n 'S 1 * 
 
 H 
 
 mam 
 
 
I 
 
T & 
 
 ftrr 
 
 * 
 
 
A PATH TO FREEDOM IN 
 THE SCHOOL 
 
DIFFERENTIAL PARTNERSHIP 
 
 METHOD OF 
 FRENCH CONVERSATION 
 
 BY 
 NORMAN MAC MUNN, B.A. (OXON.) 
 
 Assistant Master at King Edward VI- School, 
 Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 THE THINGS ABOUT US, AND A 
 FEW OTHERS. A Book of Simple French 
 Conversation. In 2 volumes (to be used by 
 alternate pupils). Small Crown 8vo, limp 
 cloth, 8d. each. 
 
 A new system of teaching French, in which the students 
 work in partnerships of two from different booklets, by 
 means of question and answer. The method has been 
 found by the author to be most successful, and is abreast 
 of the latest tendencies in the teaching of modeen languages- 
 
A 
 
 PATH TO FREEDOM 
 IN THE SCHOOL 
 
 BY 
 
 NORMAN MAC MUNN, B.A. 
 
 ASSISTANT MASTER AT KING EDWARD VI. SCHOOL, 
 STRATFORD ON- AVON. 
 
 Author of " The Mac Munn Differentialism : A New Method of 
 Class Self- Teaching," etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 
 1914 
 
TO THE BOYS 
 
 OF 
 
 KING EDWARD VI. SCHOOL, 
 STRATFORD-ON-AVON, TRUE PIONEERS, 
 WHO HAVE FROM THE FIRST HELPED HIM WITH 
 WONDERFUL ZEAL, TRUE SYMPATHY, AND AN ALMOST 
 RELIGIOUS FAITH IN THE DEEPER VALUE OF THEIR NEW 
 FREEDOM, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY AND 
 GRATEFULLY, AND IN TOKEN OF FARE- 
 WELL, DEDICATED BY THEIR 
 FRIEND, 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
PREFACE 
 
 BENEATH the seeming peacefulness some would 
 say the stagnation of the English school there 
 are signs of coming change. New and vitalizing 
 forces are rising into action and it is only the 
 confirmed traditionalist who will believe that he 
 is only watching the ordinary course of progressive 
 development in education. 
 
 As the doctrines of Rousseau were to the social 
 revolution of yesterday, so, it seems to many of 
 us, the doctrines of Montessori will be to the 
 educational revolution of to-morrow. But just as 
 the message of Rousseau was reinforced by the 
 words and actions of other leaders of intellectual 
 revolt, so we, our minds ripe for change, are 
 finding other sources of inspiration in collateral 
 movements for the emancipation of the young. 
 
 Of these none is more wonderful and more 
 inspiring than the Little Commonwealth for 
 young delinquents directed by Mr. Homer Lane, 
 on the lines of the George Junior Republics in 
 America (except, perhaps, that it carries the 
 principles of liberty to even greater lengths). 
 Surely every logical and progressive teacher 
 should be tempted by such victories of the 
 
 7 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 principle of liberty to remark : " Either these 
 young criminals are better than my boys, or my 
 boys are not quite so incapable of self-direction 
 as I have been taught to believe/' 
 
 Nevertheless the New School is very near 
 much nearer, I am convinced, than many people 
 suppose to being an accomplished fact. On 
 both sides of the Atlantic there are soon to be 
 experimental commonwealths for non-criminal 
 boys. There is no need to dwell upon the 
 significance of this first serious attempt to accord 
 to boys the right to establish and to maintain 
 the principles of their own discipline, and to leave 
 in their hands much of the ordering of their own 
 intellectual lives. It is to prove that the theory 
 of this bold venture is in agreement with the newest 
 truths of child psychology that I have written 
 the first half of my book ; and it is to the school 
 commonwealth school that I return in the last 
 few pages. The intervening portion of the volume 
 deals with a system of teaching in partnership 
 for which I venture to claim that, through the 
 activity which it evokes in the class, it makes the 
 problem of self-government much easier to solve 
 than it would be if no such simple and ready- 
 made device could be found. 
 
 I shall not here anticipate my arguments, but 
 will leave the reader to judge whether or not I 
 have made out my case for class-partnerships 
 as the readiest solution for the problem of 
 individualizing school-teaching. If I have done 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 that, I have accomplished nine-tenths of the work 
 of proving that self-government is to be the basis 
 of education in the future. 
 
 I cannot refrain from expressing my deep 
 gratitude to sympathizers among the leaders 
 (explicit or implicit) of what we may very well 
 call the movement for the emancipation of the 
 child to Mr. Edmond Holmes, to Professor 
 Culverwell, to Professor John Adams, to Mr. 
 Thiselton Mark, to Mr. G. W. S. Howson to 
 many members of the Montessori Committee. 
 Without this encouragement to carry me through 
 days rendered dark by scepticism and even by 
 hostility, I might very well have given up my 
 work in despair although I did indeed have the 
 constant sympathy and devoted zeal of my 
 boys, to whom I dedicate this book. 
 
 NORMAN MAC MUNN. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE THEORY OF CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. WORK AS PLAY THE BASIS OF 
 
 FREEDOM . 15 
 
 II. THE TAUNT OF " MAKING THINGS 
 
 TOO EASY " . . . 28 
 
 III. THE WASTAGE OF THE DIDACTIC 
 
 METHOD .... 36 
 
 IV. WAYS TO ACTIVITY ... 44 
 V. DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM . . 53 
 
 VI. THE BOY VERSUS THE SCHOOLBOY 62 
 
 VII. THE GREATEST OF ALL HUMAN 
 
 HOPES .... 71 
 
 PART II 
 
 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 I. BOYS IN PARTNERSHIP . . 83 
 
 II. NEW SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE . 93 
 ii 
 
12 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 III. THE ACADEMIC FETICH . . 103 
 
 IV. THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER . . in 
 
 V. SHOULD PARTNERSHIP WORK BE 
 
 EXCLUSIVE ? . . .119 
 
 VI. THE DIFFERENTIAL IDEA . . 127 
 
 VII. THE MATERIAL FOR PARTNERSHIP 
 
 WORK ..... 133 
 
 VIII. SOME HINTS ON DISCIPLINE . 139 
 PART III 
 
 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 I. FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES . . 149 
 II. REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION ? . 157 
 
PART I 
 
 THE THEORY OF CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 WORK AS PLAY THE BASIS OF FREEDOM 
 
 THE New English Dictionary defines work as 
 " Expenditure of energy, striving, application 
 of effort to some purpose/' It will be seen at 
 once that this definition is exclusive of no game 
 ever devised that any amusement in fact which 
 did not satisfy it would not be a game. 
 
 But in a far deeper sense is it true that all 
 young animals are working when they are playing. 
 The play of a kitten is the purest auto-education. 
 In chasing rapidly-moving objects across a room 
 it is teaching itself to catch mice and birds, and 
 probably teaching itself in quite the quickest 
 available way. Each animal spends its period 
 of immaturity in fitting itself for the struggle 
 for existence but always through movements 
 that would seem purposeless did we not know the 
 mature type which it will eventually embody. 
 Similarly the human being from earliest baby- 
 hood is learning to adapt himself, firstly to his 
 purely animal needs, secondly to a savage environ- 
 ment, and thirdly to the claims of a complex 
 and highly socialized world. But as nature's 
 slow but wonderfully sure processes are infinitely 
 
16 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 less recognizable in man than in the lower animals, 
 the issue has in his particular case been much 
 longer obscured the more so owing to the fact 
 that theological and other preconceptions have 
 helped towards its clouding. Further there is 
 the same regular progression towards a higher 
 stage of evolution. What I hope to show in 
 this volume is that what is true of auto-education 
 with regard to the simpler processes is true of it 
 also with regard to the highest functions of the 
 mind. 
 
 If the reasoning power of man has helped to 
 an inestimable extent in providing the material 
 for human education, it has also proved a 
 hindrance where methods of application had to 
 be devised. Indeed the root principles of universal 
 education lying in the idea of imposing a system 
 of adult manufacture on the child may be regarded 
 as a singular instance of misapplied logic. The 
 syllogism might be stated thus : 
 
 I know everything better than the child : 
 The child's nature is something : 
 Therefore I know more about the child's nature 
 than the child himself. 
 
 And unfortunately thousands of years have 
 passed without our doubting at all .* generally 
 whether knowledge of the child's own mind was 
 not the one exception " proving the rule " of 
 our relative omniscience. That we could theorize 
 about the immature mind better than the 
 immature mind could theorize about itself is, of 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 17 
 
 course, perfectly obvious. But self-knowledge, 
 which respects a thousand complex instincts 
 and tendencies in addition to the mechanism of 
 purely intellectual process, is a peculiarly elusive 
 as well as a strangely conclusive thing. In a 
 very profound sense a two-year-old baby knows 
 more about the secrets of its own development 
 than we could find out after ages of research. 
 And we are beginning to see that in the first 
 year or two of life there is hardly a wasted move- 
 ment hardly a movement, no matter how seem- 
 ingly capricious, that does not play some part 
 in the child's progress towards a higher stage of 
 individual evolution. 
 
 Now if that is true of the baby, why not of 
 the older child ? Until a few years ago it would 
 have been difficult to answer such a question 
 with any confidence, because children had never 
 been seen growing according to the laws of their 
 own nature. Therefore one had either frankly 
 to admit one's ignorance, or else to juggle with 
 a psychology largely based upon the merest 
 assumptions. Until Dr. Montessori's experiments j 
 one knew as little about the self-educating 
 tendencies of the six-year-old child as about those 
 of a mongoose or a guinea-pig. The veil has 
 now been lifted, and it is apparent that there is 
 precisely the same strong tendency in the older 
 as in the younger infant to work out its own j 
 destinies in its own way, and to be continually 
 seeking means to self -development. What is 
 
i8 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 infinitely more important is that it easily learns 
 to prefer an ordered to a capricious progress 
 towards the perfecting of its own type. 
 
 Nothing is more fortunate than that Dr. 
 Montessori began her experiments with feeble- 
 minded children, and that she was able presently 
 to show not only that even a defective is capable 
 of extraordinary mental expansion when allowed 
 to learn in his own way, but that he can even 
 become the mental equal (as judged, of course, 
 by purely scholastic tests) of those normal 
 children whose energies have been directed from 
 without. The lesson of this raising of a number 
 of mentally inferior children to the level of those 
 hitherto so far above them could not fail to 
 carry some conviction even to the most un- 
 imaginative. But the later developments of 
 the Montessori system, if less " sensational/' are 
 far more fascinating to the educator, because 
 they prove so absolutely (a) the purposive nature 
 of childish play ; (6) that the play tendency, 
 as compared with adult conceptions of amuse- 
 ment, is of great elasticity and can be directed 
 into channels of real profit in the social and 
 intellectual development of the child ; and (c) 
 that no external stimulus is required to induce 
 a child to discover the joy of overcoming the 
 most varied difficulties. In short, Dr. Montes- 
 sori's experiments made it abundantly clear 
 that a perfectly unspoiled child loved play not 
 for its own sake, but for the joy of overcoming 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 19 
 
 some new difficulty. He seemed rather to love 
 play because it was work, than work because it 
 was play. 
 
 Now it would be utterly impossible to exagger- 
 ate the significance of this lesson. In practice 
 it means that the schoolmaster has spent 
 thousands of years in teaching children to loaf 
 when they wanted to work. All they asked for 
 was work in activity. The schoolmaster replied : 
 " You must work in passivity or not at all. What 
 you call work in activity I call play. And as 
 I know everything it is play. And if you play 
 you shall be punished/' The strong, healthy 
 children, rich in the work-instinct, full of 
 strength and the will to create, saw no way to 
 breaking the laws of their own being, and they 
 refused. But others with a genius for nothing 
 but servitude, bowed their necks to the yoke 
 and accepted the terms and lived happy ever 
 after. Of the irreconcilables, some wrote great 
 books, and many died in our prisons and 
 workhouses. 
 
 Go at all monetary and other cost to a 
 Montessori school and watch. In five minutes, 
 if you have the gift of watching well, you will 
 have seen a miracle. You will see a little child 
 draw a beautiful letter and rub it out many, 
 many times to make it still more beautiful. 
 Later on you will see a concentration such as 
 you have never seen in infancy before ; you will 
 see new and wonderful types of children, sweet- 
 
20 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 voiced, gentle, graceful, full of a passion for order. 
 You will come away either praying for the future 
 or swearing at the past but you cannot come 
 away with unchanged ideas, because you have 
 seen the vision of a brand new world. 
 
 But if Montessori is the first to push conclusions 
 so far, she is not the first to have profited by the 
 fact that work and play for a child are inter- 
 changeable terms. Who can forget the wonders 
 wrought by " Egeria " in her village school in 
 Sussex so eloquently described by Mr. Edmond 
 Holmes in What Is and What Might Be ? And, 
 to go back further, Comenius and Ratichius and 
 Wolke and Pestalozzi and Froebel light up three 
 centuries of sombre educational history with the 
 flashes of prophetic genius. It is simply that 
 Montessori was at once deep in an almost new 
 science as well as rich in courage hence she can 
 state a universal truth after which others have 
 been merely groping. 
 
 The great secret that has at last been applied 
 completely in practice is that of Emerson when he 
 wrote : " The secret of education lies in respecting 
 the child/' Montessori did respect him, respected 
 him humanly, respected him, above all, scien- 
 tifically. She watched every movement and 
 tried to explain it, and, having found to what 
 it was tending, encouraged it and taught the 
 child to quicken its development. She found 
 that nothing was meaningless. 
 
 I can see no value in the comparison of Mon- 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 21 
 
 tessorism with the conceptions underlying the 
 kindergarten system. The kindergartener is still 
 High Priestess in her class, however gentle she 
 may be. The Montessori Directress is self- 
 effacement itself. She praises but little and she 
 never criticizes. Her advice is never imposed, 
 and her inspirations are the reflex of the inspira- 
 tions she has received from her children. There 
 is no time by which a child should have learned 
 to button its clothes or write " cat " she sits 
 patiently and watches for the moment when these 
 things shall come to pass. She shows the way, 
 but she neither drags, nor carries, nor pushes the 
 child along it because she knows that the 
 acceleration, while testing her own powers, would 
 do nothing to develop those of her little charge. 
 And she learns that the natural child, far from 
 liking to be helped, will struggle with infinite 
 patience to reach a self-proposed goal. 
 
 I am well aware that I am rendering myself 
 liable to the charge of too easily accepting the 
 claims made for a new and revolutionary system. 
 What about those who are incredulous about the 
 results of these experiments ? I am sorry to 
 be unaccommodating on this point, but I cannot 
 refrain from saying that I know no single person 
 who has penetrated to the depths of a method based 
 on very deep principles who expresses the same 
 incredulity as was implied in his first and hasty 
 judgments. Unfortunately both admirers and 
 censors are too often people who praise or condemn 
 
22 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 Montessorism without ever having taken serious 
 trouble to master either its theory or its practice. 
 There are people who, without having read either 
 Dr. Montessori's own book, or even the resumes of 
 other writers, consider themselves quite entitled 
 to pass judgment on this new psychology of 
 childhood, while ignorant of its first essentials. 
 One can only implore such critics to master a 
 little better that which they are criticizing and 
 venture, so far as politeness admits of it, to 
 consider their opinions as of negligible value. 
 
 When I first made acquaintance with the 
 Montessori school through the remarkable report 
 of Mr. Edmond Holmes, issued as a pamphlet 
 by the Board of Education, I felt at once that 
 not only had this way of teaching been fully 
 justified, but that there were a priori grounds 
 why it should be so. That fact does not, however, 
 prevent my realizing that the a priori deductions 
 of the average citizen would tend in a precisely 
 opposite direction. To countless thousands 
 Montessorism must appear as an extraordinary, 
 almost fantastic paradox. Very few people 
 appear to have a fair conception of true liberty 
 not realizing to what a remarkable extent 
 they are prisoners within their own houses, 
 and, what is worse, prisoners who have learned, 
 like some of the victims of the Bastille, to see 
 their only happiness within their prison walls. 
 To these, moulded to the idea of repression and 
 incapable of imagining that they would not 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 23 
 
 have become either clowns or rascals had their 
 activities not been checked in childhood to 
 these the idea of a free and happy childhood 
 suggests little more than licence grafted on to 
 the conditions of their own education. But here 
 they are making a very profound mistake. They 
 have to remember that they have never seen 
 a perfectly free child, for the completely satis- 
 factory reason that until the coming of the 
 Montessori school no such child had existed. 
 And there is no analogy whatever between the effects 
 of partial and of complete freedom. 
 
 It is to be remembered that liberty in the 
 Montessori sense means liberty in a limited and 
 controlled environment so that all arguments 
 from the effects of mere general indulgence are 
 quite beside the point. In reality general in- 
 dulgence has no tendency towards true freedom, 
 inasmuch as it exposes its recipient to the hundred 
 cramping influences sometimes good, sometimes 
 bad of a complicated and highly artificial 
 society. A person who was even inconceivably 
 " free " in his relations with the world in general 
 would be hopelessly fettered on every side. 
 Montessori's children mark the nearest approach to 
 actual living freedom that has ever been attained, 
 because the environment is so arranged that the 
 natural activities of the young are provided for 
 as they are provided for nowhere else. A child 
 who seemed to " do what it liked " in a street 
 would, for example, still be tied, because it would 
 
24 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 be the victim of servile imitation of older people, 
 or have its movements controlled by the presence 
 of a large grown-up audience. In a Montessori 
 school alone the child can be quite itself. 
 
 The effects of true liberty on childhood had thus 
 been, till a very few years ago, a matter of the 
 merest surmise although no impartial spectator 
 of the work of the George Junior Republics for 
 young criminals could have failed to gain very 
 valuable inspiration from the fact that the 
 apparently hopeless " loafer " learned to work 
 and to form ideals in an atmosphere of freedom, 
 when every measure of repression had failed even 
 to induce him to lead a passably innocent life. 
 If it is remarkable that relatively few drew the 
 full lesson of these particular miracles of moral 
 reclamation, we have to remember in the first 
 place that until a similar and highly successful 
 colony was established in this country the 
 American results were probably held to lack 
 full statistical confirmation, and in the second 
 place that such victories over bad moral ten- 
 dencies are apt to be attributed to the influence 
 of uniquely gifted individuals. But now that 
 the same triumphs are reported from the new 
 colony in Dorsetshire, these doubts cannot much 
 longer prevail, and it will soon have to be admitted 
 that the Montessori school and the criminal 
 commonwealth, while differing so widely in the 
 scope and the purpose of their work, are col- 
 lateral proofs of the power of Nature to restore 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 25 
 
 both the moral and the intellectual balance 
 of the individual once her restorative power has 
 been allowed full play. Here, as elsewhere, of 
 course, we have a special environment, but it 
 is in this case an environment arranged by the 
 average sentiment of a self-governing community 
 a sentiment which is healthy, (a) because 
 different sorts of evil tendency are mutually 
 destructive, and (b) because responsibility in 
 freedom has a singular power of evoking the 
 ambition to be worthy of the trust reposed in 
 those to whom it has been accorded. But how- 
 ever we are to explain the psychology under- 
 lying this restoration of the "black sheep " 
 among children to normal society, there appears 
 to be no doubt about the fact that such trans- 
 formations are frequent enough to be counted 
 upon as a matter of course. One point, however, 
 demands a special emphasis. Liberty without 
 true activity and that means for a child an 
 adjustment of individual and collective activity 
 is a sheer impossibility. To ask a child to 
 concentrate its mind on lessons learned under 
 conditions of silence and inertia is to ask more 
 from it than it is, in general, in its power to give. 
 That is why punishments and rewards play so 
 large a role in the administration of a school 
 conducted on traditional lines because we are 
 inviting the child to contradict the first law of 
 its own nature. 
 
 Anything more preposterous than this habit of 
 
26 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 expecting a child to sit for long hours a day and 
 listen attentively to the lessons of his master 
 or to the questioning of his fellow-pupils does not 
 exist. We ask a boy to be inert in precisely inverse 
 proportion to his own inner activity. We should 
 be sorry, as adults, even when we have learned 
 to concentrate our minds on the most tedious 
 of subjects, to go through the performance we 
 count on so absolutely from human beings at 
 the most restless period of their existence. Some- 
 times, indeed, we get a satisfactory response, 
 but at what a cost in the sacrifice of almost every 
 natural and healthy instinct one shudders to 
 contemplate. 
 
 So grotesque, indeed, has this inert school 
 seemed to certain critics who are also parents, 
 that I have heard it questioned and with 
 scientific arguments in support of the thesis 
 that children would be better out of school 
 altogether until they have reached the age of 
 twelve. While I do not, of course, accept this 
 quite impracticable suggestion, it seems to me 
 that it does by its very exaggeration point to 
 glaring defects in our existing system. It means 
 that there are scientifically minded parents who 
 believe that while school instruction is of the 
 highest importance, it may be bought at far too 
 high a price. 
 
 Whatever is to be the detail of the remedy, 
 I fancy we are on the point of realizing its general 
 nature. It will be the remedy of work in play 
 
PLAY THE BASIS 27 
 
 the only kind of work that nature respects or 
 encourages in her offspring before they have 
 attained adolescence. The play need not be 
 with toys, nor even be of the essence of a game. 
 All that is meant by play is work done with such 
 activity as to make a natural appeal to the 
 young. And those who have experimented in 
 evoking boys 1 real activities can tell us wonderful 
 tales of zeal and application can prove that the 
 dividing-line between play and work done 
 actively is so narrow as to be all but invisible. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE TAUNT OF " MAKING THINGS TOO EASY " 
 
 THERE is one attack on Montessorism and other 
 allied conceptions of education that we shall 
 live down much later than most others that 
 which lies in the proposition that life being a 
 struggle education must reflect throughout the 
 school-going period something of the difficulties 
 that have to be surmounted in the outside world. 
 Although I can attach no importance whatever 
 to this argument against activity in the school, 
 because I believe that it is based on a very serious 
 misconception, it would be very bad policy to 
 let it pass without attempting a refutation. 
 
 In the first place the mere urging of such an 
 objection shows only too clearly how far the critic 
 is the victim of his own up-bringing. He was 
 taught to regard work as something so diametrically 
 opposed to play that it took on an ineradicably 
 disagreeable association. He cannot conceive work 
 rendered so active and adapted so well to 
 the nature of the young that that disagreeable 
 association never has the chance to arise. A 
 boy's " objections to work " are not really 
 
 28 
 
u MAKING THINGS TOO EASY " 29 
 
 objections to work at all, but objections to work 
 which does not give scope to his inner activities. 
 Inactive work is abhorrent to him because it is 
 to him simply a superior form of loafing, or 
 rather an inferior form of loafing, inasmuch as 
 it is neither for good nor for evil on the plane of 
 his own being. 
 
