Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/32

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EDUCATION AS THE

their own activity, not as having value implanted in them from without. Above all, Thorndike's view shows an absence of that reverence for personality which is so marked a characteristic of all great schoolmasters. Let us rather hear Edw. Bowen: "The experience of teachers," he tells us, "has not generally brought the conviction that specially-directed efforts can do much to change a boy's nature. It does most of the changing for itself. The building grows, like the temple of old, without sound of mallet and trowel. What we can do is to arrange matters so as to give virtue her best chance. We can prevent tendencies from blossoming into acts, and render pitfalls visible. How much indirectly and unconsciously we can do, none but the recording angel knows." "You can, and you should," says Chiffers, "go straight to the heart of every individual boy." Well, a fellow-creature's mind is a serious and sacred thing. You may enter into that arcanum once a year, shoeless. And in the effort to control the spirit of a pupil—in the craving for moral power and visible guiding—lie some of the chief temptations of a schoolmaster's work.

And again, in speaking of the morbid effort to exercise conscious influence, "Fancy the attitude of mind of the captain of the eleven who should say at the beginning of an innings, 'Go to, I will now use my moral influence on my team.'"

I turn now to the second educational heresy—the sociological heresy. The root error of this heresy is that it treats the boy not as a relatively independent person,