"way of life."

* * * * *

=The education of the imagination in schools for older children=.--What
is the method adopted in the ordinary elementary schools for the
education of the imagination?

The school is, in most cases, a bare, naked place where the gray color
of the walls and the white muslin curtains over the windows preclude
any alleviation for the senses. The object of this depressing
environment is to prevent the distraction of the scholar's attention
by stimuli, and concentrate it upon the teacher who speaks. The
children, seated, listen motionless hour after hour. When they draw,
they have to reproduce another drawing exactly. When they move, it is
in obedience to an order given by another person. Their personalities
are appraised solely by the standard of passive obedience; the
education of their wills consists of the methodical renunciation of
volition.

"Our usual pedagogy," said Claparede, "oppresses children with a mass
of information which can never help them to direct their conduct; we
make them listen when they have no desire to hear; speak, write,
narrate, compose and discourse when they have nothing to say; we make
them observe when they have no curiosity, reason when they have no
desire to discover anything. We incite them to efforts which are
supposed to be voluntary without the preliminary acquiescence of their
_ego_ in the task imposed, that inner consensus which alone gives
moral value to submission to duty."

The children thus reduced to slavery use their eyes to read, their
hands to write, their ears to hear what the teacher says. Their
bodies, indeed, are stationary; but their minds are unable to dwell
upon anything. They must be continually exerting themselves to run
after the mind of the teacher, who, in his turn, is urged on by a
program drawn up at random, and which is certainly regardless of
childish tendencies. The mind has to pass from thing to thing. Images
fugitive and uncertain as dreams appear from time to time before the
eyes of the child. The teacher draws a triangle on the blackboard and
then erases it; it was a momentary vision represented as an
abstraction; those children have never held a concrete triangle in
their hands; they have to remember, by an effort, a contour around
which abstract geometrical calculations will presently gather thickly;
such a figure will never achieve anything within them; it will not be
_felt_, combined with others, it will