ONE moment!—I take it, my friends, we are agreed in demanding of the Philosopher that he condescend to some concrete and practical suggestions in regard to education.—Briefly, please!

The Philosopher. “You must draw your own conclusions. Traditional education is based on the assumption that knowledge is a mass of information which can be given to the child in little dabs at regular intervals. We know, however, that the education based on this assumption is a failure. It kills rather than stimulates curiosity; and without curiosity, information is useless. We are thus forced to realize that knowledge does not reside outside the child, but in the contact of the child with the world through the medium of curiosity. And thus the whole emphasis of education is changed. We no longer seek to educate the child—we only attempt to give him the opportunity to educate himself. He[Pg 150] alone has the formula of his own specific needs; none of us is wise enough to arrange for him the mysterious series of beautiful and poignant contacts with reality by which alone he can ‘learn.’ This means that he must choose his own lessons. And if you think that, left to choose, he would prefer no lessons at all, you are quite mistaken. Let me remind you that children are notoriously curious about everything—everything except, as you will very justly point out, the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything. You may imagine that they will prefer only the less complex kinds of knowledge; but do you regard children’s games as simple? They are in fact exceedingly complex. And they are all the more interesting because they are complex. We ourselves with our adult minds, penetrate cheerfully into the complexities of baseball, or embroidery, or the stock-market, following the lead of some natural curiosity; and if our minds less often penetrate into the complexities of music, or science, it is because these things have associations which bring them within the realm of the dutiful. Evolutionary biology is far more interesting than stamp-collecting; but it is, unfortunately,[Pg 151] made to seem not so delightfully useless, and hence it is shunned by adolescent boys and girls. But postage-stamp collecting can be made as much a bore as biology; it needs only to be put into the schools as a formal course.

“Consider for a moment the boy stamp-collector. His interest in his collection is in the nature of a passion. Does it astonish you that passionateness should be the fruit of idle curiosity? Then you need to face the facts of human psychology. The boy’s passion for his collection of stamps is akin to the passion of the scientist and the poet. Do you desire of children that they should have a similar passion for arithmetic, for geography, for history? Then you must leave them free to find out the interestingness of these things. There is no way to passionate interest save through the gate of curiosity; and curiosity is born of idleness. But doubtless you have a quite wrong notion of what idleness means. Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. To be forced to do nothing is not idleness, it is the worst kind of imprisonment. Being made to stand in the corner with one’s face to the wall is not idleness—it is punishment. But getting up on Saturday morning with a wonderful day ahead in which one may do[Pg 152] what one likes—that is idleness. And it leads straight into tremendous expenditures of energy. There is a saying, ‘The devil finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.’ Yes, but why should the devil have no competition? And that, as I understand it, is the function of education—to provide for idle and happy children fascinating contacts with reality—through games, tools, books, scientific instruments, gardens, and older persons with passionate interests in science and art and handicraft.

“Such a place would in a few respects resemble the schools we know; but the spirit would be utterly different from the spirit of traditional education. The apparatus for arousing the child’s curiosity would be infinitely greater than the meagre appliances of our public schools; but however great, the child would be the centre of it all—not as the object of a process, but as the possessor of the emotions by force of which all these outward things become Education.

“But, you may ask, what has all this to do with truth? Simply this. We have been forcing children to memorize alleged facts. A fact so memorized cannot be distinguished from a falsehood similarly memorized. And so we may very well say that we have failed to bring truth into[Pg 153] education. For truth is reality brought into vital contact with the mind. It makes no diffe............