 But if the critic means by " making things 
 easy " that the subject-matter of the work must 
 undergo profound modification before a " lazy 
 boy " will surmount it even under conditions of 
 activity, I can only say that my experience tends 
 to a precisely opposite conclusion. I have known 
 " lazy boys " get just as excited over French 
 verbs as over any game they ever played. And 
 if it is urged that because the boys are lazy the 
 work done must have been easy, I reply that the 
 work is neither innately more nor less easy than 
 work under (for them) impossible conditions 
 of inactivity. In short, they were not innately 
 lazy, but too strong in natural activities to be 
 able to substitute for them a purely artificial 
 and uncongenial sort of concentration. Now if 
 a boy is active in his work from infancy to adoles- 
 cence, it is surely almost self-evident that he will 
 have formed habits of concentration infinitely 
 more permanent than if he has absorbed his 
 knowledge in a way to which he was hostile 
 because it contradicted the laws of his nature. 
 
 Instead of allowing a kitten to teach itself in 
 its own way we might tie it in a chair and let 
 
30 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 it watch other cats engaged in catching mice 
 but I think we might very well doubt the 
 superiority of this over the older method of 
 learning the art of the feline chase. In particular, 
 I fancy the full grown cat's concentration on 
 mouse-catching would have lost rather than 
 gained by the change. 
 
 If there were any deep truth in the views of 
 the " pro-difficulty " school of critics, no poet 
 who had learned to write poetry for the sheer 
 joy of the thing in early years would be such a 
 good poet as he who had forced himself, in face 
 of profound aversion, to study and apply the 
 principles of versification ; an actor ought rather 
 to have studied than practised acting ; and the 
 mathematical genius should have neglected those 
 sides of his subject which most appealed to him 
 and for which he had most aptitude. In short 
 we could only end in a reductio ad absurdum, 
 implying that the aim of education is to con- 
 tradict the natural tendencies of the individual, 
 and that capacity allied with inclination is the 
 road to intellectual ruin. 
 
 To me it seems simply preposterous to believe 
 that disagreeable associations can ever have 
 helped towards a better method of work. Even 
 childhood gains, of course, by the difficulties 
 which are innate in work as they are in life 
 but to say that a child learns better because its 
 conditions of posture and behaviour are forced 
 and unnatural is to imply more than can ever 
 
"MAKING THINGS TOO EASY ' 31 
 
 be implied without landing oneself in a veritable 
 quagmire of error and false reasoning. 
 
 All this is apart from the fact that the child, 
 as Dr. Montessori would have proved if she had 
 proved nothing else, has an extraordinary degree 
 of concentration if once allowed to concentrate 
 in his own way. And it has been equally demon- 
 strated that this concentration is quite as striking 
 in its varied application as in its intensity. The 
 number of disagreeable household tasks a child 
 will take up in a Montessori school and regard 
 as play would be incredible but for the most 
 convincing of ocular evidence. And once this 
 play-association has developed, is it not reason- 
 able to suppose that it will serve to increase the 
 sum of cheerful work done in subsequent years ? 
 
 The great probability is that whatever the 
 conscious reasoning of the critics I am seeking 
 to answer, the unconscious basis of their tenets 
 is the monastic tradition. There are deep- 
 lying reasons why children should profit less 
 rapidly by the progress of social evolution than 
 any other body of human beings. The first and 
 greatest of these is that concessions made from 
 a governing to a governed class are generally 
 gained by strife and by the capacity in the 
 governed to support their claim, if needs be, by 
 force. Human nature being usually either hard 
 or indifferent, or, at the very least, impatient 
 of changes which bring it no clear personal 
 gain, has inevitably tended to give sophisticated 
 
32 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 answers to the troublesome plaints of the child. 
 So many other and stronger claims had to be 
 met that even if the child did deserve a little 
 more trust and a few more concessions to its 
 nature, was it worth while to take the risk of 
 a failure quite apart from the increased trouble 
 that the granting of a greater degree of self- 
 government to the young would entail ? How 
 many children have escaped the two extremes 
 of living under a system of external discipline 
 and of being " spoiled*' by that simulacrum of 
 true liberty, mere indulgence, I cannot say ; 
 but I imagine the number of those who have 
 grown up in freedom deliberately arranged and 
 tending to evoke all their best activities is extra- 
 ordinarily small. 
 
 So far as parents are concerned, the granting 
 of complete freedom with the closest supervision 
 and the most constant counsel and direction 
 implies many years of the most real self-sacrifice. 
 It is much easier to dress a very little child than 
 to watch its laborious efforts to dress itself; 
 and in many a poor home the mother is not in 
 a position to devote so much time to a priceless 
 factor in the evolution of the infant the more 
 especially since it is a factor the value of which 
 she may not even have suspected. 
 
 But the excuse of the parent hardly applies 
 to the schoolmaster. His business is to educate 
 scientifically and the basis of scientific education 
 is the study of the child. That many centuries 
 
" MAKING THINGS TOO EASY 1 33 
 
 of child study should have resulted in so little 
 essential change in the method of teaching is 
 one of the most saddening features in the social 
 history of Europe. Saddening and humiliating ; 
 for after all the message of Montessori is only a 
 sort of deeper good sense. All that is essential 
 in it is summed up in the two words, " respect " 
 and " watch " for any teacher who really 
 respects his children and watches closely their 
 development can hardly help arriving at the 
 germ idea of Montessorism. That Montessorism 
 can shock so many is simply a demonstration 
 of the large number who have neither respected 
 nor watched. (They have not even watched; 
 for he who watches a child must needs respect 
 must inevitably believe in its extraordinary 
 capacity for self-development.) 
 
 This rather long digression has at least the 
 value of tending to show that the world has done 
 little to prepare itself for the new doctrine and 
 of going to explain the failure to rise to the 
 conception of play-in-work as the true ideal of 
 at least ante-adolescent education. The word 
 "play " must be freed from all adult preconceptions 
 of its meaning as the expression of the soul of the 
 child. To us play (through the trend of our 
 own education, reacted upon by the claims of an 
 environment so strongly influenced in its turn 
 by the same educational tendencies as our own) 
 is essentially something apart from the main 
 business of life. To a child it is life itself. Far 
 
34 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 from precluding the useful it is the child's one 
 conscious means of proceeding to useful ends. 
 And once we offer him the absolutely useful as 
 material on which to employ his energies he will 
 welcome it with just the same avidity as that 
 which he had hitherto regarded as useful on the 
 evidence of his own subjective impressions. 
 
 Our scholastic system is based on a false analogy 
 between the essence of concentration in child- 
 hood and that of later years. (And even in 
 manhood it is to be noticed that we absorb 
 infinitely better the knowledge which we seek 
 ourselves than that which is imposed upon us 
 from without.) Concentration on uninteresting 
 work is to an adult difficult, but not in general 
 impossible ; to a child it is a complete contra- 
 diction of the laws of his being. If he is not 
 interested he may learn certain mechanical 
 principles underlying the subject-matter of his 
 studies ; but he never can and never will in- 
 corporate their spirit and their living force. 
 
 Does this mean that certain subjects now 
 taught must be left alone until the child is ready 
 to take to them of his own volition ? Not 
 necessarily, for, as I have already pointed out, 
 there is an extraordinary versatility and power 
 of adaptation in the young mind. There is no 
 subject that carries with it the scope for really 
 active work (active with both individual and 
 collective activity) that will not make a definite 
 appeal to childhood. Any child that likes to 
 
" MAKING THINGS TOO EASY" 35 
 
 overcome the varied difficulties of games will 
 like to overcome the varied difficulties of school 
 routine provided that he can overcome them 
 in his own way. I have tried to bore my boys 
 with the dullest sides of their subjects (that is 
 the sides that were dullest under the blight of 
 silence and impassivity), and so long as they 
 worked in partnership they have refused to be 
 bored. Often, indeed, one finds that the theoretic- 
 ally dullest work ends by fascinating the boys 
 the most because the essence of dull work is 
 an accumulation of slight but constant difficulties. 
 Taken rapidly these difficulties seem simply 
 an exhilarating exercise ; taken slowly and 
 serially they spell profound boredom. 
 
 After all the work of Egeria has proved that 
 children who have worked with real activity 
 at school go out into the world with an extra- 
 ordinary zest for the most unpromising of 
 occupations. Therein lies this teacher's most 
 valuable contribution to the new theory of 
 education. No similar system has had a long 
 enough trial to enable us to say how the children 
 will adapt themselves to the humdrum pursuits 
 to which most of us are fated. We have Mr. 
 Edmond Holmes' authority for believing that 
 Egeria's children carried their enthusiasm for 
 work into the routine of the wage-earner. This 
 is a truly great victory for the cause of freedom 
 in childhood and in some ways the greatest 
 of all 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WASTAGE OF THE DIDACTIC METHOD 
 
 THE two main reasons why the didactic method 
 has prevailed so long in schools are (a) that 
 nobody has suggested another, and (b) that 
 occasionally, owing to the genius of exceptional 
 masters, it was possible to introduce into it some 
 shade of individual activity on the part of the 
 pupils. But these flashes of originality in apply- 
 ing a method that can hardly ever have com- 
 pletely satisfied the really understanding teacher, 
 have only served to accentuate the general 
 gloom overshadowing these centuries of educa- 
 tion. 
 
 The outstanding evil is waste ; waste of time, 
 waste of energy, waste of character and waste 
 of opportunity. We have wasted time, because 
 we have had either to base our questions on a 
 purely imaginary average boy or else to in- 
 dividualise them, so that they are largely wasted 
 so far as the listeners are concerned. We have 
 wasted energy because we are doing the lion's 
 share of the work, thus depriving the boy of that 
 active participation which he demands as the 
 
 36 
 
THE DIDACTIC METHOD 37 
 
 first condition of showing intelligent interest. 
 We have wasted character for many reasons, 
 but principally because we had little time to 
 encourage original ways of working and because 
 our discipline, owing to the abnormal inertia 
 of the class, had to be external and based 
 on punishments or rewards. We have wasted 
 opportunity because every boy carries in him 
 the secret of his own mental growth, and we had 
 no means of inducing him to reveal himself. 
 
 If we examine an average form in any one 
 subject, we are immediately struck by the extra- 
 ordinary variety of degrees of knowledge possessed 
 by different boys. Sometimes there is a gap 
 of three forms between the top and the bottom 
 pupils for a boy's remove is not usually decided 
 on his proficiency in any one subject. Never- 
 theless all are set to the same work, and are even 
 given the same quantities of it to master. Either 
 the demand is based on the powers of the top, 
 of a middle or of the bottom boy but however 
 it is conditioned it can never be ideally fitted to 
 more than, say, four or five boys out of twenty. 
 For another four or five it will be deplorably 
 unsuitable, and for the rest it will not be better 
 than badly adjusted. If the evil ended here we 
 might content ourselves with the expression of 
 a mild dissatisfaction. But when we have added 
 to this a uniformity of method which has no 
 greater degree of adjustability to individual 
 needs than the work itself ; when we see the 
 
38 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 clever boys tied with stupid boys for a sort of 
 three-legged race with others equally hampered 
 in their movements then our disapproval takes 
 on new force. 
 
 Now that I have had the opportunity of study- 
 ing boys working in perfect freedom, I begin to 
 understand the full measure of wrong done in 
 the old way of teaching. The extent to which 
 children differ in their method of work is almost 
 incredible. In French some hitherto lazy but 
 now enthusiastic boys tend to work almost 
 incessantly with their pen ; others only write 
 when reminded by their partner, and seek nearly 
 all their knowledge through conversation. Under 
 the didactic system no allowance would be made 
 for this difference (depending mostly, as I have 
 proved, on whether the boy is stronger in visual 
 or in auditory memory), and perhaps a third of 
 the class would be at a disadvantage. 
 
 The actual loss of speaking-time enjoyed by 
 each boy under the old as compared with the 
 new system is simply immense. I suppose most 
 masters have realized that in a French class of 
 twenty, if they themselves speak half of each hour, 
 a boy has only one minute and a half in which to 
 express himself ! Is it any wonder that even 
 after seven years of this exiguous practice he is 
 frequently at a loss to frame the simplest sentence ? 
 I am surprised that he speaks as well as he 
 does, considering that his actual conversational 
 practice in those seven years has probably 
 
THE DIDACTIC METHOD 39 
 
 amounted to something like twenty-four 
 hours ! 
 
 As for encouraging originality, such a thing is 
 clearly impossible where it depends on the direct 
 evocation of the master, for he has the time 
 neither to ask for individuality nor to study its 
 manifestations. Indeed it is the troublesome 
 side of individuality that becomes the greatest 
 thorn in his flesh. And wheat and tares have to 
 be sacrificed together, lest the mechanical side 
 of the work should be sacrificed to the personal 
 and human. 
 
 English literature is studied by the very slow 
 reading of so many " books " recommended by 
 the " locals " delegates and the whole class 
 must both read the same texts and maintain the 
 same pace in the reading of them. No matter 
 how much a boy longs to read King Lear, he must 
 read Julius Ctesar ; no matter how much Shakes- 
 peare he would like to read, he is nailed to the 
 unceasing study of one play, from which, judged 
 from his own point of view, he seems to have 
 extracted all the sap. 
 
 In this matter we have much to learn from the 
 better elementary schools, where, within the 
 limits of a well-chosen class-room library, a boy 
 may read what he likes. This practice prevails 
 also, I believe, in most schools in America. And 
 it seems to me not only to be the best possible, 
 but the only way of learning to appreciate good 
 literature. Of course it does not preclude the 
 
40 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 intensive study of certain short texts but this 
 sort of work should surely occupy much less time 
 than that given to actual initiation into the 
 beauties of literature. Any one who experi- 
 ments on the lines of giving his pupils free choice 
 among the best books will soon find with what 
 extraordinary zest they read classics which would 
 have irritated and discouraged them if supplied 
 to them as " texts." I have always noticed 
 that even with what is treated on the " set- 
 books " plan, the boys were delighted with the 
 purely aesthetic beginnings of the work, and 
 one could see at this stage a rapid evolution 
 from the schoolboy (a monstrous type, infinitely 
 remote from the uncorrupted original) to the 
 boy of nature and of free self -development. 
 
 That any boy should regard either literature 
 or history as a " bore " is the clearest proof of 
 the deadening way in which they are taught. 
 The idea of limiting history, for example, to the 
 narrow study of a mere textbook is enough to 
 kill in a boy even the most remarkable aptitude 
 for his subject. Probably nothing fascinates 
 the average youth more than full, richly-coloured 
 reproductions of the past of nations. The 
 " dramatic instinct " is strong enough to make 
 him a crusader among crusaders, a baron among 
 barons, and a bishop among revolting bishops. 
 But he must have material to satisfy his imagina- 
 tion, and not be insulted by the offer of the 
 lifeless chronicle of a self-proclaimed school- 
 
THE DIDACTIC METHOD 41 
 
 book. And different boys will seek different 
 sources of joy in their reading. The boy strong 
 of physique and full of a higher animality will 
 revel in great battles and victories over over- 
 whelming odds ; a practical boy will see all in 
 the light of invention and material progress ; 
 some boy cast in a more delicate mould than 
 either will respond to a note of poetry, to a touch 
 of pageantry, to a subtle interplay of person- 
 alities. Each benefits most by that for which 
 he is best adapted ; and none loses, because in 
 the long run the roads converge and the boy 
 emerges if with different (and, I hold, more 
 valuable) views, at any rate much at the same 
 point of practical acquaintance with his subject 
 as that reached by his fellows. 
 
 In mathematics we have in an exaggerated 
 form the worst evils resulting from differing 
 rates of progress. If festina lente applies any- 
 where it applies to mathematics. The great 
 probability is that nobody need be quite such 
 a hopelessly bad mathematician as so many of 
 us are as I am myself if we were not rushed 
 through a series of " rules " and principles before 
 we had had time properly to master one. In 
 no other subject is the laggard quite so much at 
 the mercy of the proficient. I can dimly remember 
 that I used rather to enjoy doing mathematical 
 work on a portion of the subject that I thoroughly 
 understood ; but hardly had I had time to form 
 this pleasant association than I was dragged along 
 
42 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 till I was out of my depth and had become once 
 more the sworn foe of mathematicians and all 
 their works. 
 
 There seems to be no obvious remedy so long 
 as collective teaching continues to be the working 
 ideal. Even with a system that pays the maxi- 
 mum of attention to the arrangement of forms 
 and classes and " sets/' the adjustment of the 
 pace of different boys is beyond hope of attain- 
 ment the excessive " speeding-up " of one 
 and the equally wasteful retarding of another 
 is an evil innate in the traditional method of 
 teaching, and cannot be removed until we have 
 removed its cause. 
 
 But the worst effects of the collective method 
 are of a more general character. They lie in 
 the inevitable discouragement of originality, in 
 the excessive prominence of the master, in the 
 mechanical tendencies of the work, in the sub- 
 stitution for education in its true etymological 
 sense of what we might call " injection " (or 
 forcible inoculation with unasked-f or facts) . The 
 greatest hope of the new school lies, I fancy, in 
 using human material that has hitherto been 
 rendered almost useless, and in showing that it 
 may be the best of all material. The model 
 boy of unlimited powers of artificial concentra- 
 tion is destined probably, under a system based 
 on activity and personal work, to sink at least to 
 the middle of the form ; I see my Superman much 
 nearer the bottom than the top of existing classes. 
 
THE DIDACTIC METHOD 43 
 
 I shall not here anticipate the conclusions 
 to which this book is tending, and therefore I 
 postpone till later the consideration of my remedy 
 for the state of affairs which has prevailed in 
 slightly differing forms since the dawn of edu- 
 cation. At present I am only concerned with 
 showing what so many even among the most 
 conservative teachers already know that we 
 have been working for thousands of years to 
 a wholly wrong conclusion. It is a dreadful 
 thought that through all those ages we had no 
 single child educated intelligently in an atmos- 
 phere of active freedom or of free activity to 
 oppose to those brought up under a system of 
 organized repression. But the New Child has 
 now been seen and the seed of a new philosophy 
 of childhood has at last been sown. It is perhaps 
 for another generation to reap the wonderful 
 harvest. The doctrine of Montessorism is possibly 
 the most priceless contribution ever made to 
 the wisdom of the world, and if its greatest 
 value is on the constructive side, its first function 
 will be to criticize and to destroy. 
 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WAYS TO ACTIVITY 
 
 IN a preceding chapter it was admitted that as 
 early as the sixteenth century great teachers had 
 tried the experiment of turning work into play, 
 and had proved to the satisfaction of their 
 contemporaries that better results are secured 
 when children follow than when they contradict 
 the line of their natural choice. Such men as 
 Ratichius, Comenius and later on Wolke, seem 
 to have gained an approval for their aims such 
 as would hardly be so generally accorded to a 
 teacher having similar ideals in our own day. 
 But whatever the moral support they enjoyed, 
 they failed to induce any large number of teachers 
 to follow in their footsteps. 
 
 I have endeavoured, in searching among records 
 of various educational experiments, to find any 
 modern successful effort to introduce complete 
 activity, individual and collective, into the school 
 class ; but, with the one exception of Miss 
 Finlay Johnson's emancipation of her children 
 in a Sussex village school, I have failed to dis- 
 cover the practice of any new theory having more 
 
 44 
 
WAYS TO ACTIVITY 45 
 
 than a special and localized application. Of 
 course teachers have varied enormously in the 
 degree of activity they have secured from that 
 attained by the sphinx-like, monosyllabic queller 
 of the superfluous snapping of a finger to the 
 joyous " big brother " who, within the mechanical 
 limitations of time and of numbers, encourages 
 every spontaneous impulse which is not hurtful 
 or disturbing to others. But when all is said, 
 teaching a collectivity suggests limitations much 
 rather than a charter of freedom, even in regard 
 to the most innocent manifestations of person- 
 ality. 
 
 But Miss Finlay Johnson undoubtedly did 
 wonders in her Sussex village, and although I 
 have a different and, I only hope, parallel 
 remedy to offer, I must here burn a little incense 
 to what I consider to be one of the most inter- 
 esting and convincing educational experiments 
 ever carried out. Nothing is more remarkable 
 nor should be more flattering to our national 
 pride than that Miss Finlay Johnson had 
 completed her experiment before the name of 
 Montessori had been whispered in this country. 
 
 Of the dramatic method of teaching for, after 
 all, that was the basis of Miss Johnson's system, 
 and the ingredient necessary to an activity with- 
 out which freedom can never be accorded to 
 children I shall here say no more than that it 
 is applicable wherever the right teacher can be 
 found to apply it, and that its supreme virtue, 
 
46 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 so far as younger children are concerned, is that 
 it is in close psychological relation with a recog- 
 nized instinct of early development in all human 
 beings. Even without outside suggestion all 
 children have a quite obvious love of " make- 
 believe/' and it is no more than the fulfilment 
 of an a priori probability that history and arith- 
 metic (the last learned through a shopkeeping 
 game) should have been better mastered on these 
 than on conventional lines of teaching. 
 
 Much has been written directly and indirectly 
 about the success of this method, but what I 
 have found most stimulating to the imagination 
 is the remarkable idealism that this gifted teacher 
 found and that before Montessori had taught 
 us what to expect in a school that she had 
 gradually emancipated from all external punish- 
 ments and rewards. Some of the miracles of 
 auto-education particularly in the matter of 
 drawing which have been described elsewhere, 
 show clearly that free activity in the school is 
 capable of developing simultaneously and at a 
 quite extraordinary pace both the intellect and 
 the aesthetic and moral senses. 
 
 Having thus paid my homage to a remarkable 
 achievement of child-emancipation in an ele- 
 mentary school, I am free to state why I think 
 that the dramatic method alone, even in the hands 
 of a specially endowed secondary schoolmaster, 
 could not supply the whole foundation of our 
 system of teaching. It has first to be remarked 
 
WAYS TO ACTIVITY 47 
 
 that while the dramatic instinct in children is 
 both to be recognized, and as far as possible 
 provided for, it is only one of many instincts 
 that we have hitherto starved and neglected. 
 And there are others such as what we may call 
 respectively the constructive and the research 
 instincts which seem to me to be more essential, 
 and to offer in a less degree the danger of over- 
 development. If acting teaches the child to 
 imagine and to sympathize, it might eventually 
 (I hasten to say that we have proofs that it did 
 not do so as employed by Miss Finlay Johnson) 
 weaken the sense of intellectual truth and soften 
 the moral fibre. 
 
 I proceed now to my own view of what is the 
 best general remedy for existing inertia in the 
 school dealing with it for the moment on its 
 theoretical side, and leaving all practical descrip- 
 tion till a later chapter. 
 
