combination is the great lesson of life. But as this should be voluntary self-sacrifice, education must train the child equally in the two directions of spontaneity and obedience. The educated man finds recreation in change of work.
§ 28. Education seeks to assimilate its object—to make what was alien and strange to the pupil into something familiar and habitual to him. [The pupil is to attack, one after the other, the foreign realms in the world of nature and man, and conquer them for his own, so that he can be "at home" in them. It is the necessary condition of all growth, all culture, that one widens his own individuality by this conquest of new provinces alien to him. By this the individual transcends the narrow limits of particularity and becomes generic—the individual becomes the species. A good definition of education is this: it is the process by which the individual man elevates himself to the species.]
§ 29. (1) Therefore, the first requirement in education is that the pupil shall acquire the habit of subordinating his likes and dislikes to the attainment of a rational object.
It is necessary that he shall acquire this indifference to his own pleasure, even by employing his powers on that which does not appeal to his interest in the remotest degree.
§ 30. Habit soon makes us familiar with those subjects which seemed so remote from our personal interest, and they become agreeable to us. The objects, too, assume a new interest upon nearer approach, as being useful or injurious to us. That is useful which serves us as a means for the realization of a rational purpose; injurious, if it hinders such realization. It happens that objects are useful in one sense and injurious in another, and vice versa. Education must make the pupil capable of deciding on the usefulness of an object, by reference to its effect on his permanent vocation in life.
§ 31. But good and evil are the ethical distinctions which furnish the absolute standard to which to refer the question of the usefulness of objects and actions.
§ 32. (2) Habit is (a) passive, or (b) active. The passive habit is that which gives us the power to retain our equipoise of mind in the midst of a world of changes (pleasure and pain, grief and joy, etc). The active habit gives us skill, presence of mind, tact in emergencies, etc.