Education as it should be, the unfolding of a flower, not the distorting of it, is only possible to those who are willing and able themselves to become as little children.
It is because certain great spirits have done this and have tried to teach others to do it, that reforms in education have begun to be at least possible. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Signora Montessori and many a lesser star has shone upon a new path. And public interest has centred more and more on the welfare of the child. Books are written, societies formed, newspapers founded in the interests of the child, and true education becomes a possibility.
And well indeed it is for us that this is so. For the education of the last three hundred years has led, in all things vital and spiritual, downhill all the way. We have gone on frustrating natural human intelligences and emotions, inculcating false doctrines, and choking with incoherent facts the souls which asked to be fed with dreams-come-true--till now our civilisation is a thing we cannot look at without a mental and moral nausea. We have, in our countrysides, peasants too broken for rebellion, in our cities.
The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind.
If ever we are to be able to look ourselves and each other in the face again it will be because a new generation has arisen in whose ears the voice of God and His angels has not ceased to sound. If only we would see the things that belong to our peace, and lead the children instead of driving them, who knows what splendid thoughts and actions they in their natural development might bring to the salvation of the world?
In the Palace of Education which the great minds have designed and are designing, many stones will be needed--and so I bring the little stone I have hewn out and tried to shape, in the hope that it may fit into a corner of that great edifice. For if anything is to be done, it is necessary that all who have anything to give, shall give it. As Francis Bacon said:
"Nothing can so much conduce to the drawing down, as it were, from heaven a whole shower of new and profitable Inventions, as this, that the experiments of many . . . may come to the knowledge of one man, or some few, who by mutual conference may whet and sharpen one another, so that by this . . . Arts may flourish, and as it were by a commixture and communication of Rays, inflame one another. . . . This sagacity by literate experience may in the mean project and scatter for the benefit of man many rudiments to knowledge which may be had at hand."