 How are we to get activity from every boy 
 in a class of, let us say, twenty-six (the number 
 of letters in the alphabet) ? Let us look at a 
 class of the existing type an imaginary but an 
 average one and suppose that it is studying 
 French. Tabulated: (a), (b), (c), (d) and (e) 
 could recognize at once the meaning of Est-ce 
 que vous avez vu le Tsar? and each could reply 
 to it after a moment's thought ; (/), (g), (h) and 
 (i) would probably understand Est-ce que vous 
 avez vu . . ., but would reply in more or less 
 correct French to an imaginary question about 
 
48 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 le chat; (/), (k) t (/), (m), (n) and (6) will be able 
 laboriously to piece together the elements con- 
 tained in Est-ce que vous avez vu . . ., but will 
 be quite incapable of framing a reply ; from 
 (p) to (z) the question will vary from a difficult 
 puzzle to " double Dutch/' But suppose, on 
 the contrary, my question is Est-ce que la porte 
 est fermee ? That question can be answered 
 even by (w) and (x) (y) and (z) seem incapable 
 of answering any question whatsoever but to 
 the boys from (a) to let us say (/) the reply is as 
 easy as saying anything in English, and therefore 
 has practically no drill-value at all. 
 
 Of course I shall be charged with deliberately 
 making out a bad case for collective teaching, 
 but even if this example is a very slight exaggera- 
 tion of the evils of the old system, I think the 
 enlightened teacher will admit that it is not a 
 sheer distortion of the facts of the case. 
 
 My impression is that not one schoolmaster 
 in ten realizes the depths of sullen hopelessness 
 to which questions " pitched " even for (m) 
 reduce (v) and still more (z) ; or the sense of 
 wasted time produced in the mind of (e) when 
 the question is based on the capacity of (r). 
 Whatever the principle on which the inter- 
 rogations are arranged there will be a huge 
 misadjustment somewhere. 
 
 Now are these evils remediable so long as the 
 master takes his class collectively ? I hold 
 that they are not. No amount of the most 
 
WAYS TO ACTIVITY 49 
 
 ingenious " pitching " of questions can remove 
 the fact that no single question has ever quite 
 the same value for any four let alone twenty- 
 six boys. So that on top of the inactivity 
 imposed by stress of numbers and of limited 
 opportunity, we have the further crushing 
 influence of inappropriate evocation of know- 
 ledge. At least half the form is always suffering 
 by hearing questions that are either beyond its 
 intelligent comprehension or below the level 
 of its own attainments. To say that a whole 
 form can satisfy under these conditions my 
 demand for " a combination of individual with 
 collective activity " is to allege what cannot 
 possibly be true. 
 
 If the master cannot teach with success col- 
 lectively, he cannot teach " distributively," that 
 is he cannot take the boys individually or in 
 groups at all. Thus all hope of a solution so 
 long as we depend for it on the master as direct 
 teacher of his class is excluded. To whom, then, 
 must we turn ? The traditionalist can only 
 answer " to nobody." To the open-minded 
 man of logic there is an alternative answer, but 
 an answer that will probably condemn itself, 
 at the first blush, as unconsciously absurd. It 
 will come, in any case, tentatively, timidly, 
 interrogatively. To the boys ? 
 
 What an absurdity I Boys teach one another I 
 There would be a bear-garden in half an hour, 
 if not in ten minutes ! What inaccuracy ! 
 D 
 
50 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 What neglect of vital principles ! What subter- 
 fuges of pretended activity ! What a chance 
 for " ragging " and for escape from all the 
 restraints of healthy discipline ! ... Is it 
 not so ? ... NO, disappointing as it may 
 be, paradoxical as it may be to those who have 
 never seen the boy beneath the schoolboy, it 
 is not so ! It is precisely the contrary. In a 
 few minutes the only " rag " is the excitement 
 of work made active till it takes on a new and 
 delightful association, and turns to play to 
 rich and beautiful play, to the game of over- 
 coming difficulties step by step, to that rapid 
 exercise which holds the young spell-bound as 
 they feel from moment to moment their rapidly 
 growing power. For weeks this goes on, till 
 dullard after dullard comes up to an average 
 level he had never dreamt of attaining, till an 
 hour will pass without the need even for an 
 encouraging word from the master. 
 
 No longer a look of hopelessness, no longer 
 anywhere a vestige of discouragement. Each 
 boy makes his own pace, each boy makes his own 
 method a wonderful method that nobody else 
 could ever have invented for him each boy frames 
 his own work with the loving care of the genius he 
 is when his own self-development is the prize. 
 All this comes almost at once if he is no more than 
 twelve or thirteen uncorrupted by much past 
 imprisonment. With a boy of sixteen it may take 
 from six to eight weeks to reawaken his sleeping 
 
WAYS tO ACTIVITY 51 
 
 powers of initiative. The worst are the " cage 
 birds," as I call them the dutiful little slaves 
 of the system of repression. They, poor boys, 
 are lost at first, and know not where to turn. 
 Then they see themselves beaten hopelessly by 
 the " slacker" of a few weeks ago now happy, 
 free and soaring ; and it is then that they begin to 
 see that the wires of that cage are not impassable. 
 But it is they, never that famous "hopeless" 
 boy, who fly the last. Because there is no great- 
 ness in them. No sane man would ever look 
 first for greatness to the top of a class ; fifth from 
 the bottom would be, on the average, a promising 
 place to keep an eye on. It is a miracle of 
 adaptability when a great-souled boy can remain 
 great and still rise to the top of a collectively- 
 taught class. And the best are not generally the 
 best at adapting themselves to the wearing of 
 needless chains. 
 
 I apologize for talking a foreign language, but 
 it is the language we shall all be talking soon, 
 and we have to get used to its strange accents. 
 It is difficult indeed to swallow at one gulp the 
 fact that the admitted great men of the world 
 have succeeded in spite of, and not because of, 
 their greatness. If I were to meet the spirit of 
 Shakespeare, and if I were not too much alarmed 
 at the rencontre, I would first wager him that he 
 was never near the top of his classes. I would 
 add that he would have never been anywhere else 
 if he had been free to work actively and in his 
 
52 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 own way in a class conducted on partnership 
 lines. I am sure he would agree with me. 
 
 I claim for this system which will be dealt 
 with fully and from a purely practical point of 
 view later on (a) that it is the only possible means 
 of adapting work to the craving for activity of 
 the lazy (that is, generally speaking, those boys 
 who had in the beginning a particular love of 
 rapidly overcoming difficulties) ; (b) that it alone 
 can pay any real regard to originality ; (c) that 
 there is no other way of maintaining a suitable 
 rate of progress for differing degrees of intelligence ; 
 and (d) that it is the sole satisfactory outlet for 
 great gifts in the school-going period of life. 
 Hitherto no single human being has ever been 
 properly measured while he was at school, be- 
 cause nobody had a fair chance to follow the lines 
 of his own development. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM 
 
 JUST as a man would find it extremely difficult to 
 be good if he were compelled to lead the restless 
 existence of a child, so few children can long be 
 good if they are constrained to be as passive and 
 inert as an average man. There is no " innate 
 evil" in this, and he who holds that there is must 
 needs be innately stupid, or at least innately 
 illogical. It is simply the same law of nature 
 that makes a fish rebel against efforts to teach 
 it the advantages of a siesta on the grass, or that 
 leads a wild bird to see charms in a wider world 
 than can be found inside the most spacious and 
 beautiful cage. It is a fact of nature that we 
 should not only accept, but to which we should 
 adjust the underlying principles of our system of 
 education. 
 
 Without activity no child can in any practical 
 sense be free. Otherwise a child placed in the 
 midst of a desert would be held to be free, 
 whereas we know that it could nowhere else have 
 less real freedom. Hence no argument is to be 
 drawn from the moral failures incidental to an 
 
 53 
 
54 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 inactive childhood. A young boy revolts just 
 as naturally from hours of impassivity as we 
 grown-ups would revolt from the effort to impose 
 on us a day of ceaseless movement. The in- 
 dulgently treated " only son " may have a certain 
 measure of what we may call spatial freedom, 
 but he has little of aky other kind ; for few pro- 
 visions are made for the encouragement of his 
 childish instincts, and he is left to make the most 
 of a life which is half imitation of what is prac- 
 tically another species of human being, and half 
 repression of his own efforts to grow in nature's 
 own way. When he proves ill-adapted to later 
 association with his peers, this is due much less 
 to " indulgence " (although the word has just as 
 disagreeable an association for the understanding 
 apostle of liberty as for the repressionist) than 
 to a failure to arrange for the child an en- 
 vironment to which his nature can directly 
 respond. 
 
 The brutal and the indulgent inhibition of 
 child activities come very much to the same 
 thing. The brute forcibly shuts the child's 
 mouth and punishes it if it moves ; the indulgent 
 elder teaches a child that it must not be expected 
 to do anything for itself no matter how much 
 it longs to because it is " so little." Either 
 treatment is well calculated to produce a machine, 
 if it does not produce a rebel, and both have 
 tended to produce rebels in the unhappily few 
 cases in which they did not produce machines. 
 
DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM 55 
 
 If the machines had been even good machines 
 we should have had much less to complain of ; 
 but they were machines of such small range of 
 application and so monstrously alike that one 
 was beginning, about the time of the coming of 
 Montessori, to pray for more rebels. 
 
 Montessorism has two grievances against the 
 old-fashioned type of teacher that he is apt to 
 repress the finest manifestations of that activity 
 which is essential to healthy growth, and that 
 when he is not deeply guilty in this direction he 
 frequently " nurses " his pupils out of all power 
 to rely on their own endeavours. Now the 
 natural boy and this has been proved by 
 Montessori, by Miss Finlay Johnson, and, I 
 venture to say, by myself has an intense love 
 of doing everything for himself. Whether you 
 interfere with this tendency forcibly or by a 
 mistaken kindness, he will be equally ungrateful 
 at least until his nature has been corrupted 
 by practice to dependence on others. He loves 
 difficulties as he loves light and air, but he does 
 not love to be seized by the hand and rushed 
 across broken country, hardly setting foot to 
 earth, by some wiseacre who knows everything 
 but the nature of his victim. 
 - In partnership work none of these difficulties 
 exist. Each boy works on happily at his own 
 stage of development and at his own pace which 
 is always infinitely the fastest in the long run. 
 He is happy in his activity and has no need of 
 
56 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 outside distractions, and so his conduct gets 
 progressively better and gradually extends to 
 a desire to write neatly, to be tidy, to be light of 
 foot, to be polite to other boys and to be frank 
 and open in his dealings with his master. The 
 latter he sees in a new light, as the first adult 
 human being who has really understood the inner 
 cravings of his nature for active occupation 
 as the first adult human being who has believed 
 in his natural goodness and his desire to grow 
 wisely and well. And that master gets a colossal 
 power, a power which no master under a system 
 of repression can ever have. Issuing no com- 
 mands, delivering no ultimata, his lightest hint 
 is a command, a grave look has the weight of an 
 ultimatum. 
 
 If you go through the catalogue of ordinary 
 school offences you will find mighty few that have 
 any innate evil whatsoever. Nine times out of 
 ten these faults are Nature's reassertion of the 
 child's inalienable right to express itself in speech 
 and movement with more vigour and continuity 
 than the adult. Some lunatic having evolved 
 the idea, six thousand or more years ago, that 
 boys must do their work precisely in the same way 
 as adults, we have made that our ideal of education 
 ever since. Whence a farcical pretence at dis- 
 cipline, which was in point of fact no discipline 
 at all, since there can be no discipline where we 
 are handcuffed, fettered and gagged even though 
 the gag, the fetters and the handcuffs are not 
 
DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM 57 
 
 always tight enough quite to prevent a little 
 speech and an occasional movement. 
 
 Punishments are a splendid way of making 
 a really spirited boy do mischievous things that 
 he would never dream of doing if the punish- 
 ments did not exist. This fact, which many 
 grown-up people have forgotten, is a common- 
 place with boys. You will probably be able to 
 get it, by the Socratic method, from the very 
 first boy you meet. 
 
 Nevertheless it is possible that in a more or 
 less inactive class, taken by a master collectively, 
 either punishments or rewards (which are only 
 inverted punishments) are a necessity. No boy 
 who was full of sap and vigour would reduce 
 himself to the rank of a servile listener for five 
 hours a day without some stimulus. Those who 
 can do so easily may rise to the top of the class, 
 but I question very seriously whether " apart 
 from the context " it is a case of the survival of 
 the fittest. A great boy will not only be great 
 in, but great in the defence of, his nature. The 
 fact that such a boy, worsted but not unconverted, 
 ends by being " a sullen lout " proves that the 
 system has scored some sort of a vile victory, 
 but it does not, and never can prove, that the boy 
 was not made for infinitely better things. 
 
 If there is no truth in this contention, what 
 of the Little Commonwealth and the wonderful 
 capacity shown by young criminals (and criminals 
 once held to be " hopeless " at that) in self- 
 
58 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 government ? I am not at all convinced that the full 
 extent of these moral victories is not directly due to the 
 fact that nature had marked out some of her moral 
 derelicts to be her moral heroes. Rebels against 
 school repression, they also rebelled, illogically but 
 naturally enough, against even the larger re- 
 pression of the world. But such daring theories 
 are probably too far advanced for our age of 
 black-and-white psychology and of unimaginative 
 preconceptions, so I shall urge them no further. 
 
 You cannot mould childhood in a mould of 
 adult devising no matter how ideal that mould 
 may theoretically seem to be. And all efforts 
 to do so must needs mean the deforming of the 
 young nature no matter on what pinnacle we 
 choose to set any particular product of the process 
 of deformation. The moral nature, like the 
 intellectual, has suffered to a great, to an 
 inestimable extent, by our system of repression. 
 If even the infant a creature that nature made 
 selfish so that it might live can learn in freedom 
 ways of orderliness, of gentleness, of intense 
 concentration, of adaptability to an artificially 
 contrived environment, one asks what would 
 not this new type have become, once arrived at 
 an age that Nature meant to be more altruistic 
 and more highly socialized ? 
 
 I must not here dwell on what my boys have 
 taught me, because the moral results of partner- 
 ship work are to be considered in detail in future 
 pages. I will only say now that all that I have 
 
DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM 59 
 
 seen has gone to confirm the results obtained by 
 others, has accorded to a most convincing extent 
 with the theory that education in perfect liberty 
 gives us a moral strength and a moral initiative 
 in the many such as one could only get from 
 a very few under a system of external 
 discipline. 
 
 So much for the moral effects of freedom. 
 But if they are great, how much greater are the 
 effects of activity ! For activity is the first of 
 all essentials of healthy growth in early years. 
 If we could see clearly through the mist of long 
 habit and inveterate prejudice, we should hardly 
 find a child who was not a mere caricature of his 
 natural self, robbed, as he had been, of all that 
 was best in his nature in order to leave room 
 either for all that was worst or that was most 
 commonplace in his environment. 
 
 Of course the followers of Montessori must be 
 prepared to say why they believe that good 
 morals can be learned brightly and positively 
 much better than they can be learned gloomily 
 and in the light of a mere negation of evil. For 
 here we touch upon an obvious source of attack 
 on the new discipline. The answer is very 
 nearly the same as that which we have to give 
 (and which I have given) to the charge of " making 
 things too easy " in the sphere of the intellect. 
 Once children are free their will is to gain power 
 on the lines of the interest placed before them/ 
 Thus if we desire to make children tidy we need 
 
60 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 and should say little about the negative " un- 
 tidiness/' but let them see, first, if necessary, 
 by games, and then by suggestion, that the 
 effort to be tidy, like every other effort, can be 
 a manifestation of natural activity. Still later 
 (if the lesson has not yet been learned) it should 
 be associated with the general growth towards 
 a love of order, as well as with instances of 
 applied order, derived, for example, from birds' 
 nests, from the engineering works of the beaver, 
 from mathematics, from the carpenter's shop. 
 Physical orderliness should also be made to suggest 
 and be suggested by the idea of order in the 
 expression of thought. 
 
 If this way of teaching moral principles seems 
 to imply an unjustifiable belief in childhood, I 
 venture to assert that no one who has seen a 
 free child could possibly doubt that the results 
 would be a hundredfold better than those obtained 
 by any system of inhibition. The first desire 
 of the free child is to excel on lines of activity, 
 just as the first desire of the caged child is to 
 have its needs provided for. And if anybody 
 says : " That is not my experience of freedom/' 
 I can only repeat once more that since there can 
 be no approach to real freedom save in a specially 
 contrived school, this " experience " is not 
 experience of the child we are speaking of, but 
 of some unhappy midway type between the 
 products of two systems. 
 
 It is singular that one body of critics should 
 
DISCIPLINE IN FREEDOM 61 
 
 be dubious of Montessorism as an effective means 
 to produce a high moral type ; and that another 
 should only wonder whether the type educed 
 will not be too fine and too ideal for a harsh and 
 clumsy world ! 
 
 To my mind it is simply and solely a question 
 of opposing Activity to Inertness as means to 
 moral development. Nothing in this world, 
 especially in the sphere of conduct, can be mathe- 
 matically certain ; but if anything may be assumed 
 it is surely that the greatest danger in childhood 
 is to choke the natural outlets of self-expression, 
 and to inhibit even so much of movement and of 
 speech as is essential to true growth. And that 
 is what is being done to-day in very nearly every 
 school in the Occident. So that if stone-throwing 
 begins, the aggressors had better remember that 
 their house is made of very thin glass, and that 
 a new building is not ipso facto the weakest, 
 more particularly when the materials of which 
 it is constructed are the product of a new theory 
 and of scientific laws in process of reconstruction. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BOY VERSUS THE SCHOOLBOY 
 
 MOST people talk about " boys " as though they 
 had ever seen one. I have never seen one 
 myself, but I have seen them in the making, and 
 so I venture to point out that the " schoolboy " 
 is about as remote from the true boy as the 
 kettledrum is from the violin. 
 
 The schoolboy is a highly specialized product 
 of a curious and entirely unnatural environ- 
 ment. Having spent endless hours sitting in 
 unnaturally cramped positions, having been 
 silenced when he spoke, having been told what 
 he ought and ought not to do for almost every 
 conjuncture in life, having been reduced gradually 
 towards the level of a mere machine he emerges 
 into a play-world where all his companions have 
 been through a precisely similar performance. 
 If he is not quite a machine, he comes out more 
 or less rebellious and is ready for plots and privy 
 conspiracies against a system which he feels 
 subconsciously is all wrong but only so far as he 
 is concerned. He is not sufficiently free of mind 
 to have generalized, even if he has reached the 
 
 62 
 
BOY v. SCHOOLBOY 63 
 
 age to do so, but he does feel that he has been 
 loafing, and he does feel that he does not want 
 to loaf if he can see a clear and natural way 
 to do otherwise. He is at once humbled and 
 hardened, and he flies naturally to others who 
 have been humbled and hardened like himself. 
 This is not deliberate but purely instinctive. 
 
 A subtle poison spreads which most people 
 would not identify as a poison at all the poison 
 which creates the illusion that work is one thing 
 (and a hated and horrible thing), and that play is 
 another (the lifting off one's shoulders of a dreadful 
 incubus, irresponsible abandonment to the joy 
 of not-work). He quickly loses all sense that 
 play is play because it is work, and of course 
 he is quite incapable of realizing that the work 
 which has baffled him would have been play if 
 he could have handled it briskly and progressively, 
 and in his own way. Besides, what good would 
 it be if he did realize it, if he had to go on 
 doing it at other people's rate of progress and 
 in other people's way ? 
 
 The young boy is very apt to think sincerely that 
 his master is an ass. The master would say that 
 that was because the young boy was a greater ass 
 himself. In point of fact he is at an age when 
 nature still whispers facts in his ear, and she tells 
 him in her own hyperbolical way, that wisdom 
 should listen as well as talk, even when it is a 
 matter of listening to a very small boy. If the 
 master came down from his throne, and let the 
 
64 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 boy teach him a little, not only would he be on 
 the way to a great reform, but he would be 
 placed by that boy on a throne that had grown 
 upwards by some fairy process and gained in 
 majesty. 
 
 But such masters are so rare that schoolboys 
 have never ceased to maintain their general 
 attitude of stubborn revolt. And the revolt has 
 left a deep impress on their natures. Every 
 inhibition of school hours tends to suggest a 
 corresponding licence in the playground or in 
 the home. Correct speech in the class-room 
 suggests outside an orgy of slang, silence suggests 
 noise, the preaching of beauty the almost wilful 
 cult of ugliness and so on ad infmitum. School 
 life spells inaction followed by reaction ; and 
 reaction is the very soul of the schoolboy. 
 
 But in the boy himself there is little of all 
 this. His natural impulse is to be learning, 
 and if his activities are properly provided for he 
 will be learning till he falls asleep. He is too 
 sociable to remain long rough of manner or to 
 revolt against any surroundings in which his 
 nature has the least real scope. He learns quickly 
 to perceive beauties of colour, of sound and of 
 form. He has a natural tendency to order, and 
 even an infant who is directed without repression 
 will find a joy in " putting things away." He 
 comes soon to detest violence, while he never 
 ceases to adore strength. He is endlessly for- 
 giving of wrongs otherwise he would have been 
 
BOY v. SCHOOLBOY 65 
 
 driven to rage and despair by the system of the 
 silent class. 
 
 This attribution of pleasant traits is not a 
 matter of surmise. Any one who studies Mon- 
 tessori's results, and then tries the experiment 
 of giving boys freedom in activity, will have a 
 double proof of their unquestionable existence. 
 Nothing is more astounding than the rapidity 
 with which the natural boy will, under these 
 conditions, come to light and replace the " school- 
 boy/' The schoolboy will not willingly admit 
 that anything is ''beautiful" ; the natural boy 
 will find the fitting word for his reverent admira- 
 tion, and will use it, unsuspicious of ridicule. 
 The schoolboy considers a graceful courtesy as 
 something from which he is absolved ; the natural 
 boy is courteous in a graceful way through the 
 play of a potent social instinct. The schoolboy 
 thinks of his work as something alien and repul- 
 sive ; the natural boy has no contempt for 
 " shop/' and has much less marked preferences 
 in the choice of a field for his activities. 
 
 It is strange that the philosophy underlying 
 evolution brings us to conclusions reached inde- 
 pendently by certain religious sects such as the 
 Quakers. Evolution suggests immediately a 
 presumption that an instinct towards upward 
 progression will be found in the young of all 
 animals. And if our minds had hitherto been 
 blank as to the tendencies of young human life, 
 we should have to imagine that the child would 
 
66 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 be incessantly occupied in preparing itself for 
 its final role as a being embodying the best of 
 its type. Neither does the survival value of 
 man depend exclusively, nor even predominantly, 
 on his physical characteristics. Both intellectual 
 and moral strength have had a crucial value in 
 determining human progress. It is therefore 
 far more logical to presuppose that even in the 
 child there is a clear line of moral and intellectual 
 advance until we have dragooned him into the 
 abnormally rebellious and unaccommodating 
 product of our schools. 
 
