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[Pg 234] 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[Pg 235] 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[Pg 236] 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 kin[Pg 237]dergarten 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[Pg 238] 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.

Take some examples of the worst blunders of this type; the small child is often called vain who studies, full of interest, his own identity in the glass; the child who, from fear or confusion at a hard or incomprehensible question, does not answer or obey is called stubborn; the child that cannot explain his actions in those small things which adults every day entirely forget is looked upon as lying; and even before the child has a conception of the right of property, when he pilfers, he is called thievish. The child who says that he[Pg 239] knows that he is naughty, and wants to be naughty, is called obdurate and impertinent, while this statement is really a self-confession and shows a character to which one may appeal with the best results. The child, sunk in thought, who forgets the small things of daily life, people call thoughtless. Even when a child is really selfish and is really lying or lazy, these characteristics are treated as if they were something individual, while actually they are caused often by some serious fault which must be dealt with. These characteristics can proceed from a good quality which may be destroyed, if the fault is not treated suitably.

But even parents who now observe their children with more psychological insight than was used in earlier times are not able to study them, if their children go to school and kindergarten at an early age. This want of insight produces mistakes which often cause deep antagonisms between children and their parents, the sort of thing which now embitters so many households. Only fathers and mothers who reverence the individuality of their children, and combine with this feeling a careful observation of them through their whole life, are able to avoid this typical fault of our own time. People expect to gather grapes from[Pg 240] thistles, instead of being satisfied with haws. Parents must see that they cannot create where there is no material to be created. But they must be capable of developing the characteristics which they discover in the nature of their children. This work they must undertake with optimism and resignation, for it represents the teaching of real psychological study. This will stop those efforts, painful alike for children and parents, that are applied in directions which offer no reward to effort.

But the study of the psychology of the child, begun at its birth, continued in its play, its work, its rest, means a daily comparative study, and requires the undivided attention of one person. It can only be done by a person who has charge of but a few children; in a crowd it is impossible. It is all the more impossible because children in a crowd resemble one another more or less; and this makes observation more difficult.

The kindergarten is only a factory. Children learn in it to model, instead of making mud pies according to their own taste. This process is typical of what these small atoms of humanity go through themselves. From the first floor of the factory the objects that have been turned out there are sent to the next floor[Pg 241] above, the school; and from this they then go out put up in packages.

The aim of school training is to carry out, with all its might, production by quantities that expresses the demands of our time in all spheres. The invention of individual school methods may reduce the influence of "canned education."

As long as there are large cities, poor children in them must be able to obtain the possibilities of country children. Their playthings must be made out of the world which surrounds them. The obligations of their own home must supply them with work. This is altogether different from the play work of the kindergarten that has no connection with the seriousness of reality. A wise mother or teacher will adopt from the kindergarten system just so much as will enable her to teach children to observe nature and their surroundings; will take from it what enables her to make them combine their activity with some useful end; their amusement with some kind of knowledge.

The Froebel dictum, "Let us live for the children," must be changed into a more significant phrase, "Let us allow the children to live." This, among other things, means "let them be[Pg 242] emancipated from the burden of learning by heart," from the forms of system, from the pressure of the crowd, in those years while the quiet, secret work of the soul is as vital for them as the growing of the seed in the earth. The kindergarten system is opposed to this; it is forcing up the seed to life on a plate, where it looks very pretty, but only for the time being.

The school with its esprit de corps opens the way public lack of conscience. Modern society manages thus to reproduce the crimes of every past period; manages too, to reproduce them through men who are conscientious in their own private life. For those without consciences, who lead criminal movements, would never be able to put the masses of people in motion, unless they were just masses and nothing more; unless they were made to follow collective laws of honour, collective patriotic feelings, collective conceptions of duty. The child learns to be obedient to his school, to be loyal to his comrades, just as later on in life he learns these qualities as they are presented in his university, his student society, and his profession. All of this he learns sooner than to reverence his conscience, his feeling of right, his individual impulse. He learns to[Pg 243] wink at, pardon, and disguise the sins committed by his own circle of companions, his own club, and his own country.

