tter known, he loses nothing in distinction, and he reaps the
more respect in that he has sown the less pride.

XIII

THE EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY

The simple life being above all else the product of a direction of mind,
it is natural that education should have much to do with it.

In general but two methods of rearing children are practiced: the first
is to bring them up for ourselves; the second, to bring them up for
themselves.

In the first case the child is looked upon as a complement of the
parents: he is part of their property, occupies a place among their
possessions. Sometimes this place is the highest, especially when the
parents value the life of the affections. Again, where material
interests rule, the child holds second, third, or even the last place.
In any case he is a nobody. While he is young, he gravitates round his
parents, not only by obedience, which is right, but by the subordination
of all his originality, all his being. As he grows older, this
subordination becomes a veritable confiscation, extending to his ideas,
his feelings, everything. His minority becomes perpetual. Instead of
slowly evolving into independence, the man advances into slavery. He is
what he is permitted to be, what his father's business, religious
beliefs, political opinions or esthetic tastes require him to be. He
will think, speak, act, and marry according to the understanding and
limits of the paternal absolutism. This family tyranny may be exercised
by people with no strength of character. It is only necessary for them
to be convinced that good order requires the child to be the property of
the parents. In default of mental force, they possess themselves of him
by other means--by sighs, supplications, or base seductions. If they
cannot fetter him, they snare his feet in traps. But that he should live
in them, through them, for them, is the only thing admissible.

Education of this sort is not the practice of families only, but also of
great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in
putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the
most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation,
pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it
theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at
from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education.
Its processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and