the parent doing readily an unpleasant
duty, which he honestly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a parent
endure trouble or an unexpected difficulty easily, he will be in honour
bound to do the like. Just as children without many words learn to
practice good deeds when they see good deeds practiced about them; learn
to enjoy the beauty of nature and art when they see that adults enjoy
them, so by living more beautifully, more nobly, more moderately, we
speak best to children. They are just as receptive to impressions of
this kind as they are careless of those made by force.

Since this is my alpha and omega in the art of education, I repeat now
what I said at the beginning of this book and half way through it. Try
to leave the child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as possible;
keep away all crude and impure impressions; but give all your care and
energy to see that personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity
and in its nakedness, shall all be means of training the child.

Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for
self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their development,
neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults. But respect the joys
of the child, his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an
adult. Education will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely
harder art, than the education of the present day, with its
artificialised existence, its double entry morality, one morality for
the child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and lax for
the adult and vice versa. By treating the child every moment as one does
an adult human being we free education from that brutal arbitrariness,
from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have transformed him.
Whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit alone, or
whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the
result is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know equally little
of the feelings and needs of their children. The one class are happy
when the children are like themselves, and their highest ambition is
to produce in their children a successful copy of their own thoughts,
opinions, and ideals. Really it ought to pain them very much to see
themselves so exactly copied. What life expected from them and required
from them was just the opposite--a richer combination, a better
creation, a new type, not a reproduction of that which is already