ew, Education has for its
province the entire formation of the youth. The despotism of this view
often manifests itself where large numbers are to be educated together,
and with very undesirable results, because it assumes that the
individual pupil is only a specimen of the whole, as if the school were
a great factory where each piece of goods is to be stamped exactly like
all the rest. Individuality is reduced by the tyranny of such despotism
to one uniform level till all originality is destroyed, as in cloisters,
barracks, and orphan asylums, where only one individual seems to exist.
There is a kind of Pedagogy also which fancies that one can thrust into
or out of the individual pupil what one will. This may be called a
superstitious belief in the power of Education.--The opposite extreme
disbelieves this, and advances the policy which lets alone and does
nothing, urging that individuality is unconquerable, and that often the
most careful and far-sighted education fails of reaching its aim in so
far as it is opposed to the nature of the youth, and that this
individuality has made of no avail all efforts toward the obtaining of
any end which was opposed to it. This representation of the
fruitlessness of all pedagogical efforts engenders an indifference
towards it which would leave, as a result, only a sort of vegetation of
individuality growing at hap-hazard.--

[Sidenote: _The Limits of Individuality._]

Sec. 47. _The limit of Education is_ (1) _a Subjective one_, a limit made
by the individuality of the youth. This is a definite limit. Whatever
does not exist in this individuality as a possibility cannot be
developed from it. Education can only lead and assist; it cannot create.
What Nature has denied to a man, Education cannot give him any more than
it is able, on the other hand, to annihilate entirely his original
gifts, although it is true that his talents may be suppressed,
distorted, and measurably destroyed. But the decision of the question in
what the real essence of any one's individuality consists can never be
made with certainty till he has left behind him his years of
development, because it is then only that he first arrives at the
consciousness of his entire self; besides, at this critical time, in the
first place, much knowledge only superficially acquired will drop off;
and again, talents, long slumbering and unsuspected, may first make
their appearance. Whatever has been forced upon a child in opposi