 I take it that the " red tooth and claw " 
 reading of universal nature is rapidly being re- 
 placed in the mind of thinking people by the view 
 that the fighting instinct is only a stage on the 
 way to that compromise which ends in co-opera- 
 tion. And, without going so far as Prince 
 Kropotkine, one must surely admit that even 
 pre-human evolution offers countless examples 
 of active mutual aid invoked as a means to 
 survival. Throughout the human period itself 
 individual strength has played a small part as 
 compared with the mighty role enacted by the 
 clan and the community that is to say by the 
 results of co-operative living. But it will never- 
 theless be a long time before the last of the 
 scientific pessimists will have surrendered to the 
 growing force of scientific optimism. And the 
 scientific pessimist will meantime be a real 
 source of danger to the spread of this idea of the 
 
BOY v. SCHOOLBOY 67 
 
 innate desire of the child to fulfil its destiny as 
 the young of a highly socialized and socially 
 advancing species. 
 
 We shall have at first to encounter much 
 condemnation of the types we produce even 
 though they may ultimately be shown to mark, 
 from the point of view of practical living, an 
 immense advance upon ourselves. The product 
 of a free childhood will be so innately different 
 from all the children we have ever seen that a 
 large number of us are bound to criticize it simply 
 on the grounds of the divergence from an accepted 
 type. It must be remembered that the finer 
 type of man has never made much appeal to 
 the less fine average. He whom we turn out of 
 our ideal school will talk too much or too little 
 according to whether he talks more or less than 
 existing young men ; he will be " sentimental " 
 if he feels more deeply, or "cold" if he despises 
 existing sentimentality ; his taste will be bad 
 if it is independent of accepted tradition ; he 
 will be graceless if his grace is of a new and start- 
 ling kind ; he will be a fool or at least a crank 
 if he preaches a new wisdom. So that those timid 
 folk who say, " We must wait and see what 
 freedom has to give us/' should, in a strictly 
 logical timidity, go much further and suggest 
 waiting till these new types have had time to 
 be accepted by the intolerant and conventional 
 elements in the public. 
 
 Luckily there is something, quite apart from 
 
68 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 the producing of a higher type of individual, 
 which I look to as a means of reconciling the 
 more unimaginative (to whom higher types are 
 unimaginable). I mean the mere securing of 
 an individual that has an obvious mechanical 
 efficiency an individual certain to survive econ- 
 omically, because possessing a higher intellectual, 
 sensory and physical development. There is 
 no essential contradiction between powers of a 
 commonplace kind and those of an intellectual 
 or a spiritual kind. In the world as it exists now 
 we sometimes do see an incompatibility between 
 the " practical " and the non-practical types, 
 but this is due rather to a deficiency of symmetrical 
 training in one or the other direction, than to 
 innate lack of power (granted the requisite 
 exercise of each) to do the work of the other. 
 And we are beginning to believe that even the 
 philosopher might have been a greater phil- 
 osopher for a little early training in carpentry, 
 and the carpenter a more efficient carpenter for 
 the mind-training of a little philosophy. Since 
 a co-operatively-educated boy would tend much 
 more towards symmetrical development than 
 boys in existing schools (because the mind of 
 the natural boy is more symmetrical than that 
 of the schoolboy), I think we could count on 
 giving the world a man who would touch, taste, 
 hear, speak, walk, run, write, command, obey, 
 arrange and destroy as well as think, better than 
 we can do these things ourselves. And 4oes not 
 
BOY v. SCHOOLBOY 69 
 
 that mean that the writing of poetry and the 
 driving of an engine would be less divorced as 
 interests than they are now ? 
 
 No system of education is likely to win among 
 many contending systems unless it can show that 
 one of its first advantages is to be able to fit 
 boys to respond to the calls of modern life. 
 Whether we admire la haute finance or machine- 
 made boots or the modern newspaper is not the 
 question. While reserving to ourselves the right 
 to make a school as beautiful and as humanizing 
 as the circumstances will allow, we must be able, in 
 fairness to our boys (apart from the views of their 
 parents), to say : " Failing an accident, that boy 
 can never starve." 
 
 Now I contend that the true boy will have a 
 survival value to which the schoolboy could 
 never pretend. To begin with he will be helped 
 by nature's own powers of adaptation, which, 
 when nobody seeks to replace them by artificial 
 powers of adaptation, are extraordinarily strong. 
 I have already dwelt upon native human ver- 
 satility as found even in infancy, and on the power 
 of young children to fix their mind upon almost 
 anything, once the matter for concentration 
 allows free play for personal activity. This 
 feature of young life, which Montessori has done 
 much to bring into prominence, is of supreme 
 importance in the matter of vocational as well 
 as of general training. It seems to suggest that 
 loafing to the child brought up on lines of perfect 
 
70 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 freedom would be a process as difficult and pain- 
 ful as it now appears to be inviting ; and, over 
 and above this, one can see boundless oppor- 
 tunities for taking advantage, on the culture or 
 general side, of this elasticity of interests, and, 
 on the side of vocational specializing, of that 
 intense concentration which, anomalously enough, 
 now appears to be capable of as high development 
 in childhood as in adult years. 
 
 I have given more space to this comparison 
 of the boy with the schoolboy than I should have 
 otherwise deemed necessary, because it appears 
 to me that without a very complete sense that 
 the schoolboy is not the real boy, we shall run 
 perpetually the risk of arguing from false 
 analogies. Indeed it is the drawing of a false 
 analogy, whether in this connection or in asso- 
 ciating indulgence with active freedom, or in 
 arguing from collective to individual teaching, 
 that will, for a long time to come, cause most 
 waste of time by giving us problems to solve 
 which are problems only through some non 
 sequitur on the part of those who propound 
 them. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GREATEST OF ALL HUMAN HOPES 
 
 IF the schools had done their work well, it is 
 probable that nearly every human being would 
 have some immediately obvious charm. There 
 is hardly a living soul but once had in him the 
 beginnings of originality, of constructive power, 
 of a sense of beauty. It is as natural, I maintain, 
 for the unimprisoned brain to give birth to fine 
 thoughts as for the body of a woman to bear a 
 perfectly formed child. Why, then, this dull 
 level of unimaginative reasoning, this dreadful 
 monotony of utterance, this mean contempt 
 for all that has greatness and splendour ? Be- 
 cause the soul of man has never grown as nature 
 would have it grow because there was a stage of 
 evolution through which as a race we had to pass 
 a stage at which we learned how to inhibit, but at 
 which we did not know how to set free. The will 
 to guard and to develop the freedom of another can 
 only come when man is entering upon a supremely 
 great stage of racial development. 
 
 It is for the philosopher to work out the wider 
 meaning of this daring statement of the case 
 
 71 
 
72 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 (which, I hold, is quite obviously true in the 
 light of recent educational experiment) ; my 
 present aim is merely to show its significance in 
 so far as it relates to the children in our schools. 
 When Emerson said that the secret of education 
 lay " in respecting the child/' the full value of 
 his meaning (all of which he may not have 
 realized) was that each child was a little cosmos, 
 knowing more about itself than it could express, 
 but also knowing infinitely more about the rela- 
 tion of its own impulses to the laws of its own 
 progress than any outsider could ever know. 
 It was to be the aim of the master to watch these 
 impulses reverently and to turn them to account 
 in his methods of instruction. 
 
 To be just to the education at least of the past 
 twenty or thirty years there has been some 
 movement in this direction. But so long as 
 teachers are hampered by the circumstance of 
 having to teach collectively (which carries with 
 it an inevitable tendency to address oneself to 
 a non-existing average type), the scope for 
 adaptation to individual needs must always be 
 extremely restricted. 
 
 This necessary neglect of individuality has had 
 the most deplorable effects, in that nine-tenths 
 of the dynamic force of a school class has had 
 to be sacrificed, that true individualized know- 
 ledge has been replaced by a sort of average mental 
 food for which no natural boy has more than a 
 weak and acquired appetite, that ten thousand 
 
GREATEST OF HUMAN HOPES 73 
 
 opportunities for constructive development have 
 been missed while we satisfied ourselves with 
 dragging our pupils along roads not only repulsive 
 to them, but leading to no goal of adequate per- 
 sonal achievement. Our very school books have 
 till very recently reflected this unimaginative 
 contempt for the individual ; and even now I 
 notice that many boys tend to learn more from 
 simple books written for adults than from text- 
 books supposed to be adapted to their own needs 
 because the adult book usually contains a 
 glimmering of that purely personal appeal which 
 is nearly always wanting in the arid pages of 
 school books. 
 
 With a system of teaching through partner- 
 ships we enter an entirely different world. The 
 activity generated by the reduction of the class- 
 group from twenty or more to two has a magic effect 
 on the concentration of the boys, and on their 
 natural tendency to satisfy their own curiosity 
 in their own way. We then begin to see some- 
 thing of the extraordinary range of " right " 
 methods of work, and to learn, on the evidence 
 of natural tendencies, that what was a right way 
 for B was a hopelessly wrong way for A. Very 
 soon we have instances of boys' clever inventions, 
 of devices to help the memory, of ingenious ways 
 of questioning ; and all of these things have 
 ipso facto a psychological aptness which can never 
 be guaranteed in an idea imposed by the master. 
 Originality grows by what it feeds on, while the 
 
74 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 merely rebellious side of originality is suppressed 
 by its sovereign antidote, a happy activity. I 
 have seen boys who had hitherto seemed dull and 
 crushed and indifferent to their work emerge, 
 after a few weeks of partnership teaching, bright- 
 eyed and full of zeal, and brimming over with 
 a new-found hope. The conservative teacher 
 might say : "So they might under any other 
 system " ignoring the fact that those boys who 
 have now found their intellectual salvation were 
 but yesterday dull and hopeless and incapable 
 of rising up clear from their discouragement. 
 
 If one believes, as I believe, that these " dull " 
 or vagabond types tend to hide with considerable 
 frequency a very high order of initiative and 
 originality, the moral becomes evident. By 
 quickening the activity of our classes we are 
 helping to revitalize the spirit of our youth, to 
 add a new force to the inspiration of society, to 
 quicken the pace of social evolution. To elimin- 
 ate the loafer would in itself be much ; to accom- 
 plish all that the elimination of the loafer 
 implies is to have started on the making of a new 
 and a more beautiful world. 
 
 No less important is the fact that the boys 
 now seek knowledge instead of being invited to 
 receive it in doses of our arranging. What they 
 learn is fresh and real to them ; they transmute 
 mere information into an individualized posses- 
 sion of their own. The way in which a boy, 
 failing to learn what he wants to from his partner, 
 
GREATEST OF HUMAN HOPES 75 
 
 questions his master, is something quite new and 
 inspiring. One feels that one is feeding a growing 
 flame instead of quenching one fire in order to 
 kindle another. 
 
 Nobody who looks back over his early school- 
 days can fail to notice how clearly something 
 that he learned voluntarily, during holidays or 
 when ill, or in connection with a favourite subject, 
 comes back to his consciousness, graphic and 
 vivid ; whereas no matter how well one may have 
 kept the memory of some uncongenial subject, 
 even known well (at least from the examination 
 point of view), it invariably lacks form, and has 
 little power of spontaneous presentation to one's 
 mind. I can remember practically nothing of 
 the work done in a kindergarten to which I was 
 sent between the ages of four and nine ; but no 
 early image is stronger in my mind than are 
 certain pictures in Wood's Natural History. I 
 can still see the pictorial cover, the gilt edges, 
 sundry woodcuts of silvery gibbon, lynx and 
 cobra ; I can remember joyous struggles to 
 understand the lengthy words in the descriptive 
 text. In the kindergarten I gained no doubt 
 many facts ; at home I gained those indelible 
 pictures that are for the little child the true 
 highway to knowledge. 
 
 It is this sort of realized, individualized know- 
 ledge that we must offer to our children, because 
 it means an infinite gain to their mental develop- 
 ment. " Knowledge sought is good, knowledge 
 
76 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 unsought is not true knowledge " is a perverted 
 parody that tells the exact truth. And children 
 will seek knowledge all day and every day will 
 seek any knowledge you ask them to if you 
 will let them seek it actively and in their own 
 way. Tell them where the thing is hidden and 
 they will not only rejoice in finding it, but will 
 not quickly forget where it lay. But find it 
 yourself and announce its lurking-place, and the 
 fact will be as a snowflake on the window-pane 
 of a well-warmed room. The natural child loves 
 research, as he loves also creation. We cannot 
 say dogmatically that nearly any one might be 
 great with an appropriate provision for free 
 development from earliest years, but there is a 
 growing probability that this statement is not 
 far from the truth. 
 
 The future, I believe, is going to be a future 
 abounding in proofs that there is no innately 
 commonplace type, but that the commonplace 
 type is an artificial product of repression. There 
 must always, probably, be degrees of originality 
 for the very fact that some yield so easily to 
 repression seems to prove that their originality 
 is of inferior texture ; but it seems to be nearly 
 proved that undreamt-of stores of personal power 
 have been destroyed by the clumsy methods of 
 a repressive education. 
 
 These revolutionary theories will not be justified 
 in a day, or a year and perhaps not in their 
 entirety for a considerable portion of a century. 
 
GREATEST OF HUMAN HOPES 77 
 
 In the first place it does not follow that even with 
 the most ideal arranging of free activities we are 
 going to work miracles with children who have 
 already been moulded to passive obedience. 
 And the failure to do so will react unpleasantly 
 upon the apostles of revolt. There is no certain 
 limit at which we may say that it is too late to 
 try the revivifying effects of a well-controlled 
 freedom ; but there is no doubt, in practice, 
 that the older boy, through the vices of his train- 
 ing, responds much less readily than his juniors 
 to the stimulating influence of enlarged oppor- 
 tunity. I certainly foUnd that my own boys 
 made progress at a rate in precisely inverse pro- 
 portion to their age. This fact, while disappoint- 
 ing to a master having control of boys of sixteen 
 and upwards, is at the same time a glorious 
 proof of the natural basis on which the system is 
 reposed. The child of nature takes to it joyfully, 
 while the product of an artificial education has 
 to undergo what we may call a tuning process 
 before his early instincts can be revived. But 
 as I have only one really unpromising boy out 
 of more than fifty and he was a most dutiful 
 boy under the system of repression, if mild 
 repression, which I have abandoned I claim 
 that any boy may reasonably be expected in the 
 long run to adapt himself to the new conditions 
 of work. 
 
 Nobody can have long experimented on the 
 lines of free activity without having noticed 
 
78 CHILD EMANCIPATION 
 
 some remarkable transformations of personality. 
 Nothing is more striking than the immediate 
 effects of freedom on that curious aversion of 
 boys to express judgments on abstract topics. 
 I can now ask my pupils questions implying a 
 highly abstract reply that I should not have 
 dreamed of expecting before they had undergone 
 the changes incidental to individualized work. 
 Then I notice in a very few weeks remarkable 
 progress in the power to realize characters in 
 the reading aloud of Shakespeare and even in 
 those of prose fiction. It is a commonplace with 
 my boys to remark to me how " So-and-so is 
 coming out/' and how he is " getting more 
 original/' and how " X would never talk about 
 anything till this term/' 
 
 There is then much more in this partnership 
 idea even than the arousing of a new enthusiasm, 
 although that would be worth sacrificing much 
 to secure. There is the' reawakening of the 
 creative power ; there is the restoring of the 
 constructive, the dramatic and the social instincts. 
 There is the moving of the stimulus to action 
 from outside to within. There is the growing 
 sense of personal responsibility and the strength- 
 ening of will-power and the growth of concen- 
 tration. 
 
 I expect no easy victory, because I am working 
 on a field where so far there has been a minimum 
 of encouragement for the innovator and none at 
 all for the revolutionary. The idea of freedom 
 
GREATEST OF HUMAN HOPES 79 
 
 in the school has come to stay, but it cannot 
 in the nature of things make the rapid progress 
 of a mechanical invention or even of a new 
 political system. My best hope lies in incredu- 
 lous experimenting with the mere machinery 
 of my method. This may for a long time be 
 timid and tentative the mere insertion of an 
 hour of partnership work in many hours of 
 collective teaching. But the value of this will 
 soon be apparent ; and I have hopes that these 
 hours of individualized work will grow more and 
 more numerous till at last the teacher takes what 
 so many of us consider his rightful place that 
 of the self-effacing, sympathetic inspirer of the 
 spontaneous work of his pupils. 
 
PART II 
 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 BOYS IN PARTNERSHIP 
 
 I BELIEVE other teachers have set their boys 
 to work in partnership. 1 There is no sovereign 
 specific in this idea, which, although nobody had 
 ever suggested it to me, seems in itself so simple 
 as to be worth no serious claim to originality. 
 Any two adults working at the same subject 
 would naturally hit upon the device of reading 
 together, and many boys have no doubt done so 
 of their own free will. 
 
 The essence of my system is not that the boys 
 work together in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 but (a) that they are always studying different 
 material, so that they may be mutually useful 
 in their questioning ; and (b) that the subject- 
 matter is so contrived as to give constant scope 
 to their activities. I contend that both of these 
 two provisions are necessary ingredients in a 
 system of this kind. 
 
 Professor John Adams and Professor Culver- 
 well have since reminded me of the system of cemuli 
 among the pupils of the Jesuit schools. I rather think, 
 however, that there was no differentiation of work 
 certainly I have never heard that there was, and the 
 term amuli suggests that there was not. 
 
84 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 If the work done by the two partners were the 
 same, there would be several obvious disadvant- 
 ages. In the first place one of the two would 
 nearly always be more advanced in his subject 
 and would tend merely to lead his partner by 
 the hand ; in the second place the useful stimulus 
 of curiosity would be largely wanting (for under 
 my system each partner has always the key to 
 mysteries concealed from the other). This will 
 be clearly seen if I give an example : 
 
 A (questioning B from " red " French conversa- 
 tion book) : Comment vous appelez-vous ? B : Je m y 
 appelle. . . . 
 
 B (questioning A from "blue" conversation book) : 
 Quel age avez-vous ? A : J'ai douze ans. 
 
 If the second condition (scope for the partners' 
 activities) were not fulfilled, we should find that 
 the work could not long go on, inasmuch as 
 external discipline would have to be invoked to 
 keep the boys to their books, and this would 
 be the prelude, first to reproof, then to nagging, 
 and finally to disorder. It is best, therefore, so 
 to arrange the work that from one-half to two- 
 thirds of a given lesson consists of active question- 
 ing and answering (the answers being always 
 under the eye of the questioner, so that he may 
 check the responses of his co-worker). The 
 following, for example, would be purely a game, 
 although having every advantage of serious 
 mental arithmetic. Disciplinary intervention 
 would be absolutely uncalled-for. 
 
 Section i : What is one-eighth of i ? Half a crown. 
 
PARTNERSHIP 85 
 
 What is one-eighth of 20 shillings ? Half a crown. 
 How many shillings in half a crown ? Two and a half. 
 What is one-eighth of 20 ? Two and a half. What is 
 eight times two and a half ? Twenty. What is four 
 times two and a half ? Ten. What is a quarter of 
 ten ? Two and a half. 
 
 Section 2 : How many times is 3d. contained in one 
 shilling ? Four times. How many times is ijd. con- 
 tained in one shilling ? Eight times. What is one- 
 eighth of one shilling ? Three halfpence. What is 
 one-eighth of twelve ? One and a half. What is eight 
 times one and a half ? Twelve. 1 
 
 Or, again, take the " missing word tests/' which 
 are beloved of the boys, and do much to develop 
 their powers of expression : 
 
 Section i : A man who seldom strikes out on a new 
 line of action lacks (initiative). Mr. Lloyd George is 
 the (Chancellor of the Exchequer) . A man who does not 
 eat meat or fish is a (vegetarian). 
 
 Section 2 : Carriages, bicycles and carts are (vehicles) . 
 He who makes his living by buying and selling stocks 
 and shares for customers is a (stockbroker). A doctor 
 who operates only is a (surgeon) ; a doctor who only 
 prescribes medical treatment is a (physician). 
 
 (The boys usually supply the word " something " 
 to indicate the bracketed word.) 
 
 In all of these cases the two essentials 
 activity and differentiation of work are present ; 
 and one may reasonably expect to find intense 
 application and a complete failure on the part 
 of the boys to associate their happy activity 
 with what they quite rightly hate and despise 
 that cold and uninspiring and artificial pro- 
 
 1 This example is purely theoretical, as I have never 
 taught mathematics on this, or any other system. 
 
86 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 ceeding which they regard as " work." If a 
 boy with such material as that suggested above 
 remains sleepy and inactive, it will prove abso- 
 lutely either (a) that any imaginable work has 
 for him a deeply-ingrained unpleasant associa- 
 tions formed in earlier years, or (6) that he is in 
 bad health. I find that six per cent, is the 
 maximum number of boys who find a difficulty 
 in applying themselves even to the most active 
 kinds of work and there is not one of these 
 who does not show signs of progress towards 
 a higher degree of concentration. Eventually, I 
 am convinced, no boy would " slack " except 
 through ill-health. 
 
 Here is a case of a boy who was quite incapable 
 of applying himself under the collective system 
 of teaching. Aged sixteen. Under the old 
 system he entered the class slouchingly and with 
 a look of good-humoured indifference. When 
 examined he was worth rather less than ten 
 per cent. Three weeks later extraordinarily keen 
 work had brought him up, on another test paper, 
 to a good thirty-five per cent. He now enters 
 the class-room briskly, takes up his work at once, 
 and applies himself to it enthusiastically for the 
 full period. He no longer needs even encourage- 
 ment, and is one of the best boys in the school. 
 
 I cite this case because it is one of several 
 remarkable instances of the recovery of a boy, 
 well on his way to manhood, from chronic failure 
 to concentrate his mind on his work. The effect 
 
PARTNERSHIP 87 
 
 of the system on younger boys is, on the average, 
 and as one would expect, far more remarkable 
 than on their seniors. My third form did 
 splendidly from the very day on which I set them 
 to do partnership work. Within a week they 
 had reached what I considered the perfection of 
 individual and collective enthusiasm. Form IV. 
 was for a further week remarkably keen as judged 
 by old-time standards, but still a little weak as 
 compared with Form III. Then, quite suddenly, 
 it reached the highest point of intense and 
 continuous concentration. This phenomenon 
 merits some detailed description. 
 
