y makes everything
unreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat good
earth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog of
abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes of
abstraction, the earth is a great plain, with hills and valleys. Why
force abstractions and kill the reality, when there's no need?

As for children, will we never realize that their abstractions are
never based on observations, but on subjective exaggerations? If there
is an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the child soul
which cannot get over the mystery of the eye. If there is a tree in a
landscape, the landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. The
attempt to make a child focus for a whole view--which is really a
generalization and an adult abstraction--is simply wicked. Yet the
first thing we do is to set a child making relief-maps in clay, for
example: of his own district. Imbecility! He has not even the faintest
impression of the total hill on which his home stands. A steepness
going up to a door--and front garden railings--and perhaps windows.
That's the lot.

The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child
anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children
together and teach them through the head. It causes absolute
starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain
knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so
vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at
all. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escape
into the streets. But even the children of the proletariat are now
infected.

And, of course, as my critics point out, under all the school-smarm
and newspaper-cant, man is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and more
dangerous. The living dynamic self is denaturalized instead of being
educated.

We talk about education--leading forth the natural intelligence of a
child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming
in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion,
suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. A
nice day of reckoning we've got in front of us.

Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not have mental knowledge
before us as the goal of the leading. Much less let us make of it a
vicious circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, like a cow in
a ring at a fair. We don't want to educate chi