huge, dreary kinetoscope of
it, grinding its cogs and wheels, and swinging its weary faces past our
eyes. The most common sight in it and the one that hurts the hardest, is
the boy who could be made into a man out of the parts of him that his
parents and teachers are trying to throw away. The faults of the average
child, as things are going just now, would be the making of him, if he
could be placed in seeing hands. It may not be possible to educate a boy
by using what has been left out of him, but it is more than possible to
begin his education by using what ought to have been left out of him. So
long as parents and teachers are either too dull or too busy to
experiment with mischief, to be willing to pay for a child's originality
what originality costs, only the most hopeless children can be expected
to amount to anything. If we fail to see that originality is worth
paying for, that the risk involved in a child's not being creative is
infinitely more serious than the risk involved in his being creative in
the wrong direction, there is little either for us or for our children
to hope for, as the years go on, except to grow duller together. We do
not like this growing duller together very well, perhaps, but we have
the feeling at least that we have been educated, and when our children
become at last as little interested in the workings of their minds, as
parents and teachers are in theirs, we have the feeling that they also
have been educated. We are not unwilling to admit, in a somewhat
useless, kindly, generalising fashion, that vital and beautiful children
delight in things, in proportion as they discover them, or are allowed
to make them up, but we do not propose in the meantime to have our own
children any more vital and beautiful than we can help. In four or five
years they discover that a home is a place where the more one thinks of
things, the more unhappy he is. In four or five years more they learn
that a school is a place where children are expected not to use their
brains while they are being cultivated. As long as he is at his mother's
breast the typical American child finds that he is admired for thinking
of things. When he runs around the house he finds gradually that he is
admired very much less for thinking of things. At school he is
disciplined for it. In a library, if he has an uncommonly active mind,
and takes the liberty of being as alive there, as he is outdoors, if he
roams through the books, vaults