 It was a Saturday morning, and these boys 
 were with me for a " double period " of ninety 
 minutes. For seventy minutes they worked not 
 only with intense zeal, but with the true game 
 " intoxication/' Not one of them, although all 
 were overcoming incessant difficulties, seemed to 
 realize that he was working at all. I was deeply 
 moved, for this seemed to be the material proof 
 that my theory was correct. I turned to them 
 and asked them to stop. But they were deep in 
 their work and did not hear me. By dint of 
 nearly shouting I secured their attention, and 
 told them that they had worked splendidly, and 
 that if they liked a rest of three minutes they 
 might have a quiet chat with one another for 
 that time. I shall never forget their expression 
 of boredom in some faces, I am afraid, it was^a 
 look of irritation when they heard what a silly 
 
88 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 motive had prompted my interruption. In fewer 
 seconds than it takes to write this sentence they 
 were deep in their work again ! 
 
 This little incident, surprising as I found it at 
 the time, was merely a forerunner of a hundred 
 such instances of joyous activity given to work 
 which had hitherto proved a source so far as a 
 large portion of the class was concerned of 
 indifference or of painful application. Several 
 times in a week the boys voted unanimously in 
 favour of staying in for a quarter of an hour after 
 school and that without the slightest pressure 
 on my part ; for I have ostentatiously with- 
 drawn my right to punish, and each of my classes 
 is now completely autonomous. 
 
 Neither must the reader run away with the 
 impression that the work is specially recreational 
 in its subject-matter. If I have (as any master 
 ought to have) introduced pleasant dialogues 
 for use in partnership, I found, in practice, just 
 as good work done on French verbs, on syntactical 
 exercises and on prose composition. The work 
 is only easier in the one sense that it gives scope to 
 active treatment ; it is innately neither more nor 
 less difficult than the material used in collective 
 teaching. The charge of " making things easy " 
 is therefore no better founded than would be a 
 similar charge brought against adult work which 
 had been quickened by the evocation of a joyous 
 activity. In practice no Government department 
 would receive anything but praise were it to 
 
PARTNERSHIP 89 
 
 arrange its routine in such a way as to develop 
 at once the briskness and the happiness of its 
 functionaries. And the grown-up man should 
 be capable of finding his happiness in tasks 
 accomplished with much more deliberation than 
 is likely to appeal to the child ! 
 
 What the boys learn under these conditions 
 of responsible, self-sought work is, I am con- 
 vinced, far more truly knowledge than are the 
 facts gleaned from the discourse of a master. 
 The truth is that even an adult learns relatively 
 little from information which he has not been 
 seeking. My younger boys cross-question me in 
 French with a rapidity and a confidence and a 
 zest that could only come if they were in touch 
 with the very soul of the language. And a 
 language is one of those things (failing incessant 
 practice over many months) that only come to 
 you when you have been carried into its depths 
 by the fire of enthusiasm. 
 
 For the present no special books have been 
 printed with a view to partnership work. 1 I 
 hardly know whether this fact produces in me 
 more joy or more regret. It produces joy in me 
 because it brings me to reflect that if material 
 so clumsy and inadequate can produce results 
 of such promise after a relatively short period, 
 what may we not expect with the use of ideal 
 textbooks during six or seven years ? As 
 things are, all that one can do, apart from pre- 
 
 1 This statement has now to be amended, thanks to 
 the enterprise of the publishers of the present book. 
 
90 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 paring manuscript conversation books and other 
 written matter, is to choose from the mass of 
 school books those which are best adapted to 
 rapid interrogation. To attain this end one has, 
 of course, to pass by much that is admirable in 
 the provision for the needs of collective teaching, 
 in favour of often slightly inferior books respond- 
 ing better to the purpose of partnership teaching. 
 Hence the regret. 
 
 My method of using printed books is to cut 
 them up into sections and rebind them in paper 
 covers. The labour of this proceeding is really 
 formidable, though one eventually gets an accum- 
 ulation of material that gives one a rest. The 
 number of sections varies, and there is no reason 
 why the whole of a class should be doing one 
 particular kind of work at the same moment. 
 But the total number of sections has to be very 
 large, because in most cases a given textbook is 
 of progressive difficulty, and it is frequently 
 impossible to use more than the first two or 
 three sections in one class. I have frequently the 
 opening sections of half a dozen different books 
 in use at one time. 
 
 Once the number of sectional books has become 
 really large, it is easy to set every pupil in a school 
 to do work exactly suited to his particular develop- 
 ment. And here lies, I think, one of the greatest 
 advantages of class-partnerships. There is no 
 speed in mastering a subject equal to a speed 
 arranged in accordance with one's own capacity. 
 
PARTNERSHIP 91 
 
 All other means of fixing the rate of advance 
 lead more often than not to the most deplorable 
 intellectual wastage. The boy who is backward 
 cannot profitably be driven on to a new stage 
 before he is thoroughly at home on the level of 
 his present attainments. It is merely repeating 
 the process which has helped to make him back- 
 ward. In point of fact I believe that eighty 
 per cent, of boys in secondary schools would be 
 better to be driven back instead of being driven 
 forward. In two years the result would probably 
 be surprisingly good. I have watched boys 
 doing long multiplications before they were sure 
 of the product of seven and six, doing long 
 divisions before they were sure of the remainder 
 in dividing fourteen by nine and their teachers 
 were men of long and honourable experience ! 
 
 My system allows the slow worker to work 
 slowly and the rapid worker to work rapidly. 
 The average schoolmaster either will not or 
 cannot vary his demands according to the pace 
 of different individuals. Very few teachers, I am 
 convinced, realize that in giving as homework 
 ten sentences to put into Latin, they are often 
 either giving a fine lesson in " scamping," or 
 demanding of a boy a solid evening's drudgery 
 on a single subject. If they could see, as I have 
 had the chance of seeing, the despair to which 
 this sometimes reduces a nervous and con- 
 scientious boy who dreads the reproaches or the 
 punishments he knows so well will follow if he 
 
92 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 does not somehow get through this monstrously 
 mismeasured task, they would either vary their 
 demands according to individual powers, or else 
 seek safety in reducing it by one-half. 
 
 But can any solution be so satisfactory as to 
 so interest the boys that they must do their best, 
 and to accept then their efforts with sincere and 
 visible pleasure, whether their tangible fruit be 
 great or small ? I think not. But it certainly 
 demands a rare faith in a boy's own pride, in 
 his honesty (when free from punishments), in 
 his growing desire to develop and exercise his 
 powers. I have convinced myself more deeply 
 than I have ever convinced myself of anything 
 that this optimistic view of the boy is profoundly 
 true that the view of him as naturally a 
 " shirker," a loafer, a fraud, is profoundly wrong. 
 The worst of boys is, to me, better as a source of 
 self-evolved activity than the best as seen by 
 the schoolmaster of the old type. Indeed, once 
 the fire of enthusiasm has been kindled it is not 
 your Blifil but your Tom Jones who will work 
 like a hero and develop endless devices for 
 strengthening and testing his own powers. The 
 " good " boy is sometimes out of his element 
 when he finds that his master is resolved to be 
 neither a bully nor a nursemaid. He soon proves 
 to what shaky motives his goodness was due. He 
 wants to be " told what to do/' while that " good- 
 for-nothing slacker of a So-and-so " is showing 
 him how to do great things without being told. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 NEW SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE 
 
 UNDER collective teaching by a good master the 
 only reason why initiative is not encouraged is 
 because it cannot be at least to anything like 
 a proper extent. " Twenty boys twenty methods 
 of work " at once conveys a truth and suggests 
 the true ideal ; but so long as boys are treated 
 in herds, how is it possible for each to pursue 
 the method of study to which he is best suited ? 
 One boy, like many men, learns better when the 
 scope of the work is wide and generous (or even 
 circuitous) ; another, like many other men, makes 
 more progress when his subject-matter is concen- 
 trated, when its scope is narrow and restricted. 
 To one boy mechanical aids are futile and mean- 
 ingless ; to another they are the first essential 
 to his getting a quick grasp of his subject. To 
 apply spontaneously principles that we feel to be 
 right, oblivious to what others may think of them, 
 is to show initiative ; to tell us that not only must 
 we not apply our principles, but that we have no 
 right to believe in them, is to crush initiative 
 before it is fairly born. Hence one of the gravest 
 defects in existing education. 
 
 93 
 
94 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 It does indeed want a certain faith in the 
 instincts of childhood to believe, as I believe, 
 that boys know best how to get their own know- 
 ledge. This must not, of course, be construed 
 into meaning that a boy has nothing to learn 
 about the proper method of his own work. I 
 only urge that he already knows far more about 
 it than the schoolmaster who, with a class of 
 from fifteen to thirty individuals, can hardly 
 discover and keep before him the lines of complex 
 mental process which distinguish each par- 
 ticular boy. I do not expect, because it would 
 not be fair to expect, that most people will accept 
 this statement without justifying it by practical 
 experiment themselves. But what I do ask them 
 to remember, as a preliminary step to conviction, 
 is that he who has never seen boys working with 
 real scope for individual initiative, has not the 
 right to say that their initiative will lead them 
 along a less advantageous path than that of 
 mere passive obedience. At the same time I, who 
 have seen something of the effects of letting boys 
 arrange the lines of their own mental and spiritual 
 development, may perhaps be allowed to give 
 here some of the results of my own experience. 
 
 Throughout my experiments I have been 
 labouring under the very great disadvantage 
 of having, so to say, to graft my way of teaching 
 on to the collective system of education pursued 
 by the other masters in the school. Thus two 
 methods of instruction were liable to clash, 
 
SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE 95 
 
 leaving the boys a little lost and confused by their 
 alternation. But notwithstanding this difficulty, 
 I think I shall be able to show sufficient evidence 
 of the development of originality and of other 
 higher qualities to suggest the need for a trial of 
 this method on a far larger scale. 
 
 In the first place the progress of boys working 
 in partnership depends to a greatly increased 
 extent on what corresponds with a scientist's 
 original research. At first the boy may not 
 realize the inner change of attitude that this 
 implies ; but presently he will notice that every 
 bit of work suggests its " Why ? " or its " Be- 
 cause " and his curiosity as well as his desire 
 to explain will be correspondingly quickened. 
 Points of syntax in the French sentence, for 
 example, will come to him with all the force of 
 unaided discovery. And this sense of discovery 
 will add constant zest to his work. Taking 
 French again, I have been astonished by the boys' 
 delight in putting questions in that language to 
 their master, as well as in answering them. 
 This idea came spontaneously to one of the 
 youngest of my beginners, and soon there was 
 nothing he liked better than rapidly to point 
 out the objects in the room, saying each time, 
 " Qu'est-ce que cest que cela ? " or to go through 
 the movements of washing his hands, buttoning 
 his coat or brushing his hair, while he asked me 
 " Qu'est-ce que je fais P " Gradually he widened 
 the scope of his enquiries and all the time learned 
 
96 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 new words and expressions, which he would 
 ask me to write for him on the blackboard. This 
 device was quickly adopted by the other boys 
 in the form. I have also known pupils who 
 hit on the idea of teaching one another to count 
 in French by means of the centimetre rules, and 
 others who strove desperately to write an original 
 story in French. 
 
 A few weeks have sufficed in several cases to 
 bring a thoroughly practical and terre-a-terre 
 young " free scholar " to read to his partner 
 passages from Shakespeare with the truest 
 feeling and the proper dramatic expression ; 
 to write a story having claim to some real beauty 
 and imagination ; and to abandon a gruff and 
 surly manner and develop a refreshingly natural 
 and spontaneous politeness towards, and con- 
 sideration for his master. It is indeed, as I 
 have already hinted, precisely the unpromising 
 material of traditional methods of teaching that 
 shines out clear once one has accorded freedom 
 to one's classes. 
 
 But whatever remarkable changes may be 
 brought about under these restricted conditions, 
 I am convinced that they are nothing compared 
 with the possibilities suggested by the conception 
 of a school that was completely free and self- 
 governing. What we need is not only freedom 
 within the subject, but a large measure of freedom 
 to choose between subjects. This aim was fore- 
 shadowed as much as twelve years ago in 
 
SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE 97 
 
 Mr. Harold Gorst's The Curse of Education a 
 book in which the author pointed with bitterness 
 to the wastage of originality in making the same 
 demands from every boy, without considering 
 in any degree the important question of his 
 personal preference. 
 
 If it is urged that it would be dangerous to 
 leave a boy complete freedom of choice between 
 the different subjects of a school curriculum, 
 there is surely a far greater danger in leaving 
 him no freedom at all. At the very least school 
 subjects should be treated on the lines of allowing 
 for each a maximum or a minimum number of 
 hours, so that a boy loving history per se and hating 
 geography per se should be able to do extra 
 work at his history. It is frequently forgotten 
 that a boy sometimes learns more of a hated 
 subject through a close study of a subject for 
 which he has a liking than by forcing himself 
 to concentrate his mind on that which repels 
 him. Later on, having (so to say) incidentally 
 picked up the rudiments of the less attractive 
 subject, he will be far more likely to pursue it 
 to advantage if he is left to himself than if he is 
 dragged through what are to him its meaningless 
 formula, before he is ready for their digestion. 
 We have moreover to remember that if every 
 boy had at least one " special " subject of study, 
 two boys could never talk together without each 
 teaching the other something. 
 
 Of course schools are very much fettered by the 
 
98 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 demands of the universities, and we shall for 
 some (I hope not for many) years to come be 
 driven either (a) to make university subjects 
 obligatory, leaving complete freedom of choice 
 between all other subjects, or else (b) to allow a 
 a boy complete freedom of choice only until, 
 say, the last two years before he reaches uni- 
 versity age. 
 
 With regard to " local examinations," one can 
 only say that this horrible weapon for killing all 
 originality and invention in childhood is not only 
 entitled to no consideration in this connection, 
 but that there are a score of other reasons why it 
 should be discountenanced by any one having the 
 first instincts of the true teacher. Nothing is 
 more extraordinary than the continued existence 
 of the examination fetich in face of the condemna- 
 tion it has received. That a bad servant should 
 have been allowed to become a still worse master 
 is one of the anomalies of recent educational 
 history which I shall not stop to seek to explain. 
 
 While urging and praying for complete liberty 
 for school-going children a liberty that has 
 succeeded beyond the wildest hopes with young 
 criminals in the George Junior Republics and in 
 the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire one 
 must admit that this is a counsel of perfection 
 on which one has no right to insist in the present 
 state of the educational world. All that one 
 can claim as a first step is that boys and girls 
 shall be allowed to work actively and in their 
 
SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE 99 
 
 own way on subjects that may still have to be 
 imposed upon them, but that are rendered more 
 palatable by an increased scope, within them, 
 for children's own initiative. 
 
 At the very least there must be an end of 
 insisting that every child must work in one 
 stereotyped way ; it must no longer be a crime 
 for a boy to rise and go quietly for a book in 
 another part of a room without first asking the 
 permission of the master : there must be no 
 minimum limit set on the amount of preparation 
 to be done. (For young boys five hours a day 
 of intellectual work are fully enough, and seven 
 hours very greatly too much.) 
 
 These are negative postulates. On the posi- 
 tive side " composition " must include an essay 
 or a story or a dramatic scene at the boy's 
 own choice ; and he must be allowed not only 
 to choose his subject but to treat it in his own way, 
 secure from all really crushing criticism. My 
 boys have advanced in freedom of style and grip 
 of their subject in writing an essay far more 
 through their excursions in the writing of fiction 
 than they ever could have done had I kept them 
 to the formal composition. The criticisms come 
 best from the boys the master being the watchful 
 protector of the author against direct disparage- 
 ment. His own remarks come last when the 
 boys have omitted to mention some serious 
 defect of style or of development ; and then they 
 should be tempered constantly by that sincere 
 
ioo THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 sympathy which any healthy-minded man may 
 be expected to feel with purely creative work. 
 The greater the mistake the less should be said 
 of it both on grounds of chivalry and of common- 
 sense. 
 
 Neither does initiative begin and end with 
 initiative in intellectual matters. Moral initia- 
 tive is at least as important. And the gain is 
 here even more marked than is the case with 
 spontaneity in the process of learning. I could 
 write endlessly of the effect on the boys* ethical 
 sense of the granting to them of the full privileges 
 of self-government. The greatest effects of self- 
 government on the moral side, it must be re- 
 membered, are constant, whereas those on the 
 intellectual side are merely very frequent. Then 
 this, I think, is an interesting point fashion, 
 which plays so large a part in a society of boys, 
 soon reverses its ideals. It becomes the fashion 
 to work and not to loaf. The boy who wants 
 to loaf and not the boy who wants to work 
 becomes the eccentric and the freak so much 
 so that such a boy has sometimes to be protected 
 from the ridicule of his companions. Thus there 
 is collective as well as individual initiative, and 
 that altogether in a good and wholesome direc- 
 tion. 
 
 Recently, on the last day of term, my boys 
 asked if they might have a class debate. Other 
 subjects failing, we decided on the motion : 
 " That boys govern themselves better than they 
 
SCOPE FOR INITIATIVE 101 
 
 can be governed. 1 ' Now I learned much from 
 the arguments advanced. One boy, aged eleven, 
 said : " When we started this system, there was 
 still a little bullying in the school ; now there is 
 none/' Others, taking up this cue, said how 
 much better it now was for a boy who was 
 " odd " ; people got to know him better in 
 class, and he became more popular. Lest there 
 should be any doubt as to the value of this 
 testimony let me hasten to add that not only 
 had I never suggested this line of thought to my 
 pupils, but that it was a consequence of partner- 
 ship teaching upon which I had not counted. 
 
 But how does this touch the question of moral 
 initiative ? Very closely, I think ; for it comes 
 to mean that the boys no longer judged and 
 condemned in herds, but were learning to form 
 their own conclusions about their companions. 
 And I hold that this is a result of far-reaching, 
 of incalculable importance. Mr. Edmond Holmes 
 has told us most eloquently of the likely social 
 consequences of evolving a more highly socialized, 
 more completely humanized type through freedom 
 in our schools. There is nothing that makes me 
 happier than the fact that I have caught a glimpse 
 of a similar advance of type in actual progress 
 towards realization. How could it be otherwise 
 where a master shows constant sympathy with 
 all shows pity for the loafer and makes a rule of 
 not seeing the peculiarities of the eccentric ? And 
 here I refer, of course, to the demeanour of eman- 
 
102 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 cipatory directors in general, and not to any 
 particular teacher. Soon, I hope from the bottom 
 of my heart, the psychological cruelties (if I may 
 use the expression) that still persist in schools 
 the cruelties that the boys borrow, though 
 certainly with interest, from their masters, will 
 follow physical cruelties, and belong to a bar- 
 barous past. But to those who hold, with all 
 sincerity, that to evoke the initiative of boys 
 is to evoke a thousand evil traits this line of 
 reasoning will not commend itself. The re- 
 pressionist will here call to his aid all his batteries 
 of out-of-date theology, whole book-loads of 
 Spartan maxims. It may sound impertinent, 
 but I venture not to be dismayed, for we of the 
 new school have something better to urge than 
 the best and most cogent of theory ; we have 
 the fruits of actual experience. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FETICH OF THE ACADEMIC 
 
 I APPROACH now a chapter full of difficulty, for 
 it is not always easy to find expression for even 
 the most soundly based conclusions and I have 
 to go deep down in my own consciousness even 
 to be sure of my ground. Roughly speaking the 
 academic ideal of education is what we may 
 describe as a geometrical ideal. It wants every- 
 thing to be nicely rounded-off ; it aims at plotting 
 out the field of knowledge into neat compart- 
 ments, which are to be explored one by one, and 
 in one particular way. It pretends to measure 
 results quantitatively, and demands that every 
 step in the educational process shall be taken 
 with a view to this quantitative estimate. Hence 
 " boys " must be expected to construe so many 
 lines of Caesar, to put so many sentences illus- 
 trating a particular rule into French ; to learn 
 arithmetic in one fixed order of " rules/' The 
 academic schoolmaster would no more allow a 
 boy to stray from the path of knowledge laid out 
 for him than he would give him carte blanche 
 to go alone to London or Paris. 
 103 
 
104 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 Now it is only a very special and not generally 
 an intellectually superior type of adult that is 
 adapted to a very cramped and inelastic way of 
 working. Most of us prefer to skip certain parts 
 even of the most authoritative works, and to 
 make good what we have skipped by reading 
 another book If we did not do so we should 
 not, generally speaking, have gained, since 
 absolute perfection of memorizing (other than 
 that of a purely mechanical kind) is unattainable, 
 and that which is retained depends on a selective 
 process which varies infinitely according to the 
 degree of our interest and the strength of our 
 tendency to form the requisite associations. 
 
 With children engaged in reading that which 
 they have no special and personal desire to read, 
 the proportion of what is mentally dissected 
 and remembered in any useful form is enormously 
 less than even that which is remembered by an 
 adult under similar circumstances. Thus the 
 idea that children in masses can be made to 
 master books in a certain fixed way is based on 
 the conception of a narrow perfectibility of brain 
 which is impossible of realization either in the 
 child or the adult. If children's mental processes 
 throughout their studies were of that order, they 
 might prove themselves to be very good machines, 
 but they would not represent a very high type 
 of intelligent human being. Preference and 
 selectiveness in the exercise of intellectual process 
 mark a superiority and not an inferiority of 
 
THE ACADEMIC FETICH 105 
 
 type. Hence to lay down the law for each detail 
 of study is to offer a premium to mediocrity. 
 
 Now all this has a very direct application to 
 our present purpose. We must first prove that 
 children do not tend to swallow these exact 
 doses of learning with the same academic regu- 
 larity as that with which they are presented to 
 them. To have toiled through a particular book 
 could be justified in some measure if even half 
 a form had mastered thoroughly the greater part 
 of its contents ; but if, as so often happens, 
 this narrow method of study leads to general 
 disgust and the acquiring of a singularly meagre 
 stock of mere information then one begins to 
 ask if the academic method of study is so un- 
 avoidable as it is generally supposed to be. And 
 if, as I maintain, it nearly always leaves a child 
 destitute of all understanding of the inner spirit 
 of what he is working upon then one comes 
 within measurable distance of actually framing 
 an indictment. Far from framing it, however, 
 I am going to leave the responsibility of attack 
 with the forces of the old order, and shall here 
 only try to show that in a great part of the work 
 of the school there is far less need for rigid lines 
 of method than is generally supposed which, 
 of course, is a very different thing from saying 
 that no method is required. 
 
