THE AIM OF MODERN EDUCATION. 497 



— any unsophisticated child, I mean — and get at his preference 

 for one place over another. I think you will find, for example, 

 that he prefers the shabbiest old farmhouse to the trimmest vil- 

 lage mansion ; and the reason is simple — there is more to do there. 

 This is the great fact that the newer education has seized upon. 

 It attempts to make knowledge real to children by making it a 

 part of their experience, and to do this it enlists the life forces on 

 its side instead of arraying them against it. As educators, we are 

 to use our skill in directing the wonderful self-activity that in 

 children is already a reality. We are to provide the theater for 

 its exercise, and decide, in large measure, what shape it is to take. 

 But always we are to do this with the sympathy and co-operation 

 of the child, and never against his protest. It is bad practice in 

 medicine to deal with symptoms and treat only them. It is good 

 practice to go back of symptoms to causes. It is bad practice in 

 education to attempt to control the occupations and activities of 

 children, and neglect the motive power back of it all. It is good 

 practice to accept the desires of children and allow them whole- 

 some expression. A large part of the childish instinct is the de- 

 sire to make things, to construct something — anything, indeed, 

 from a mud pie to a canoe or playhouse. It is a wholesome in- 

 stinct. It is only by such experience that the child comes to 

 know the great outer world and to find himself in it. Think for 

 a moment how much he has to learn ; how much that to you and 

 me are mere commonplaces, but to him are brand-new wonders ! 

 He is a born investigator, an inquisitive experimenter in a very 

 large laboratory. And not only this, but it is very desirable that 

 he should be. To prohibit these activities, to thwart these in- 

 stincts, and to deliberately propose as a substitute that he shall 

 sit still indoors with the abstractions of formal education is sim- 

 ply grotesque. If the proposition and the carrying out of it did 

 not involve so much mischief of a very grave sort, they would be 

 highly humorous. No educational ideas are defensible which 

 have not their foundation in ethics, and one's ethics, I need not 

 add, must rest upon one's philosophy of life. In proposing to re- 

 spect the desires of children, or, in a word, to let them have their 

 own way, I am proposing something quite at variance with the 

 ethical ideas of the majority of people and notably at variance 

 with the Puritan ethics, yet I do it on ethical as well as psycho- 

 logical grounds. It is a moral universe, this, in which we find 

 ourselves — a universe so constituted that health-giving activities 

 are followed by happiness, and evil activities by pain. It is this, 

 indeed, that constitutes the rightness or the wrongness of the ac- 

 tion — the good or bad results. If we wish to make the moral life 

 a reality, we must from the cradle up let children feel this essen- 

 tial relation between cause and efliect, and discriminate between 



