Now, all such factors of physiological development are suffocated by our antiquated pedagogic methods. We prevent, more or less completely, the development of the separate personalities, in order to keep all the pupils within the selfsame limits. The perfectionment of each is impeded by the common level which it is expected that all shall attain and make their limit, while the pupils are forced to receive from us, instead of producing of their own accord; and they are obliged to sit motionless with their minds in bondage to an iron programme, as their bodies are to the iron benches.
We wish to look upon them as machines, to be driven and guided by us, when in reality they are the most sensitive and the most superb creation of nature.
We destroy divine forces by slavery. Rewards and punishments furnish us with the needed scourge to enforce submission from these marvelously active minds; we encourage them with rewards! to what end? to winning the prize! Well, by doing so we make the child lose sight of his real goal, which is knowledge, liberty and work, in order to dazzle him with a prize which, considered morally, is vanity, and considered materially is a few grains of metal. We inflict punishments in order to conquer nature, which is in rebellion, not against what is good and beautiful, not against the purpose of life, but against us, because we are tyrants instead of guides.
If only we did not also punish sickness, misfortune and poverty!
We are breakers-in of free human beings, not educators of men.
Our faith in rewards and punishments as a necessary means to the progress of the children and to the maintenance of discipline, is a fallacy already exploded by experiment. It is not the material and vain reward, bestowed upon a few individual children, that constitutes the psychic stimulus which spurs on the multifold expansions of human life to greater heights; rewards degrade the grandeur of human consciousness into vanity and confine it within the limits of egotism, which means perdition. The stimulus worthy of man is the joy which he feels in the consciousness of his own growth; and he grows only through the conquest of his own spirit and the spread of universal brotherhood. It is not true that the child is incapable of feeling a spiritual stimulus far greater than the wretched prize that gives him an egotistical and illusory superiority over his companions; it is rather that we ourselves, because already degraded by egotism, judge these new forces of nascent human life after our own low standards.
The small boys and girls in our "Children's Houses" are of their own accord distrustful of rewards; they despise the little medals, intended to be pinned upon the breast as marks of distinction, and instead they actively search for objects of study through which, without any guidance from the teacher, they may model and judge and correct themselves, and thus work toward perfection.
As to punishments, they are depressing in effect, and they are inflicted upon children who are already depressed!
Even in the case of those who are adult and strong, we know that it is necessary to encourage those who have fallen, to aid the weak, to comfort those who are discouraged. And if this method serves for the strong, how much more necessary it is for lives in the course of evolution!