 Let us take the ordinary " first " French book, 
 We strike at once against countless instances of 
 the academic fetich. Frequently a boy has worked 
 
106 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 for a good part of the year without ever having 
 had occasion to use a past tense although prac- 
 tically all the interest in using a language arises 
 precisely from being able to relate or hear things 
 related that have actually taken place. The 
 theory, I need hardly point out, is that " boys 
 must know their present tenses before they know 
 their pasts/' That the exact contrary would 
 be rather more true, it would only want a 
 moment's thought to make clear. The study of 
 no subject should rely on dulness for its first 
 principle : and what could be duller than endless 
 pages about cornfields, the relationships of 
 imaginary people and lifeless descriptions of 
 scenes in an imaginary village ? Hardly even 
 those ancient dialogues about " my uncle's 
 walking-stick," and " your brother's penwiper " ! 
 If, on the other hand, the boy can make 
 sentences, as my boys have after two or three 
 lessons, about what they have seen or done, 
 their subject fascinates them from the outset. 
 I have myself had occasion to study to some extent 
 about six of the principal European languages ; 
 and in all I naturally inclined, I remember, to 
 work on the perfect tense before I troubled about 
 the present, simply because the perfect tense 
 had life and interest in it, while the present, 
 apart from scientific or philosophic reading, 
 of which I was then incapable, was relatively 
 tame and uninspiring. Even a child who can 
 : " J'ai la plume," can also say " J'ai vu 
 
THE ACADEMIC FETICH 107 
 
 M. Jones " and how infinitely more interesting 
 it is to say it. 
 
 The fetich leads the enemy to dilate to us 
 upon the importance of " knowing one thing 
 thoroughly/' and to ask us to try to pile up in 
 our pupils' minds an immense vocabulary of 
 nouns, adjectives, pronouns and adverbs on the 
 mean foundation of a single tense. (With truly 
 wonderful inconsistency he is asking two or three 
 years later for almost unusable tenses of obso- 
 lescent verbs !) 
 
 The same thing in history. All the life-blood 
 is almost deliberately drained-off, and the master 
 feeds with well-feigned greed on his pupils' 
 definitions of " scutage " and " Danegeld." The 
 exact terms of a treaty learned only to be for- 
 gotten are welcomed more eagerly than the 
 vital facts in the evolution of liberty, in the social 
 life of the people, in the growth of industries. 
 
 All this arises from the absurd notion that 
 everybody ought to know everything. No matter 
 how clear a view a boy may wish to have of 
 the rise of Napoleon, he is to be better employed 
 in cramming the Constitutions of Clarendon ! 
 In point of fact, if his view of the rise of Napoleon 
 were really clear and sound, his knowledge of 
 general history would be ipso facto fuller than that 
 of the average educated citizen ; whereas if he 
 knew well three different periods of thirty years 
 each (with the gaps left quite empty), he would 
 have a better appreciation of the spirit of history 
 
io8 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 than most boys are ever likely to get. This 
 does not amount to urging that boys should 
 necessarily specialize in periods of history ; it 
 means only that this pursuit of the academically 
 perfect inevitably defeats its own ends and leads 
 to wastage where it aims at economy. 
 
 One reason why I have given so much space 
 to this aspect of current education is that I have 
 to pave the way to the wholly heterodox procedure 
 which I have followed with my own boys. I have 
 felt from first to last that the boy must be his own 
 book that he must seek his own information, 
 absorb it and reproduce it in his own way. There 
 is no royal road to the mastery of any one subject, 
 and a fact which would have a profound effect 
 on one boy at a given moment leaves another 
 quite indifferent until his moment of responsive- 
 ness arises. But each pupil, if he works with 
 free activity, can find endless material to which 
 he can be almost incessantly responsive, so that 
 the intellectual wastage is reduced to the lowest 
 possible minimum, and the boy is always pro- 
 gressing towards a higher plane of intelligent 
 appreciation of his subjects. 
 
 Hence those who follow the partnership plan 
 of teaching will not content themselves with the 
 meagre resources of the old school of teachers. 
 And the fact that even beautiful editions of 
 books can be cut up into sections at a fairly small 
 cost per head and lent to the boys will help 
 to enlarge the range of material brought into 
 
THE ACADEMIC FETICH 109 
 
 play. " Geography " will include travel books ; 
 " History " will draw on biographies and on 
 richly-illustrated editions of the great historians ; 
 " Science " will be enriched from the almost 
 endless resources of modern publishing-houses ; 
 modern languages will be taught as the expression, 
 not of one author's thoughts, but of many-sided 
 life, revealed in books of the most varied kinds, 
 gradually unfolding their meaning through a 
 study based rather on natural logic than on 
 artificial laws. 
 
 Work in partnership makes this mode of 
 study not only possible, but inevitable. The 
 school will be its own little world, reflecting in 
 miniature all the interests of the greater world 
 outside. Thanks to their activity the boys of 
 the new order will mount joyously from height 
 to height in their upward climb. That they will 
 not follow the same path is not, I think, a matter 
 for regret. To me it is a matter for thanksgiving, 
 firstly because we shall thus have the first human 
 beings who all through their lives have, so to 
 say, personalized knowledge; and secondly we 
 shall have men and women who have learned the 
 sweetness of voluntary and devoted effort. 
 
 Then we shall hear less of " subjects " and see 
 more of a proper synthesis of intellectual interests. 
 New things that are not " subjects " will be 
 taught ; the boy will for the first time have some 
 thoughts about civic principles ; he will have 
 more scientific ideas about health and disease ; 
 
no THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 he will have a notion of aesthetics and of experi- 
 mental psychology ; he will know in what books 
 to look for any information he may require ; 
 he will have passed through his school days 
 afraid of no book because he has never been 
 forced to read one against his will and end by 
 loving books in general because from first to 
 last they have been in his mind associated with 
 his own joyous activity. 
 
 In some schools " General Knowledge " is 
 taught as a " subject/' I cut up for my boys 
 The Parent's Book and NuttalTs Encyclopedia. 
 Humble enough material, in good sooth. But 
 what a joy they were ! The unflagging enthu- 
 siasm with which my pupils questioned one 
 another set me thinking of the great days 
 that are coming, when every boy will be able 
 to satisfy that yearning for knowledge which 
 is his constant possession till the traditional 
 school has taught him never to say " Why ? " 
 again. Most boys have in them much of the 
 born scientist. And it will be a great day for the 
 world when this yearning for a knowledge of 
 laws and principles has full scope. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 THE new order of schoolmaster will not, strictly 
 speaking, be new at all. He has existed in all 
 ages, but he has always been rare. He will 
 soon be commoner, because more may depend 
 in these matters on a hint from changed con- 
 ditions than most people are apt to suppose. 
 Many repressionists repress because they have 
 never heard it seriously said that boys are not 
 the better for being repressed. Others repress 
 because it is easier to do so than to be constantly 
 finding scope for their pupils' activity. Many 
 of the first class will be slowly converted by the 
 lessons of Montessori and of the Little Common- 
 wealth ; the second will be won over when plenty 
 of material is to hand for the use of their pupils. 
 
 The qualities to be possessed by the new school- 
 master at his best are not difficult to sum up. 
 He will be at once the modest, patient, scientific 
 observer and the sympathetic friend of his pupils ; 
 he will know how to be silent when there is no 
 need to speak ; he will be a natural (never a 
 hypocritical) diplomat, with an instinct for saying 
 in 
 
H2 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 with sincerity that which is psychologically apt ; 
 he will be profoundly an optimist with regard to 
 individuals and to the mass ; from the goodness 
 of his heart he will make each boy feel that no 
 boy is more honoured nor more trusted than the 
 boy before him. 
 
 These are general requirements for all that 
 is mere " method " can be learned easily enough. 
 Now are such men common ? Certainly not at 
 present. Will they become common ? If the 
 best of the new type will, as I think, always show 
 a clearer lead over their fellows than did the best 
 schoolmaster of the old order over his, still I 
 feel that there are a very large number pf good 
 men ready to do fair justice to that rather for- 
 midable list of requirements. And, after all, 
 the risks of utter failure in conducting a class 
 provided with material enabling it to work 
 actively are much less than in conducting a 
 class under conditions of unnatural silence and 
 inertness. 
 
 Of all the qualifications I have mentioned 
 none, I think, is more important than what I 
 have described as " modesty/' By this I mean 
 scientific modesty, a sort of agnosticism with 
 regard to the appropriate didactic method to be 
 applied to each individual, a tendency to wait 
 and to watch. The new psychology has little to 
 say about " boys/' Its business is with units, 
 and it is ever willing that the unit should put 
 it to school again. My ideal master will trust 
 
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER 113 
 
 himself to act on no generality that cannot be 
 made on what he sees before him at the moment. 
 He will claim no superiority, so that his evident 
 superiority of experience and of mechanical 
 efficiency may have their due and natural weight. 
 His politeness and consideration will be unfailing 
 (I believe that, short of a violent exaggeration 
 which might suggest irony, courtesy to boys 
 cannot be overdone) ; he will be unceasing in his 
 search for what has been better done, and of that 
 which has been badly done he will say little, and 
 that with a friendly smile ; he will be frank and 
 communicative without " making himself too 
 cheap " ; he will be (in a good and holy sense) 
 the servant and not the master, and so increase 
 his boys' respect a hundredfold. 
 
 At the risk of bringing myself under the ban of 
 my own condemnation of generalities, I cannot 
 help insisting on the almost unobserved paradoxes 
 of the healthy boy's nature. Short of the 
 pedagogic " holy terror " (if signs of fear are to 
 be taken into account), no master gains much 
 true respect from his boys unless his claims 
 are reduced to a minimum. Initiative in conduct 
 has the same value as initiative of the intellectual 
 kind, and the perfectly natural boy respects first 
 the man whom he chooses to, and not the man 
 he is told to respect. Hence, I say, short of a 
 demeanour which a boy might dub " wormish- 
 ness/' the less a master claims for himself in a 
 class of free boys the more he is certain to get 
 H 
 
H4 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 I have said elsewhere that the spirit we shall 
 want in our newest teachers ought to be some- 
 thing between the spirit of the referee at a foot- 
 ball match and that of an enthusiastic spectator. 
 All must be keen, all must be positive. No 
 reproaches, no talk of punishments or all may 
 collapse like a house of cards. " I think it would 
 be good fun to do this " is a frequent prelude of 
 mine, and it very rarely excites anything but 
 an enthusiastic response. We must learn to 
 respect every child to watch sympathetically 
 and only to inhibit after due and imaginative 
 reflection. Every child works and should work 
 in a different way and don't let us even suggest 
 our way of doing things until we are quite certain 
 that the child's is not, for him, the better and 
 the more profitable. In the early stages of my 
 experiment I interfered with different methods 
 of work far more than I do now. I thought 
 some questions too easy but how often I have 
 found my mistake, and that the natural genius 
 of the child was superior to all conventional 
 calculation ! 
 
 I have dealt already with the relative efface- 
 ment of the teacher in this system as compared 
 with collective instruction. Our role will be 
 to pass from child to child, encouraging, suggest- 
 ing new ideas, correcting pronunciation, and last 
 but not least circulating the new ideas we gain 
 from our pupils for these are often full of 
 ingenuity and, above all, of psychological fit- 
 
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER 115 
 
 ness. Montessori, after many years of scientific 
 study of conventional and unconventional child 
 psychology, has boldly stated that there can be 
 no such thing in practice. The only person who 
 understands a child is another child. And every 
 day I am proving the truth of her contention, 
 and every day my boys are teaching me more 
 than ever I could teach them. 
 
 Then one must not be timid about the according 
 of a full measure of freedom. On one occasion, 
 when my third form was flooded with new boys, 
 I told them in the most deliberate tone that there 
 was " no possible hope of getting a punishment/* 
 and I never knew the sternest of actual punish- 
 ments produce a more healthy or a more lasting 
 effect. This is the form in which in two terms 
 I have not had a single boy who did not work 
 with real enthusiasm for nine-tenths of his time. 
 There is something challenging in a strong and 
 vigorous declaration of this perfect immunity 
 from external pressure, but when all is said I 
 am too much of an educational agnostic to seek 
 to explain the phenomenon in terms of everyday 
 psychology. But one thing is quite certain 
 that the same words could not have the same 
 effect on a class doomed to sit silent while the 
 master talked. 
 
 One remark made by a little fellow of twelve 
 in this same third form has its interest in the 
 present context. After a burst of excitement 
 over some new development of my partnership 
 
n6 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 system, I reminded my boys that while they 
 might believe, it would not be so easy to convince 
 outsiders. The little boy of whom I write looked 
 at me with an expression of extraordinary under- 
 standing, and said : " You MUST WAIT FOR us, 
 SIR/' 
 
 The significance of this saying (which 
 opponents, through their " knowledge of boys/' 
 may easily translate into an example of my 
 exceeding credulity) lies in the fact that it co- 
 incides with the view several times expressed or 
 implied by Mr. Edmond Holmes, that the hope 
 of a supply of Montessori-inspired teachers lies 
 in the pupils of existing schools of liberty and 
 enlightenment. But who would have expected 
 the perception of this possibility to come from 
 one of the youngest of those very pupils ? 
 
 If it were a matter of replacing every repres- 
 sionist by teachers resolved to give a maximum 
 of liberty to their pupils, we should indeed have 
 to wait for many years before any marked effect 
 had been made on the untroubled, if muddy, 
 waters of English education. But fortunately 
 for my peace of mind, if not for my value as a 
 statistician, I believe that quite one-third of 
 existing teachers, and quite possibly a good many 
 more, are beyond hope neither of conviction nor 
 of making the experiment of leaving much more 
 to the initiative of their pupils than they are 
 prepared to do at the present time. I have 
 known one case at least of a master of an exag- 
 
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER 117 
 
 geratedly repressive order who, in a few months, 
 through his having been convinced of the truth 
 of Montessori's contentions, has emerged as the 
 gentlest and most considerate of pedagogues. 
 Is it beyond hope of realization that such radical 
 changes of outlook should be frequent ? After 
 all it must not be supposed that the average 
 repressionist is what he is necessarily either from 
 laziness or liver or lack of heart. Most frequently, 
 in all probability, he is so because it is the correct 
 and traditional thing to be, and because he has 
 never seen any serious reason to be anything 
 else. 
 
 Whatever effect emancipationist theories may 
 have upon the present generation of teachers, 
 one thing is certain : they are going to attract 
 into our ranks a new and more original type of 
 schoolmaster. To sensitive men and they are 
 just the people we want under the new regime 
 there has been much that was repugnant under 
 the old class-teaching. The rough-and-ready 
 justice, the need to harden one's heart when one 
 felt most pity, the application of trivial and 
 vexatious rules, the effort to produce a uniform 
 type in a world already so dreadfully uniform 
 all these things, on top of the petty irritations 
 of the ordinary schoolmaster's life, have served 
 to make our calling one of the least attractive 
 to those born with what has hitherto been the 
 curse of a delicate sympathy and a rich imagina- 
 tion. The new school might very well be a 
 
n8 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 perpetual delight to such a man. His work will 
 at every moment be creative ; there will be a 
 fine field for his sympathies ; he will be immune 
 from all danger of committing the once inevitable 
 injustice. He will have before him a little world 
 growing all the time with the wonderful growth 
 that can be seen only when spontaneity has full 
 play. It will be a life full of richness and beauty 
 and endless charm for the true artist ; of constant 
 and fascinating and endlessly changing problems 
 for the man of science. In a world of true 
 thinkers such a prospect would be singularly 
 alluring, and even in this commercialized world 
 I have hopes that it will not be without its 
 attraction. Nearly all the spheres of work which 
 offer the chance of creation or of research have 
 been filled for the most part by men who were 
 prepared to sacrifice their material interests to 
 the passion of their intellectual life. Teaching 
 may yet be another. 
 
 But even on the material side I know of no 
 way in which the public is more likely to be 
 converted to a true appreciation of the teacher's 
 mission than in the coming effort to revitalize 
 the whole structure of society through its children. 
 Mention education now, and even the father or 
 the mother will suppress a yawn. The day is 
 fast approaching when it will be recognized that 
 the highest human function is the art of training 
 the young through their own activities. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SHOULD PARTNERSHIP TEACHING BE EXCLUSIVE ? 
 
 WE shall have to wait for a long and varied 
 series of experiments before we are able to say 
 with confidence that work in partnership is to 
 occupy this or that particular proportion of the 
 manifestation of boys' activities. All I can say 
 at present is that partnership teaching and the 
 dramatic method are the only really promising 
 outlets for the natural energies of children in 
 the schoolroom that I am aware of and that 
 the dramatic method, excellent as it is under 
 ideal conditions, has certain obvious disadvantages 
 to which I have already referred. The whole of 
 the teaching of languages, ancient or modern, 
 could, I feel certain, be carried out by pupils 
 working in partnership ; and at the least a very 
 large portion of the work on history, geography, 
 English literature, chemistry, shorthand and 
 general knowledge could be studied in this way. 
 Mathematics offer a very special problem, as 
 to which I am in the unfortunate position of 
 having no right to an opinion owing to my own 
 incapacity in this direction. Those whom I 
 119 
 
120 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 have consulted vary in their view from a 
 confident assertion that "it is the most suitable 
 subject of all " to the expression of a grave doubt 
 whether it would not have to be left to its present 
 devices. (This last, by the way, is by no means 
 the inevitable alternative, since it happens, on 
 the showing of other experiments, to be a subject 
 in which fine results have been achieved by a 
 strict individualization of work, allowing each 
 boy to maintain his own pace.) One most 
 capable mathematician has promised me to 
 experiment, in a well-known boarding-school, on 
 lines which he thinks would render the appli- 
 cation of the partnership principle certain of 
 success. I should be most grateful for any 
 hints on this particular field of investigation. 
 
 Whether we have or have not to make excep- 
 tions to the general principle of teaching in this 
 way, I think we can take for granted that it 
 may well become the chief means of giving scope 
 to the boys' spontaneous effort. But to say this 
 is not to imply that we need be too bigoted in our 
 heresy and exclude, for example, the purely 
 individual work that boys might be encouraged 
 to carry out in their school library, or to deny the 
 value of an occasional lecture by a master. To 
 do so would be to adopt the very methods of 
 exclusive intolerance which we have had occasion 
 to regret in our opponents. The idea of setting 
 boys to teach one another from material placed 
 before them by the master must, in any event, 
 
PARTNERSHIP WORK 121 
 
 evolve. It cannot come in a day, because we have 
 first to provide and set up the machinery necessary 
 to the working of the method. All that really 
 matters at this juncture is the securing of a large 
 number of masters resolved to end, as soon as this 
 proves possible, the practice of teaching boys 
 in a mass at one fixed pace, and to substitute for 
 it a policy based on the taste, the capacity and 
 the rate of progress of the individual boy. 
 
 Madame Montessori has over and over again, 
 but not once too often, emphasized the danger 
 of confounding the new ideal of education with 
 the mechanical use of this or that piece of didactic 
 apparatus, and the same warning has to be 
 repeated with any fresh effort to provide for 
 the free activities of children. It is in this 
 reference that it is true that sound educa- 
 tional theory is often more practical than 
 practice itself. The incredulous master the 
 master who still believes that repression is 
 a necessary basis of the training of children 
 would do well, therefore, to limit, at first, the 
 application of the partnership method to a very 
 small area in the field of his activities. Within 
 this area he will, of course, " play the game " 
 to the extent of according the fullest possible 
 liberties, and of effacing his own authority to 
 the utmost possible degree. He must remember 
 that no didactic theory can stand the test, in its 
 application, of even a subconscious intention 
 to let it end in a reductio ad dbsurdum. To 
 
122 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 educate without enthusiasm is not to educate at 
 all ; but to educate without the least presump- 
 tion that the method you are applying has some 
 soundness in it can only produce complete 
 disaster. I have no fear either of the true 
 enthusiast, nor of the impartial and serious 
 experimenter, but one cannot shut one's eyes to 
 the danger of experiments rendered bad by the 
 fact that they are something worse than half- 
 hearted. 
 
 The policy of " the thin end of the wedge " 
 is then, I fancy, the best upon which we can 
 discreetly enter in the present state of the edu- 
 cational world. From that will come the general 
 perception of new psychological truths which are 
 infinitely more important than any application 
 of them in the practical administration of the 
 school. All roads having the direction of free 
 activity lead at last to the goal of self-govern- 
 ment, and it is the sense of direction which we 
 need to cultivate first in the teacher of the new 
 era. 
 
 With actual teaching through partnerships 
 certain individualizing methods of imparting 
 instruction are directly parallel. Such are, for 
 example, my French game of " Solitaire/' in 
 which in his home-work a boy, by means of 
 " stage directions " in English, teaches himself 
 all the commoner expressions 1 connected with 
 
 1 e.g. " You are going to wash your hands : Je vais 
 me laver les mains. (Taking the soap) Je prends le savon. 
 
PARTNERSHIP WORK 123 
 
 his daily life ; guessing games 2 involving tests 
 of his efficiency in vocabulary, and class debates. 
 In fact the advocate of teaching in partnership 
 could be opposed to no other form of evocation 
 of the boys' own will to do good and cheerful 
 work. It will be found, moreover, that once 
 the boys have found an outlet for their own 
 activities of the co-operative kind, they will be 
 far better prepared to do good work entirely 
 by themselves than if they had had whole hours 
 of continuous impassivity in class. 
 
 On certain sides of the teaching of particular 
 subjects the partnership method has a special 
 significance. Such, for example, is the conver- 
 sational treatment of Latin. Whether this is 
 
 Qu'est-ce que je prends ? Je prends le savon. (Dipping 
 hands and soap in water) Je plonge les mains et le savon 
 dans I'eau," etc. After the various actions of washing 
 and drying the hands have been completed, the boy 
 questions himself in the past tense, beginning with 
 Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait d'abord ? If a boy has a railway 
 passing at the bottom of his garden I provide for him 
 meditations in dialogue form concerning the passing 
 of a train. Another boy I send in his leisure time to 
 the station with appropriate sentences ready-made, so 
 that he learns to associate the language of particular 
 actions with the actions themselves. 
 
 8 The guessing game was used with much success in 
 the teaching of Latin as far back as the eighteenth 
 century. With little boys it will serve to strengthen 
 the vocabulary of available nouns ; with older boys I 
 go through a series of actions and get them to guess 
 which of them it is of which I am thinking, e.g., Qu'est-ce 
 que fai fait? Vous avez montve le plafond vous vous 
 etes lave les mains vous avez mis le livre sur le pupitre, 
 etc, 
 
124 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 going to be the future method of teaching the 
 dead languages par excellence, or whether it is 
 only going to be a minor help to that end, Latin 
 conversation in partnership has obviously the 
 greatest possible advantage over similar con- 
 versation taught collectively. And whatever one 
 may think of the future of co-operative work 
 in mathematics, it is certain that dual work on 
 mental arithmetic would provide a better basis 
 for the firm and easy handling of numbers than 
 anything of which I, at any rate, am aware. It 
 must be remembered that if boys are provided 
 with my material for mutual questioning (the 
 answer, of course, always following the question), 
 and catechise their partners for the space of a 
 quarter of an hour, they have at the end of that 
 time covered, in a class of average size, the 
 equivalent of some five hours* work as under the 
 system of collective teaching. 
 
