with one another.

The main thing that science has done in the last fifty years, in spite
of conventional religion and so-called scholarship, has been to bring to
pass in men a respect for the natural world. The next thing that is to
be brought to pass--also in spite of conventional religion and so-called
scholarship--is the self-respect of the natural man and of the instincts
of human nature. The self-respect of the natural man, when once he gains
it, is a thing that is bound to take care of itself, and take care of
the man, and take care of everything that is important to the man.

Inasmuch as, in the long run at least, education, even in times of its
not being human, interests humanity more than anything else, a most
important consequence of the self-respect of the natural man is going to
be an uprising, all over the world, of teachers who believe something.
The most important consequence of having teachers who believe something
will be a wholesale and uncompromising rearrangement of nearly all our
systems and methods of education. Instead of being arranged to cow the
teacher with routine, to keep teachers from being human beings, and to
keep their pupils from finding it out if they are human beings, they
will be arranged on the principle that the whole object of knowledge is
the being of a human being, and the only way to know anything worth
knowing in the world is to begin by knowing how to be a human being--and
by liking it.

Not until our current education is based throughout on expecting great
things of human nature instead of secretly despising it, can it truly be
called education. Expectancy is the very essence of education. Actions
not only speak louder than words, they make words as though they were
not; and so long as our teachers confine themselves to saying beautiful
and literary things about the instincts of the human heart, and do not
trust their own instincts in their daily teaching, and the instincts of
their pupils, and do not make this trust the foundation of all their
work, the more they educate the more they destroy. The destruction is
both ways, and whatever the subjects are they may choose to know, murder
and suicide are the branches they teach.

The chief characteristic of the teacher of the future is going to be
that he will dare to believe in himself, and that he will divine some
one thing to believe in, in everybody else, and that, trusting the laws
of human nature, he will go to work on