rience
through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his
ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they
ought to be.

A man sees a great many things when he looks at the world for himself,
and he sees them from many sides; but this method of learning is not
nearly so short or so quick as the method which employs abstract
ideas and makes hasty generalizations about everything. Experience,
therefore, will be a long time in correcting preconceived ideas, or
perhaps never bring its task to an end; for wherever a man finds that
the aspect of things seems to contradict the general ideas he has
formed, he will begin by rejecting the evidence it offers as partial
and one-sided; nay, he will shut his eyes to it altogether and deny
that it stands in any contradiction at all with his preconceived
notions, in order that he may thus preserve them uninjured. So it is
that many a man carries about a burden of wrong notions all his life
long--crotchets, whims, fancies, prejudices, which at last become
fixed ideas. The fact is that he has never tried to form his
fundamental ideas for himself out of his own experience of life, his
own way of looking at the world, because he has taken over his ideas
ready-made from other people; and this it is that makes him--as it
makes how many others!--so shallow and superficial.

Instead of that method of instruction, care should be taken to educate
children on the natural lines. No idea should ever be established in a
child's mind otherwise than by what the child can see for itself, or
at any rate it should be verified by the same means; and the result of
this would be that the child's ideas, if few, would be well-grounded
and accurate. It would learn how to measure things by its own standard
rather than by another's; and so it would escape a thousand strange
fancies and prejudices, and not need to have them eradicated by the
lessons it will subsequently be taught in the school of life. The
child would, in this way, have its mind once for all habituated
to clear views and thorough-going knowledge; it would use its own
judgment and take an unbiased estimate of things.

And, in general, children should not form their notions of what life
is like from the copy before they have learned it from the original,
to whatever aspect of it their attention may be directed. Instead,
therefore, of hastening to place _books_, and books alone, in their
hands, let them be mad