 The library might be made a centre of intel- 
 lectual activity such as it has never been made 
 hitherto. Indeed it might become the true 
 centre of all intellectual activities. Not only 
 might the boys seek in it literary and scientific 
 knowledge, but it could form the strongest link 
 between books and life by including, besides the 
 greatest and the best achievements of the human 
 intellect, works of practical import on gardening 
 and carpentry, for example which would form 
 the basis of corresponding manual activities, 
 and so train the boys to go to books for informa- 
 
PARTNERSHIP WORK 125 
 
 tion of every possible kind. Seeing the average 
 citizen's bigoted separation of " theory J> and 
 " practice/' the gain through this proceeding 
 would be extremely great. The library would 
 form, again, the proper centre for seeking in- 
 formation for the English composition, for the 
 historical story, for the play, for the debate. Such 
 a state of things might prevail even under present 
 conditions ; but with the new encouragement 
 of the boys' own initiative it would have 
 a new meaning and an enormously increased 
 value. 
 
 In laying down any laws as to what the boy 
 should be asked to learn, the disciple of the new 
 school of thought will show an inevitable reserve 
 based on his faith in the boy himself, and on the 
 surprises that he must needs count upon in the 
 directions taken by the interests of those who have 
 been emancipated from the excesses of outside 
 control. Once the creative instincts of the young 
 have been revitalized, a hundred new avenues 
 of learning will be opened to us. And so many 
 new " methods " will be invented by the greatest 
 of all educational reformers the pupils them- 
 selves that it would be an impertinence on my 
 part to lay down laws in which they might see 
 nothing but psychological ineptitude. 
 
 What right, then, have I to lay down even the 
 principle that the class partnership is to be our 
 first and greatest resource in providing for the 
 intellectual energies of our boys ? In the first 
 
126 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 place I have seen it in working order, and I have 
 seen no single boy to whom it seemed unsuited ; 
 in the second place it is so simple in conception 
 that if a test with seventy boys is considered 
 insufficient, I urge that its very inevitableness 
 would commend it to any boy at the very first 
 moment of its application. The partnership 
 represents the natural arrangement of the two 
 sides of a game reflects a principle that a boy 
 would invent himself if it were not ready to his 
 hand. Indeed I believe that it is only by dint 
 of looking at things through the eyes of the child, 
 and not through any elaborate deductions, that 
 I have arrived at this most unassuming of devices 
 for leading boys to regard their work as play 
 And that is the best thing that I could ask of 
 those who are prepared to work this method as an 
 experiment that they will do all in their power 
 to gain something of a child's faith in the simple 
 but wonderful vision of the children about them ! 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DIFFERENTIAL IDEA 
 
 IN the middle of last summer I published, as a 
 ballon d'essai, a brief and too hastily written 
 pamphlet, entitled " Differentialism : A New 
 Method of Class Teaching/' Despite its rapid 
 treatment of a very large subject this booklet 
 aroused much more interest than I had dared 
 to anticipate. But much in it was necessarily 
 vague and indefinite. And there are many 
 misconceptions about this particular side of my 
 theory that are still in need of correction. 
 
 The way it arose was this. I was standing 
 before my class one day, wondering what verb 
 I should give the boys to learn, when it came 
 into my mind to ask myself why I gave one verb 
 to a whole class, and whether there was any 
 well-founded reason why masters gave twenty 
 boys one particular thing to learn at one par- 
 ticular moment. Needless to say I found it 
 very difficult to give myself any valid reason 
 for this proceeding, and I at once decided to try 
 the effect of giving as many verbs as there were 
 boys. The result, as I had half foreseen, was 
 127 
 
128 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 remarkable. The bottom boys in the form, 
 spurred to effort by the fact that for the first 
 time they knew things of which their class 
 superiors were ignorant, at once showed an interest 
 in their work such as they had never displayed 
 before (for these were pre-partnership days). 
 After that, and so long as I taught collectively, 
 I set my work on this principle of letting one boy 
 teach another through being in possession of 
 different information ; and when I reached the 
 partnership stage of my experiments I saw no 
 reason to depart from this plan. 
 
 I am convinced still that partially differentiated 
 work is a necessity for work in partnership, but 
 I have come to see that complete differentiation 
 to the extent of giving every boy different work 
 from that of any other boy is less necessary than 
 was the case in collective teaching. By this I 
 mean that so far as the actual working of the part- 
 nerships is concerned there is no great advantage 
 in providing twenty different sections of books 
 over providing two sets of ten, so that the 
 two boys working together may have different 
 material, enabling them to be mutually useful. 
 But I think it would certainly be of the greatest 
 possible advantage, from the point of view of 
 general culture, that the boys should be able to 
 exchange ideas taken from the widest possible 
 range of sources. 
 
 Another advantage, where existing printed 
 books are used, is that this proceeding results in 
 
THE DIFFERENTIAL IDEA 129 
 
 an immense economy since it enables, as I have 
 stated elsewhere, a single copy of a valuable 
 book to be read simultaneously by many boys. 
 Where manuscript books have to be made, the 
 best method is, I think, to compromise and take 
 from four to six copies of each section. Boy A 
 may then be questioning his partner B on the 
 futures of French irregular verbs, while B is 
 interrogating A on the corresponding past parti- 
 ciples. C, E and G may then have the same 
 matter before them as A, and D, F and H may 
 have a provision similar to that of B, but the 
 rest of the class may be quite differently occupied. 
 And the fact that the boys are offered all possible 
 choice of material certainly tends to add to their 
 enthusiasm for their work. 
 
 In English and in a school that is perfectly 
 free of all " set-books " it would be a clear 
 advantage to reverse the process I have just 
 mentioned and encourage differentiation in reading 
 except as between the partners, who in the reading 
 aloud would take it in turn to read to one another. 
 The fact that ten different English classics were 
 being read in a class of twenty boys at one moment 
 would certainly encourage a very healthy ex- 
 changing of notes and would indirectly help 
 considerably the boys' powers of expression. I 
 know well that it will be a matter of much 
 difficulty to get the vast majority of masters to 
 see eye to eye with me in this matter of letting 
 relatively so much work pass without the most 
 
130 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 vigilant enquiry into the detail of what is being 
 done. And so long as they look at the problem 
 from the one angle there is little hope of their 
 conversion. For we are suddenly in the very 
 depths of genuine Montessori theory. 
 
 I have never felt a greater sense of responsi- 
 bility than I feel at this moment. For people 
 so often forget that good grounds for a belief 
 may meet with such a bad exposition that it 
 is all as if those grounds were bad. In the first 
 place to any one of the new school the question 
 is on all fours with the problem of allowing a child 
 to dress itself twelve months before most children 
 are allowed to do so. It is only the Montessori 
 mother who could never hesitate, because she 
 would know that even if the child's efforts to 
 dress itself are at first clumsy and grotesque, 
 its very blundering is more educative than the 
 most finished exposition of dressing at the hands 
 of its mother. 
 
 Then our critics have to remember that it is 
 the schoolboy and not the boy who is careless 
 of the mistakes he makes. Let me remind you 
 once more of that Montessori child who rubbed 
 out a beautifully-made letter seven times that he 
 might make it still more beautiful. Lastly, 
 nurse a boy and he will go on being nursed. 
 Every day that you make him dependent on 
 you for the care and accuracy of his work will be 
 a day that renders him more incapable of self- 
 criticism. The best avenue to self-criticism is 
 
THE DIFFERENTIAL IDEA 131 
 
 that of self-discovered mistakes, otherwise the 
 perpetual faultfinder would be the best, and not, 
 as even the most conservative of theorists would 
 admit, the worst of teachers. 
 
 Of course if any subject is to be learned 
 thoroughly there must be adequate provision 
 for, so to say, an attack upon it from many 
 points. And this is a particular in which this 
 system has a clear advantage over collective 
 teaching. Its elasticity provides the possibility 
 of supplying at any moment the material for 
 correcting any defect found in a particular 
 individual. If a boy is weak on a syntactical 
 construction in a foreign language, we can at 
 once provide him with the section of a full treatise 
 that he requires ; if he thinks that a moujik is 
 an animal of the mongoose tribe, what better 
 moment for him to learn, without keeping back 
 a whole class, something of life in Russia from 
 the sectional library ? With this system the 
 material for self-correction is constantly at hand. 
 
 The principal of differentiation, even in the 
 respect where it might at first seem to be weakest, 
 may well be regarded as a source of strength, 
 inasmuch as it throws the onus of government 
 on the boys themselves. The master has to 
 trust the boys ; if they were all doing the same 
 work (which on quite other grounds would be 
 impracticable) the principle of self-government 
 would have no real scope for development, since 
 it would be too easy and too tempting to the 
 
132 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 master, from force of habit, to take complete 
 command. To those who are not anxious to 
 extend this new franchise to boys, this will 
 hardly be considered a point in favour of the 
 partnership principle. But it will be the greatest 
 of all consolations to the master of the new school 
 and to many a parent who has seen the coming 
 of the dawn in education. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MATERIAL FOR PARTNERSHIP WORK 
 
 I HOPE we shall soon have a considerable amount 
 of printed matter for use under the partnership 
 plan. Meantime the master who wishes to 
 experiment can begin by making his own printed 
 and manuscript sectional books. The possible 
 variety of this material is practically infinite. 
 It is impossible to have too many sections on 
 hand, because some point of delicate adjustment 
 to individual needs is constantly needing atten- 
 tion. 
 
 In French, those who wish to begin in a very 
 cautious way may very well cut up Hachette's 
 or Macmillan's full French verb books into the 
 requisite number of sections. The simplest way 
 to treat the pages after their removal from the 
 parent book is to take first a doubled piece of 
 kitchen paper a little larger than the requisite 
 size, so as to allow of subsequent cutting, and pass 
 the seccotine tube down it in such a way as to 
 deposit a continuous streak of glue just wide 
 enough to cover the back and half the margin 
 on each side of the batch of leaves. The final 
 
134 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 cover may be of thick brown paper applied in the 
 same manner. This should be labelled with the 
 name of the book and the number of the section. 
 . . . Next, if it has been realized through this 
 simple test that even relatively dull material 
 can lead to keen work, the master may make 
 a few class dialogues on my system of giving 
 " stage " directions in the margin of the page. 
 The French tenses may be specially studied on 
 the same principle one or two cards being 
 devoted to each tense. I will give, by way of 
 example, a sentence or two of typical conver- 
 sational exercises on the past participle. The 
 participles of practically all the commoner French 
 irregular verbs can be introduced on this plan : 
 
 Partner (having placed book on table) : Qu'est-ce 
 que fai fait? Vous avez MIS le livre sur la table. 
 (Having opened the book) : Qu'est-ce que fai fait? 
 Vous avez OUVERT le livre. (Having read) : Est-ce 
 que fai LU quelque chose? Out, vous avez LU quelque 
 chose. (Having written in his exercise-book) : Qu'est-ce 
 que fai fait? Vous avez &CRIT dans votre cahier. 
 
 The time can be taught by watches or by 
 clock faces together with time-cards on some- 
 thing like the following principle : 
 
 Question : Quelle heure est-il? 
 Partner sets watch to : 
 
 9 o'clock. II est neuf heures. 
 
 11.30 o'clock. // est onze heures et demie. 
 
 4.20 o'clock. // est quatre heures vingt, etc. 
 
 Activity may be introduced into the reading 
 side of the work by what I may call the intensive 
 study of texts. The principle is much that 
 
MATERIAL FOR] WORK 135 
 
 followed in an admirable book called Textes et 
 Questions, except that I give preliminary exercises 
 in vocabulary, and naturally add, in the dialogue 
 which succeeds the text, the full answer as a 
 check on the reply of the partner. And there 
 is practically no limit to the provisions that may 
 be made for the study of modern languages on 
 the partnership plan. 
 
 Both for French and English I strongly recom- 
 mend the " missing word game " (or " missing 
 word tests " as the conventional master would 
 perhaps prefer to have it). In French we might 
 have, in order to exercise the pupil on the pro- 
 nouns: La maison (dont) je parle ; in English; 
 in the first case as vocabulary drill, and in the 
 second as a matter of general knowledge, we 
 might have : (a) Glue, honey and treacle are 
 (viscous) substances ; (b) " Utopia" was written by 
 (Sir Thomas More). The imaginative master will 
 see that even this little device suggests the possi- 
 bility of an almost indefinite development. Indeed 
 quite a considerable amount of special as well as 
 of general knowledge might be acquired by this 
 means. And where it is applicable it has the 
 advantage of not even wasting the time necessary 
 to the framing of an appropriate question. 
 
 Of the consequences of giving boys thorough 
 partnership drill in mental arithmetic, I could 
 not say quite all I anticipate, because I should 
 seem to many to be exaggerating. But let me 
 remind them of the immense economy of time, 
 
136 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 of the encouraging effect on boys who have no 
 leaning towards figures, and of the value in this 
 and kindred subjects of boys being able to master 
 one principle before passing on to the next and, 
 even if they do not accept the full measure of my 
 optimism, I believe they will agree " that there 
 is something in it." If we did not create in 
 the very young boy a greatly increased sense of 
 number we should at the very least add con- 
 siderably to his ability to handle figures in later 
 youth and throughout his manhood. Exactly 
 what w r ould be the lines along which we should 
 adapt partnership methods to the more advanced 
 problems of arithmetic and of algebra I can only 
 repeat that my ignorance of mathematics must 
 needs hinder me from any clear and definitive 
 statement ; but it does seem to me that a method 
 which only demands for its success the providing 
 of material giving scope for full personal activity 
 and the supplying of the solution of every problem 
 which the boy has to propound to his partner 
 must be capable of adaptation to the teaching of 
 most, if not all, of the branches of mathematics. 
 
 Such important educational details as spelling 
 would be especially provided for. In fact spelling 
 is a subject in which work in partnership finds 
 one of its greatest sources of justification. I do 
 something in this direction with the sectional 
 dictionary, but I also do much for the training 
 of the observation, by encouraging the boys to 
 give one another time-tests, in which one boy 
 
MATERIAL FOR WORK 137 
 
 allows his partner a certain number of seconds 
 to look at a word real or " nonsense " which 
 involves more or less prolonged and accurate 
 study before it is possible to reproduce it 
 correctly. 
 
 But there is one thing that the more impatient 
 of my critics must bear in mind that whatever 
 be the merits or the defects of the partnership 
 method as a provision for the innumerable 
 requirements of modern education, it is not for 
 one man to offer a ready-made programme 
 claimed to be applicable to every side of the work 
 of the class-room. I only claim, given a large 
 number of true enthusiasts working along these 
 lines, and patiently evolving ever newer ways of 
 employing the principle laid down, that we are 
 on the eve of solving the problem of adapting 
 school work to every conceivable need of the 
 individual. But such a result cannot be attained 
 in a day. There is nothing harder than to 
 induce men accustomed all their lives to the idea 
 that " boys are to be seen and not heard/' that 
 " idle boys must be punished/' and that to 
 " spare the rod is to spoil the child/' even to 
 believe that one's theories are not of the evil 
 one, let alone to add to their own work (for the 
 moment at any rate) by starting on what they 
 might conceive to be a very useless series of 
 experiments. Indeed such men are probably 
 beyond hope of conversion. On the whole it is 
 wiser not to try to convert them, but to apply 
 
138 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 all one's energies to winning over those who 
 are already ripe for conviction 
 
 If it were hopeless to expect that a fair 
 proportion of schoolmasters would approach this 
 method of teaching with an open mind, and in 
 the event of their being convinced would make 
 some small personal effort to test its principles 
 in practice, this book would not have been written. 
 And whatever may be said about the " con- 
 servatism " of the pedagogue, I do believe that, 
 scattered over these isles, in the Empire beyond 
 and in America, there are men of fire and energy, 
 men of science, men of reason, who have long 
 groaned over the lifelessness, the cruel rigidity, 
 the hopelessness of repressive education. What 
 is more, I believe that not a few of them are doing 
 far more than the letter of the law of their em- 
 ployment dictates to them to do, in their sincere 
 efforts to make the best possible use of what 
 they know to be a bad and worn-out machine. 
 It is on such men as these that I depend for the 
 fair and exhaustive trial of the idea with which 
 I set out in this volume, and it is to them that 
 I now appeal. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SOME HINTS ON DISCIPLINE 
 
 FEW people who have not given the matter 
 special thought are likely to have realized that 
 to accord liberty to children is not merely to 
 withdraw interference, but to encourage them to 
 be free. It is quite amusing to notice how many 
 people there are, from school inspectors down- 
 wards, who cannot understand this little point. 
 As I pointed out in the first part of this book, a 
 child may be free in a spatial sense in the sense 
 of mere capacity to move among grown-up people 
 without either being truly free, or, what is 
 more, enjoying the vestige of a feeling of freedom. 
 The master will not, therefore, content himself 
 with withdrawing ordinary class penalties while 
 this system is in operation, but he will do all that 
 lies in his power to render that freedom vital and 
 inspiring. I would say : Take your boys wholly 
 into your confidence, and tell them precisely 
 what you are aiming at. You are helped from 
 the start by the fact that the majority of your 
 pupils, once you have made a perfectly free and 
 frank and natural explanation of the idea upon 
 139 
 
140 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 which you are working, will immediately rank 
 themselves on your side. In a tw T elve-year-old 
 class of twenty there will be at least seventeen 
 to work with you from the very first minute. 
 It goes without saying that the three-twentieths 
 do not long resist the will of the seventeen- 
 twentieths and another ten minutes will leave 
 you with perhaps one merely passive resister. 
 The third lesson should show boundless enthusiasm 
 and such rapid progress as you would hardly have 
 imagined possible. 
 
 With older boys the victory may come a little 
 more slowly, but in no case will a very little 
 patience fail to get a result that will surprise 
 any master used to the relative dulness of the 
 collectively-taught class. The older the boys 
 the more need for tactful and sympathetic hand- 
 ling. Resent as little as possible, and you will 
 have fewer and fewer causes for resentment. 
 Will your boys to confide in you ; pick up the 
 passing joke and join in the laugh, if it is worth 
 it. (If it is not, laugh good-naturedly at the boy 
 who made it, and pass on.) Let the ideals you 
 set before the boys be constantly positive. A 
 boy often loves you for encouraging him to work, 
 but he loathes you for telling him what you think 
 he is when he has a mind to loaf. Remember, 
 in framing sentences, that the cat plays a part 
 in the life of a small boy, and at all times that a 
 big boy thinks you ought to listen when he speaks. 
 Turn your back deliberately if you see the begin 
 
HINTS ON DISCIPLINE 141 
 
 nings of disorder, and five minutes later ask the 
 boys whether they noticed the incident, because 
 it is for them to prevent such a thing from happen- 
 ing again. 
 
 I am purposely putting the problems of dis- 
 cipline at their most difficult, for a master may 
 conceivably have to handle a number of boys 
 who have been used to an excess of repression, 
 and the repressed boy, being naturally the least 
 quickly responsive to the discipline of freedom, 
 is more likely to abuse his new emancipation 
 than were my own boys, to whom I had allowed 
 a certain degreee of liberty before proceeding 
 to the self-government that they enjoyed more 
 latterly. But no master need have fear, for 
 the very tendency to break away at first proves 
 that the boy, whatever else he may be, is not the 
 " caged bird " from whom his teachers will soon 
 be praying to be delivered. 
 
 With the vast majority of boys, younger or 
 older, the great probability is that a good result 
 will follow at once, always supposing that the 
 material provided is of a character calculated to 
 give due scope to active work. That is, of 
 course and more especially before the boys have 
 formed the habit of working co-operatively a 
 prime essential. With such material it is simply 
 inevitable that the game association will quickly 
 assert itself, and the boys will after a few lessons 
 be quite ready to accept as a common-place that 
 there really is no difference, save in the pace at 
 
142 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 which we deal with it, between what we call work 
 and what we call play. 
 
 Indeed the chances are that the master will 
 be so satisfied with his early results that he will 
 be content to accept them as the utmost that 
 partnership teaching has to give. In point of 
 fact he is only at the beginning of a marvellous 
 unfolding of wholly new traits in the characters 
 of his boys. As yet he has seen little of the 
 innate inventiveness, so long stifled and repressed, 
 which will presently emerge and play an ever- 
 increasing part in the method of each pupil's 
 study ; he has not yet seen more than the begin- 
 ning of the schoolboy's gradual metamorphosis 
 into that boy of whom he never dreamed. 
 
 It is only when the real boy begins to appear that 
 the master's really heavy responsibilities (however 
 sweet they may be rendered by the fascination 
 of the work) may be said to begin. He sees that 
 he has a new power for good, inasmuch as the 
 emancipated boy hangs upon his lips as the 
 imprisoned boy never could. Now is the time, 
 at the very moment of a seemingly complete 
 victory, that he has to set a watch upon his 
 tongue. The schoolboy was hard and obtuse ; 
 the boy is finer, quicker of perception, more 
 anxious to please. A harsh word is now almost 
 a stab, and the gentlest of criticism has the 
 weight of a headmaster's ultimatum. The artist 
 among teachers will look with infinite pity, with 
 infinite hope, at the still unmoulded clay before 
 
HINTS ON DISCIPLINE 143 
 
 him, and learn that this boy, now so free, is 
 bound to his teacher, to his environment, with 
 triple chains. He will set to work with infinite 
 respect, with enthralled attention, to help on 
 this new and marvellous being along the path to 
 the realization of a higher human type. He will 
 curse the days of wasted opportunity, and wonder 
 whether he will ever quite make good those 
 years of cruel, meaningless repression ; but he 
 will rejoice unceasingly that it is his lot to be 
 among the first to be at the work of beginning to 
 recreate the world through the laws on which 
 the world is founded. 
 
 But there are many masters who while working 
 keenly and aptly enough will not see any such 
 vision. To them the appeal must be a little 
 different. What one would ask of them is : 
 Watch, be silent, respect, and trust ! Forget all 
 that the school-class has taught you, and believe 
 nothing that you do not see before you. Be 
 boundless in your understanding sympathy ; 
 shut up in yourself all desire to reproach and to 
 sneer. If you are in a bad temper, say so like 
 a man, and apologize like a man, and don't 
 pretend like a coward that you are speaking from 
 a principle when your spleen finds some vent. 
 All men lie in one way or other, but that is no 
 reason why we should teach lying as a subject 
 in our schools. 
 