This is the way the world produces its "Dreyfus Affairs," its Transvaal Wars. If the aim is to create men and not masses, we should follow the educational programme of the great statesman Stein—"to develop all those impulses on which the value and strength of mankind depend." This is only possible when the child is taught, at the earliest age, the freedom and danger of his own choice, the right and responsibility of his own will, the conditions and duties of being put to the test himself. All of these elements of character are unconsciously opposed by the kindergarten; the home alone can develop them. The highest result of education is to bring the individual into contact with his own conscience. This does not mean that the individual cannot experience by degrees the happiness and the necessity of being a factor in the service of the whole, first in his home, then among his companions and in his country, and finally in the world. The difference is this: in the first case the man is a living cell, co-operating and building up living forms; in the other he is a piece of cut stone used in artificial construction.[Pg 244]

Both for the development of individuality, as well as for the cultivation of the emotions, the home is to be preferred to the kindergarten and to the school. In the limited small circle of the home the emotional element can be deepened and tenderness can be developed, by the acts called for in the realities of domestic life. The kindergarten first, and then the school, free children from their natural individual obligations and put in their place demands that can only be fulfilled en masse. The child enters into a number of superficial relations. This situation tends to make his emotions superficial; here is the great danger of beginning school life at a tender age. On the other hand a one-sided home life brings with it the danger of concentrating the emotions to an excess. Education at home in the years when the emotions become harmonious and receive their decisive training is just as important for the child as is later on a pleasant sociable life with others of the same age, after the twelfth year is passed. All intellectual cultivation done according to the most excellent method, all social feelings, are worthless unless they have as their basis an individual development of the emotions. Somewhere in our body we must have a heart, to act as a[Pg 245] real balance against our head. Only the man who has learnt to love a few, deep enough to die for them, is able to live profitably for the many.

I should like to see not only the kindergarten but the preparatory school transferred to the home. There things can be considered that are never taken into account in a general school. The child need not have the nourishment he does not want, and which he does not need, at the time he now generally receives it. In the home school, one child can put off reading to a later age, another can be taught reading early. The desire for action in one child can be satisfied; the book-hunger of the other encouraged. Bodily development, the desire to make a real acquaintance with external nature can be considered in home work, play, and out-of-door activities. Then we can begin to teach when the child himself asks for teaching; that is, when he wishes to hear or do something in which knowledge alone can assist him. The child can twice as easily learn at ten years, under these conditions, what he now learns at eight; at eight what he now learns at six, if he comes to his study with developed powers of observation and an eager desire for action. Schools can never attain a[Pg 246] full insight into the peculiar character of personality, into the ways in which knowledge must be placed before different individuals, into the right time for taking a subject or giving it up. The home school must be considered the ideal method where the child studies with a small group of well-selected companions. Individuality can be considered, plans of study and courses can be neglected. Through such neglect only, is a real living instruction possible. The advantages the modern school has over the home are hardly worth discussing. The order of the school, its method, system, and discipline, so much praised by its advocates as advantages, are, from my point of view, nothing but disadvantages. Habits of fulfilling duties, or work, orderly and punctual activity, that belong to a sound education, can be attained in the home school through far less artificial means. Of course it is urged as another advantage of the school that the school child becomes a member of a small community where he learns social duties. But the home is the natural community where the child, in full seriousness, learns the real social duties of readiness to help, and readiness to act, while the present-day school artificially re[Pg 247]places that domestic social education, of which the child is now robbed by studies at school and preparation at home. The real value of school life among companions can be had from the home school without its ordinary dangers. These dangers are not only evil influences, but, more than anything else, that collective process of reaching a standard of stupidity, due to the pressure of public opinion that comes from association in masses. The fear of common opinion, of being laughed at, is created in the receptive years of childhood, so open to such influences. The slightest deviation in dress, or taste, is criticised unsparingly. If an investigation were conducted on the sufferings of children through the tyranny of their fellows, a tyranny which sometimes takes harsher, sometimes milder forms, it would upset the prejudice that the usefulness of the school in this respect cannot be replaced.

Besides there is the levelling pressure of a uniform discipline, which stunts personality from above, while life with school companions restricts it on all sides. Every criticism on this formal pedantry is met with the answer, "In a school it is absolutely impossible to permit children to do what can be done in the household; only fancy if all children in the[Pg 248] school were to sharpen their lead pencils or erase words in their exercises." There is no need to insist further on this point. Hundreds of petty rules must exist, we are told, for the sake of discipline. And even if the rules could be reduced to a fourth of their present cubic contents, even the best schools would still feel the pressure of uniformity. The more this pressure is resisted by individuals, so much the better.

