ee items:

One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact
from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.

I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and
immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague
failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of
puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife,
designed to smother that which was real in the heart.

Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it
appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers
among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their
calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called
upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children,
having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the
loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut
the loaf evenly--to every one his equal part. The first crime was
favoritism....

I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in
age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a
boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically
opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the
mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely
sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be
bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain,
tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production
was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place;
the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding
expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It
was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a
tithe of its tissue.

The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.

The boy next had not done well in school. The word _dreamer_ was
designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me--the
mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly
told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if
anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of
almost phenomena