Rousseau represents both these streams in his own person. His
sentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality pass belief. His
sensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the death of his dog but he
bravely consigns his illegitimate children to the foundling asylum
without one tremor. In his justly famous and justly infamous
_Confessions_, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at
the last Judgment, these _Confessions_ in his hand, a challenge to the
remainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let a single one assert
to Thee, if he dare: I am better than that man." But his preachment
of natural and spontaneous values, return to primitive conditions,
was equally aggressive. If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the
Montessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, who
declared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of not
having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says
that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed.
There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system. It
recognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; that
the process of education need not and should not be forbidding; that
natural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; that
the imagination and the hand should be trained with the intellect.
But the method which proposes to give children an education along
the lines of least resistance is, like all other naturalism, a
contradiction in terms, sometimes a _reductio ad absurdum_, sometimes
_ad nauseam_. As long ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romanes
lecture on _Evolution and Ethics_, this identity of natural and human
values was explicitly denied. Teachers do not exist for the amusement
of children, nor for the repression of children; they exist for
the discipline of children. The new education is consistently
primitivistic in the latitude which it allows to whim and in its
indulgence of indolence. There is only one way to make a man out of
a child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of achievement;
that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor; that the foundation of
self-respect is drudgery well done; that there is no power in any
system of philosophy, any view of the world, no view of the world,
which can release him from the unchanging necessity of personal
struggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in human life.
"That wherein a man cannot be equaled," says Confucius