Education in the first years must aim to strengthen individuality. The whole of biographical literature supplies an almost uniform proof of the importance of not commencing too early the levelling social education of the school. Early attendance at school is one of the reasons why we so frequently meet, as Dumas says, so many clever children, and so many stupid adults.

Almost all great men and women, who have thought and created for themselves, have received either no education in school at all, or have gone to school at a rather later period, with longer or shorter interruptions, or have been trained in different schools. In most cases it was an accident, some living point of view, a book read in secret, a personal choice of subject that gave these exceptional be[Pg 249]ings their training. In this respect Goethe's education was ideal, considered apart from some pedantry due to his father's influence. At his mother's work-table he learnt to know the Bible; French he learnt from a theatrical company; English from a language master, in company with his father; Italian, because he heard his sister being taught the language; mathematics from a friend in the household, a study which Goethe applied immediately, first in cardboard diagrams, later in architectural drawings. His essays he prepared in the form of a correspondence in different languages between different relatives, scattered in various parts of the world. Geography he eagerly studied in books of travel in order to be able to give his narrative local colour. He knocked about with his father, learnt to observe different kinds of handwork, and also to try himself small experiments of his own skill.

But some one may say, all men are not geniuses, and accordingly the majority without distinct talent need the school. Is it possible that the connection between originality and irregular attendance at school is merely accidental? How often does the school sin in its watering down of originality! As for unori[Pg 250]ginal people, the argument urged here is an application of the biblical axiom, that from him who has nothing even the little will be taken away. I mean the individual who has no distinct personality will be forced in the school to give up the little that he can call his own. The old-fashioned school where a few subjects were learnt by heart, where the teachers were often badly prepared, where the students could go to sleep or pretend to learn, where the courses were simple and attention concentrated on Latin, seems barbarous to us. But it had less danger for the personality than the present-day school with its thorough preparation, its interest in readings, its perfected methods, its capital instructors who take every little stone out of the student's road, and prepare as much delightful intellectual nourishment as possible, sometimes even in a cooked-up form. This "good school" with its over-insistence on versatility is responsible for the nervousness of our day. Its general intellectual apathy has caused the negativeness of our times.

The quietest, most obedient child is thought the best pupil, that is, the most impersonal individual is the model. So we see how the school confuses its conception of values. The[Pg 251] more the soul and body are passive, are willing to be controlled and receptive, so much the better are the results from the school standpoint. Mischievous children, obstinate characters, one-sided and original natures, are always martyrs at school because of their desire for action, their spirit of opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-going, amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own individual tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get good certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced into shape—or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a pebble on the seashore. It is struck by one wave after another, day by day, term by term; on they come—forty-five minutes for religious instruction, the same period for history, then French, then sloyd, then natural history; the next day new subjects in new, small doses. In the afternoon, there is preparation at home, and writing exercises, previously arranged and marked out, then corrected with care, and the prepared readings made the basis of questioning by the most approved methods, the mother having at home first gone over them[Pg 252] with the child. These powerful billows stupefy the brain, and take the edge off the souls of both teacher and scholar. Even the most active teachers move along fettered by requirements and prejudices, unconditional necessities and methodical principles. Only occasionally is a soul saved from this fate by total skepticism. Some exalt this pettifogging professionalism to a plan of salvation, others are untiringly busy in changing details, in discussing minor improvements. Every real thoroughgoing reform affecting the principle, not the methods alone, goes to pieces, because it conflicts with the system supported by the state. It fails, through the obedient acceptance of the system on the part of parents, through the incapacity of teachers to look at the whole results of the system, through their disinclination to all radical methods of improvement.

The school, like the home and society, in general should aim to fight more vigorously and more successfully the influences belittling life, and should further its development towards ever higher forms. This end is opposed by the modern schools. It is a gross mistake to hold up their excellent material and their number as proofs of popular culture. How[Pg 253] the people are educated in the schools, how the material is used, what subjects are pursued in them are the momentous questions.

Goethe's saying that "fortune is the development of our capacities" is as applicable to children as to adults. What these capacities are can be determined soon in the case of the talented child; his future can be secured by obtaining for him the possibility of such a development. But there are common capacities, proper to every normal human being, and from their development, fortune too can be the outcome. Among such capacities is memory, which modern man has nearly destroyed. "We throw ashes," says Max Muller, "every day on the glowing coals of memory while men of past ages could retain in their minds the treasures of our present literature." To these capacities belong, among others, power of thought, not in the sense of philosophic thinking, but in the simpler use of the word, gifts of observation, ability to draw conclusions and to exercise judgment. Of the common universal human faculties the emotions suffer most at the hand of the modern school.