 There is still another class of master which one 
 has to reckon with consisting of those who are 
 
144 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 neither enthusiastic nor open-minded nor overtly 
 hostile. These people might be called roturiers 
 those who live and move and have their being in 
 an atmosphere of unending routine. None of 
 them can conceivably be reading this book, so 
 I shall be safe in warning others against their 
 conclusions. They are ready, on request, to 
 "try" anything. They would obediently make 
 their boys stand on their heads, or learn to read 
 backwards, if they were told to do so. They are 
 infinitely accommodating to orders from above, 
 and they will set boys to work in partnership with 
 the most commendable resignation. The trouble 
 is that a man of this type will go no further. His 
 ideal of education being mechanical and based on 
 an inferior order of deductive reasoning, he will 
 embrace this system as a mere device, on the one 
 hand, and, on the other, with an inner resolve 
 that the boys shall not be left for one moment to 
 incur the " dangers" incidental to spontaneous 
 work. His pupils, sick to death of the petty 
 persecutions of " old Blank" in the past (for the 
 mechanical teacher is always a tyrant), and know- 
 ing perfectly well that their present degree of 
 formal emancipation is not due to him, may 
 quite conceivably see in the first application of 
 the partnership system an opportunity to react 
 from their erstwhile restraints. The true teacher 
 will regard the momentary failure of such a man 
 (who, to save himself from further trouble, will 
 announce an absolute and final collapse of the 
 
HINTS ON DISCIPLINE 145 
 
 method) as due to his omission to apply more 
 than the letter of the partnership principle to his 
 classes. 
 
 Some masters, again, will be completely over- 
 come by the sound made by ten boys speaking at 
 one and the same moment. And there is, indeed, 
 the true workshop buzz about a class conducted on 
 these lines. Those who have entered the teach- 
 ing profession in order to have a quiet time will, 
 in particular, resent this hum of happy activity. 
 To the enthusiast it will be an almost continual 
 joy, for it will remind him constantly that this 
 noise typifies a glorious reaction from thousands of 
 years of cruel and unnatural silence. If he does 
 not interfere, all that is excessive in this sound 
 will disappear of itself, as the boys soon protest 
 to one another when they are disturbed in their 
 work. 
 
 All that I have written on this subject of the 
 new discipline amounts, I think, to saying that 
 the first and last essential is to have faith. With 
 faith in the boys and faith in the sovereign power 
 of liberty and these things never come to some-r 
 there is little left to the master but to accomplish 
 the sometimes slightly difficult task of being 
 or of becoming himself. After all perfect 
 naturalness is a signal proof of trust, and that, 
 I think, is why boys have so much more respect 
 for a man who, not being a weakling, says what 
 he really thinks, than for that unamiable teller 
 of unceasing white lies, the old type of " dis- 
 
146 THE PRACTICAL SOLUTION 
 
 ciplinarian." The natural man, again, tends to 
 have more of that variety of manner, that faculty 
 of saying the thing that surprises, than he whose 
 every word is measured by a desire to produce 
 an appropriate effect. And the least theoretical 
 of pedagogues knows that variety of personality 
 and constant change of the forms of speech is 
 one of the first essentials to winning the esteem 
 and affection of the young. 
 
 There are difficulties, then, and I cannot pretend 
 that there are not, in finding men prepared to 
 enter with enthusiasm into the task of unlearning 
 so much that has been laboriously pieced together 
 in the school wedded to collective teaching. 
 But I still dare to end this chapter with a note 
 of hope and of confidence, in saying that I believe 
 that we shall soon have teachers enough to try 
 skilfully the value of partnership teaching, and 
 to prove that it is worth adoption on a very 
 much larger scale. 
 
PART III 
 
 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 
 
 FROM the self-governing class to the self-governing 
 school is but a short step. From the common- 
 wealth colony for young delinquents to the 
 commonwealth school for normal boys is scarcely 
 a step at all. The leaders of our movement have 
 all the proofs, all the plans, all the necessary 
 faith. For what, then, do we wait ? To put 
 it bluntly, for men and for money. 
 
 Neither of these difficulties is, however, in- 
 superable. Scattered sparsely throughout the 
 schools of Great Britain, and bound together by 
 a bond of common zeal and intense sympathy, 
 is a growing band of workers who have seen the 
 light, and are but awaiting the chance to give 
 effect to their hopes and their convictions. Not 
 only the outside world, but their own colleagues 
 often hardly know how deeply they are in revolt 
 against the repressive system they are called 
 upon to administer. But between them there 
 is an understanding, stated or understood, that 
 the moment the chance comes they will take 
 up their stand on the ground of light and liberty. 
 149 
 
ijo THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 With these men we could not staff the schools of 
 one county, but we could find among them a 
 personnel for all the schools that could possibly 
 be capitalized at this early stage of our move- 
 ment. 
 
 At present, indeed, we need no more than one 
 experimental school, where we may carry out 
 our principles, fearless of that formidable person, 
 the interim critic. The problem of finding pupils 
 is far from really serious. If I may venture to 
 say so on the basis of my own experience and 
 that of my acquaintance, there must not be tens, 
 nor hundreds, but several thousands of intelligent 
 fathers and mothers in these isles who have cause 
 to desire a profound change in the system of 
 school-government. Some are in revolt through 
 over-pressure, some through bad teaching, some 
 through excess of subjects, some through the 
 uniformity of the idea-less type produced by 
 our schools ; some and more than most people 
 imagine have themselves embraced the full 
 theory of the auto-education of the child, either 
 (in rare and happy cases) through their own dis- 
 covery, or by recent conversion to the doctrines 
 of Dr. Montessori. Whatever the grounds of 
 their belief, parents in considerable numbers 
 await only the inauguration of such a school to 
 support it, and to spread the new gospel upon 
 which it depends for its existence. 
 
 To say why I believe that the commonwealth 
 school is the only scientifically right sort of 
 
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 151 
 
 school is to imply most of the arguments advanced 
 in favour of freedom in childhood in the course 
 of the preceding pages, and to add to them as 
 I shall now do some statement of the practical 
 ideals that we might well hope to carry out : 
 
 A school of this sort will be a school of liberty 
 in every sense physical, intellectual and moral. 
 The only restraints will be those imposed on the 
 individual boy by the collective will of his fellows. 
 
 There can be no compromise, as any one having 
 a glimmering of the Montessori inspiration will 
 not fail to see. True liberty means discipline 
 the finest discipline the world has ever seen ; 
 partial liberty only makes repression the more 
 subversive of true discipline. True freedom 
 also (once more let me beg the reader to expect 
 truth in paradox where the young are concerned) 
 ensures to the master a full scope for his intel- 
 lectual and moral influence. My wishes were 
 far more consulted when my boys were free than 
 when I still claimed the right to direct. 
 
 Now comes a little problem of administration 
 that is sure to find expression from the hostile 
 critic, even if I do not state it here. If the boys 
 are to choose what they shall learn and what 
 they shall not learn, what guarantee have we 
 that a boy will not leave school knowing nothing 
 of the subjects necessary to him in professional 
 life? 
 
 In the first place remember that the boys 
 while free from repression are free neither from 
 
152 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 the influence of the master, nor from the moral 
 pressure of the collectivity. The boy has the 
 right to choose, but his choice is far more likely 
 to fit in with our wishes than it would be if a 
 training in freedom had not taught him to 
 correlate his natural activities with the idea of 
 useful development. 
 
 It has been proposed to encourage the boy to 
 do exactly what he wants to do whether it be 
 woodwork or Latin so long as he is working 
 to some useful end in the direction of his own 
 development. While I think that such a plan 
 would come out in the end much more success- 
 fully than the orthodox educationalist could 
 consider possible, I am on the whole in favour 
 of a compromise, in which there would be a 
 certain number of subjects w r hich would be placed 
 before the boy as subjects that he ought to 
 consider essential but to each of which he might, 
 at his choice, give a maximum or a minimum 
 number of hours per week. Thus, a boy anxious 
 to learn history could study that subject for as 
 many as six hours a week, while another pupil 
 to whom this subject made little appeal might 
 reduce his hours to two or even one. 
 
 It must also be realized that the degree of 
 general ignorance found in the school of repression 
 is impossible where boys have learned to use 
 their own intellectual initiative. I am more 
 certain of nothing than that our school would in a 
 year or two show a higher degree of what I will 
 
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 153 
 
 call, for want of a better name, cultural efficiency 
 than has ever been seen among children before. 
 Had I not seen the wonderful effect of perfect 
 freedom on the intellectual life of my own boys, 
 had I not read of the wonderful metamorphosis 
 of the pupils of Egeria, had I not heard thrilling 
 stories from the mouths of eye-witnesses of the 
 work done in the Little Commonwealth, and had 
 I not watched the perpetual miracles that one 
 sees in a class of Montessori infants a much 
 smaller claim for the results of free activity 
 than that would have seemed to me to be 
 preposterous. But I have seen those things, and 
 I know that what I say is true. 
 
 By dint of a judicious use of the partnership 
 method and by teaching the boys from the first 
 that work and play are essentially the same thing ; 
 and that to play slowly is work and to work fast, 
 granted that you are free, is much the same thing 
 as to play, we shall create a wholly new spirit, 
 
 All the work must be rendered active, the boys 
 being encouraged to turn to the quiet and re- 
 flective as a relief from the incessant game of 
 work. The senses will be trained and moral 
 principles such as social order and tidiness and 
 the like will be taught through the game asso- 
 ciation. There will be as between the master 
 and his boys no negative faultfinding, but the 
 master will have his positive ideals to suggest to 
 the boys, and the boys will have their own ideas 
 as to what pressure to apply to one another. 
 
154 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 Their methods will be gentle and their pressure 
 will be moral, because they will have the master's 
 constant example of unfailing pity as an off-set 
 to any impulse to primitive brutality. Their 
 laws, moreover, will almost certainly make 
 cruelty the one unpardonable offence. Remem- 
 ber what my eleven-year-old boy had to say 
 as to the absence of brutality from the time 
 that I enfranchised my classes in the school of 
 my experiments. The experience of workers 
 in the Montessori schools, all of whom comment 
 on the humanising effects of free development, 
 may also be cited in support of this view. 
 
 The commonwealth school will not be fitted 
 out like the school of the old type. It will (in 
 a modest degree till funds permit us to realize 
 our ideals to the full) make some attempt to be 
 worthy of our aim to produce a type loving that 
 \vhich is beautiful. There will be no distinction 
 between living-rooms and class-rooms. The 
 boys will be encouraged to bring flowers from 
 our garden to brighten the places where we are 
 to spend the happiest of our hours of active 
 life. We shall have, when we can, casts of the 
 world's statues and monotypes of great pictures. 
 A musician on our staff shall correlate music 
 with history, and our art master will have much 
 to say about something greater than the laws of 
 perspective. 
 
 This is no Utopian dream ; I would guarantee 
 that the boys would give me much of the spirit 
 
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 155 
 
 of this, if not its precise form, without much 
 more than my answering of their questions. If 
 you think otherwise it is because you know the 
 schoolboy but not the boy. Can one ever forget 
 that Egeria's children taught themselves to draw 
 beautifully because, and not in spite of, the fact 
 that they taught themselves ? The free child 
 has funds of strength and of wisdom and of 
 goodness such as the repressionist has neither 
 seen nor dreamed of. It shall be our glorious 
 mission to evoke this wisdom and goodness and to 
 give scope to this strength in a school of waking 
 dreams. 
 
 But our appeal is not only to the idealist 
 we have a word also for the man of business. We 
 can train boys vocationally in an individualized 
 school such as our commonwealth school would 
 be, as they could be trained in no school where 
 the teaching is collective. Nowhere else could 
 you have the sense training necessary to the 
 surgeon, the training in dimensions necessary to 
 the quantity surveyor, the training in the free 
 and independent handling of books necessary 
 in each and every intellectual calling. Here a 
 boy could be prepared for every imaginable 
 vocation, from that of backwoodsman to that of 
 Court poet. When our school has grown to be as 
 large as the great public schools it will contain 
 all that they contain when all put together and, 
 what is far more, the lion's share of what they 
 have always left out. Above all we shall aim 
 
156 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 at a symmetry of which they have never taken 
 thought. 
 
 Every boy will have a private tutor in his 
 partner, in addition to a series of intellectual 
 directors to feed the tutors with ever new 
 knowledge and to play the role of the university 
 professor rather than that of the ordinary 
 schoolmaster. The masters, instead of getting 
 stale and disheartened by a horrible routine of 
 uninspired date-grinding and punishment, will be 
 the spectators of a fresh and w r onderful play of 
 native psychology. They will be witnesses of a 
 stupendous phenomenon the birth of a new and 
 higher type of man. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION ? 
 
 APART from the establishment of a school founded 
 on a commonwealth basis, we shall have other 
 work to do in helping on the present evolutionary 
 movement towards freedom in the older type 
 of institution. Our faith in the New Idea will 
 make us believe that every school will eventually 
 emancipate itself from the principle of repression, 
 and accept the principle of self-government. 
 But one aim we shall hold to steadfastly 
 that of pointing out that this is one of the 
 cases in which revolution is better than evolution, 
 because, as I repeat once more, even a generous 
 half -measure of liberty neither has a tithe of 
 the disciplinary value of complete liberty, nor 
 is it very closely connected therewith as a 
 matter of practical psychology. Partial freedom 
 is in practice nearly as far divorced from absolute 
 freedom as absolute freedom is from repression. 
 If this fact is not by now apparent most of my 
 work in stating my case has been in vain. 
 
 But as one cannot expect the headmasters 
 of the great public schools abruptly to change 
 '57 
 
158 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 the whole system of their organization as well as 
 the spirit by right of which they have existed ; 
 it will be necessary for them to make their experi- 
 ments in a more or less cautious way. Now there 
 is a solution which implies neither pure evolution 
 nor pure revolution. What I am thinking of is 
 the possibility of conferring absolute freedom on 
 a certain portion of the school, which would, 
 of course, have as few points of contact as possible 
 with the unemancipated remainder of the estab- 
 lishment. The obvious thing and this would 
 be trying the experiment under ideal conditions 
 would be to take a form of young boys of not 
 more than thirteen and give them entire freedom 
 for a term, with the understanding that success 
 would mean the indefinite prolongation of the 
 principle of self-government. Where a school has 
 a preparatory department a beginning might be 
 made here. But it must be remembered that 
 when education has been fully reformed on a 
 scientific basis very small boys will have very 
 much less work with books and a great deal more 
 scope for their- physical activities than is at 
 present the case. The same objection has not 
 to be faced with boys of twelve or thirteen 
 at any rate in anything like the same degree. I 
 always felt that the twelve or thirteen-year- 
 old boy, because old enough to have outgrown 
 what may be called the mainly physical period of 
 his life and too young to have been permanently 
 injured by pedagogic nurses or bullies, formed 
 
REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION? 159 
 
 the type that was most quickly responsive to 
 the idea of self-government. 
 
 The natural tendency of those who had not 
 studied the newest theories and watched the 
 latest experiments in self-government would be 
 to suppose that the older boy would be much 
 better adapted to the principle of autonomy than 
 his junior. But more attention to the problem 
 will suggest the probability, which agrees with 
 actual facts, that nearly every boy of sixteen, 
 having been repressed either by correction or 
 indulgence, is much less capable of self-direction 
 than a mere child whose own healthy instincts 
 lead him to be active when he can. Thus a short 
 application of partnership or other emancipatory 
 methods to the older boy would be quite without 
 scientific value. I would expect a better result 
 from a boy of thirteen in three hours than from a 
 youth of sixteen in three weeks. If, indeed, I 
 follow my experience in my own classes this would 
 represent pretty correctly the relative period 
 required for adaptation. 
 
 One consequence of profound importance to 
 the race which will follow the freeing of boys 
 from outside control will be the ending of the dire 
 evil of over-pressure. I suppose most parents 
 and, I hope, all schoolmasters, read the remark- 
 able figures recently published showing what 
 period of life was most responsible for the great 
 increase in recent years of the number of people 
 placed in mental hospitals. While the increase 
 
160 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 was insignificant in manhood it amounted to some- 
 thing like ten per cent, for young people under the 
 age of sixteen. I only trust that there was some 
 error in the statement of these figures for 
 certainly they are almost incredible as they 
 stand but even if there was some slight statis- 
 tical error behind them I fear that since the 
 paper which published them did so with the 
 avowed intention of pointing a truth, and no 
 doubt with the original returns at hand, they 
 may be fairly used to demonstrate the appalling 
 strain to which, under the repressive system, 
 many boys are subjected. 
 
 With freedom we know that the boy is doing 
 precisely his fill of natural spontaneous work 
 always a fine but never a dangerous total ; and 
 that he is practising continually the best economy 
 of method inasmuch as what he learns is absorbed 
 into his inmost being, instead of passing through 
 him undigested. His work having all the joy 
 of an activity that he has imposed upon himself, 
 he leaves it with freshness and returns fresh to 
 it, until a healthy natural tiredness, having 
 nothing of that intense exhaustion which follows 
 unwilling effort, leads him to desist. 
 
 Of the other advantages of freedom in the 
 school I think I have already dealt with the 
 greater number in the course of this volume. 
 To many of my readers I shall, of course, have 
 seemed to have greatly overstated the case, but to 
 me the matter becomes more and more vital the 
 
REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION? 161 
 
 more I reflect upon its meaning. Never in the 
 world yet have we had a childhood developing 
 naturally and by its own laws. We have sought 
 to imprison the free spirit of the child in a mould 
 based on our maturer frames ; we have contra- 
 dicted every principle of its growth. Is there 
 danger rather than hope in emancipating it from 
 the shackles of our imposing, and in allowing it to 
 chain itself (as it inevitably does and will) in the 
 fetters of self-evolved discipline ? 
 
 I know well with what sense of responsibility 
 one must answer that question. I know that 
 in admitting how great are my hopes of a coming 
 revolution I have implied a power in the child 
 which to others might conceivably suggest dis- 
 aster. To us who believe in the new order of 
 ideas it is the question of whether, in Montessori's 
 phrase, we trust or do not trust life. Well, I 
 do trust it. I do believe that Nature has powers 
 of equilibrium and of compensation that can 
 suffer no loss from an increased respect for her 
 own sovereign law. I have observed how in 
 each of the three emancipatory systems of which 
 I have spoken, freedom, far from producing 
 licence, generates at once a spirit of sweetness 
 and reasonableness and true comradeship ; by the 
 exercise of activity it protects the young from 
 a hundred dangers of our complex civilization; 
 by the stimulus of individualism (in a good and 
 admirable sense of the word) it brings into play 
 a new originality and a new and healthy 
 
162 THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 
 
 confidence in the world and in the boy's won 
 powers. 
 
 There may be danger, as there is in all changes, 
 as there is in sitting still if the lightning happens 
 to come your way. But we are beset already 
 by dangers by the danger of a diminished 
 vitality, of imperfect and unwilling work, of 
 slavish acceptance of worn-out creeds in a world 
 in which we must think scientifically in order to 
 survive. After all the chances of general failure 
 are hardly to be reckoned with seriously. If 
 the new concept of true education proves to be 
 wrong it will have proved to be so long before 
 it has had time to modify the fabric of society 
 or to change the trend of civilization. What 
 we have to realize is that all we want for the 
 present is a fair field to try Nature's own remedy 
 for past contradictions of her own laws. The 
 child has been long enough shut up in the 
 dungeons of adult contriving ; let us give him a 
 run in the fields, and see how he fares. 
 
 THE END 
 
 THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON AND KORWlCH 
 
Crown 8vo. With many Photographs. 3/6 net. 
 
 MONTESSORI 
 
 PRINCIPLES & PRACTICE 
 
 By E. P. CULVERWELL, M.A., 
 
 FELLOW AND SENIOR TUTOR, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN. 
 PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN. 
 
 A brilliant account of the new method and its 
 psychological basis written with masterly clearness. 
 Professor Culverwell is a keen enthusiast, but also a 
 careful critic : his book is the most thorough and 
 complete examination of the method in existence. 
 
 FIRST PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 " It contains much suggestive and fair-minded comment 
 on the theory and practice of the system, and will go a long 
 way towards its establishment as a definitely valuable 
 element in the philosophy of modern education." Times, 
 
 " Professor Culverwell has approached his task with 
 sympathy and understanding but always in the scientific 
 spirit. His book shows us the physiological basis upon 
 which the Montessori psychology is constructed in a clearer 
 and more scientific manner than the authoress herself. He 
 expounds the salient features of her practice, also, quite 
 simply and briefly, so that the average teacher who runs 
 may read. All the same he preserves a critical attitude 
 throughout. ... It forms an important contribution 
 to Montessori literature, and to pedagogics in general." 
 Morning Post, 
 
 " This very thoughtful book should be read by all teachers 
 or parents who wish fully to understand the Montessorian 
 system of child training." Teachers' World, 
 
 " His book is a most valuable contribution to the literature 
 of education, and should find a place in the library of every 
 progressive teacher. 3 ' Nation. 
 
 " This book may be recommended as a thoughtful and 
 illuminating contribution to a subject of great interest." 
 Aberdeen Free Press. 
 
 LONDON; G. BELL & SONS, LIMITED. 
 
Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 WHAT IS EDUCATION? 
 
 By STANLEY LEATHES, C.B., 
 
 FORMERLY FELLOW AND LECTURER IN HISTORY OF TRINITY 
 
 COLLEGE, CAMBHIDGS, JOINT EDITOR OF THE 
 
 "CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY." 
 
 Mr. Stanley Leathes, formerly Fellow and Lecturer in History at Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, and one of the editors of the Cambridge Modem History, is now 
 engaged in directing public *xaminations. H*> here uses his long and wide 
 experience to treat of education as a wholf, physical, moral, spiritual, intellectual ; 
 education for business, education for life; education by life, education by the 
 State ; the education of all, of the many ; of the few. 
 
 FOR INFANT AND JUNIOR SCHOOLS. 
 THE 
 
 PETER PAN PICTURES 
 
 Reproduced from 
 
 ALICE B. WOODWARD'S Illustrations to 
 " The Story of Peter Pan." 
 
 Each 30 inches x 20 inches. Printed in Colours on Stout Paper. 
 
 Price 2s. 6d. net each. 
 Framed in Dark Oak and Glazed, 75. 6d. net. each. 
 
 Also in special frame, containing all four pictures, any one of 
 which may be displayed at will, with removable back, 175. 6d. net. 
 
 NOW READY. 
 
 I. WITH MICHAEL SITTING ON HER BACK. 
 II. THE LOST BOYS KNELT BEFORE HER. 
 
 III. THAT MAN IS MINE. 
 
 IV. THE INDIANS CREPT SILENTLY UP. 
 
 A Prospectus, Illustrated in Colour, will be sent on application. 
 
 LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 
 
. 
 
 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, 
 or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only: 
 
 Tel. No. 642-3405 
 
 Renewals may be made 4 days priod to date due. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 1 4 J994 
 
 i 
 
 CIRCULATION DCPT. 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
 (G4427slO)476B 
 
/ 
 
 YB 0480: 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY