To work these lessons out in detail would lead us too far afield, and I must proceed to touch very briefly upon one or two characteristics of the process of education viewed in the light of our conception of personality.
First, then, education as the training of personality will not be a thing of rules and observances, though these, too, have their place. Its atmosphere is rather one of freedom, of inspiration, and of adventure. For it aims at stimulating the boy's achievement, not at merely bringing him under discipline. I would apply to education Wm. Wallace's description of morality. Let us not forget—we all do forget—that the art of education is not how not to do it. Its function is not merely to keep us from falling, nor is it to help us to become proper. It is to teach us to love God with all our hearts and strength and mind, and our neighbours as ourselves. … In the work of education you enter on a grand enterprise, a search for the holy Grail, which will bring you to strange lands and perilous seas. For you cannot say, interpreting, 'Thus far and no further, merely according to the bond and duty' … You follow by what has been, what is ruled and accomplished, but you follow after what is not yet.[1]
If we like we may describe this aspect of education by saying that education is concerned with the boy's self-realisation, or that self-activity is the law of mental growth. Only we must remember that self-realisation means also self-transcendence, the achievement of interests deeper and wider than those which we call our
- ↑ Lectures, p. 210.