One of the fundamentally wrong pedagogical assumptions, is that mathematics and grammar develop the understanding. This[Pg 254] is only true after a higher stage is reached in these courses. But there is no one who seriously maintains that, so far as nature or man is concerned, he has used directly or indirectly, in a single observation, conclusion, or exercise of judgment, the theses, hypotheses, statements, problems, the rules and exceptions, of mathematics and grammar, with which his childish brain was burdened. I have heard from mathematicians and philologians the same heresy that I am proclaiming, that mathematics and grammar, when they are not pursued as sciences, must be reduced to a minimum. Provided a person has mathematical talent, the study of mathematics is naturally agreeable, through the development of a capacity in a certain direction. If one has the gift for languages, the same is true of linguistic study. But without such special talent, these subjects have no educational value, because the powers of observation, drawing conclusions, exercising judgment, are just as undeveloped as they were before the mathematical problem was solved or the grammatical rules learned.

Life—the life of nature and of man—this alone is the preparation for life. What the world of nature and the world of man offers[Pg 255] in the way of living forms, objects of beauty, types of work, processes of development, can, by natural history, geography, history, art, and literature, give real value to memory; can teach the understanding to observe, to judge and distinguish; can train the feeling to become intense, and through its intensity combine the varying material in that unity which alone is education. In brief, real things are what the home and school should offer children in broad, rich, and warm streams. But the streams should not be taken off in canals and dammed up by methods, systems, divisions of courses, and examinations.

I never read a pedagogical discussion without the fine words "self-activity, individual development, freedom of choice," suggesting to me the music which accompanies the sacrificial feasts of cannibals. The moment these words are used, limitations and reservations are introduced by their advocates. Their proposed application is ludicrously insignificant, in contrast with the great principle in the name of which they urge these changes. And so the pupil continues to be sacrificed to educational ideals, pedagogical systems, and examination requirements, that they refuse to abandon. The everlasting sin of the school[Pg 256] against children is to be always talking about the child.

The sloyd system (manual dexterity, handwork, artistic production) has certain good results on children. Accordingly the sloyd must be introduced into the school, and all must be made to share the advantages of this training; but there are children for whom the sloyd is as inappropriate and as useless a requirement as learning Latin. The child who wants to devote himself to his books should be no more forced to take up the sloyd, than the child who is happy with his planing table should be dragged to literature.

All talk about "harmonious training" must be given the place where it belongs—in the pedagogical culinary science. Certainly harmonious development is the finest result of man's training, but it is only to be attained by his own choice. It implies a harmony between the real capacities of the individual, not a harmony worked up from a pedagogical formula. The results from the school kneading trough with its mince-meat processes are something quite different.

Isolated reforms in the modern school have no significance; they will continue to have none, until we prepare for the great revolu[Pg 257]tion, which will smash to pieces the whole present system and will leave not one stone of it upon another. Undoubtedly a "Deluge" of pedagogy must come, in which the ark need only contain Montaigne, Rousseau, Spencer, and the modern literature of the psychology of the child. When the ark comes to dry land man need not build schools but only plant vineyards where teachers will be employed to bring the ripe grapes to the children, who now get only a taste of the juice of culture in a thin watery mixture.

The school has only one great end, to make itself unnecessary, to allow life and fortune, which is another way of saying self-activity, to take the place of system and method.

From the kindergarten period on the child is now, as has been said, a material moulded, sometimes by hostile, sometimes by friendly hands. The mildest, the apparently freest methods produce uniformity by insisting on the same work, the same impression, the same regulations, day by day, year by year. Besides in the school, classes are never arranged according to the child's temperament and tendency, but according to his age and knowledge. So he is condemned in deadly tedious[Pg 258]ness to waste an infinite amount of time while he is waiting for others.

The very earliest period of instruction should use the power the child has for observation and work. These capacities should be made the means of his education, the standard for using his own observation. If the power of observation is vigorous, no general rules are to be drawn, but only particular ones. One child must read, play, or do handwork in a different degree to another. One can at an early age, the other only at a later period, take advantage of the education to be obtained from going to museums or from travel (the best of all travel is tramping). The indispensable elements will be reduced to their lowest measure; for what any one man needs to be able to do, in order to find himself at home in life, is not considerable.............