The Moral and Religious Training of Children [pp. 26-48]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
tory or confidence in present institutions as it is belief that
human nature is at bottom good, and trust in the beneficent,
regulative power of knowledge.
The notion of freedom as quite commonly interpreted is
strictly anti-pedagogic. John Stuart Mill is wrong. The laissez
faire, laissez aller principle is suicidal in a republic, impressive as
is the casuistry with which it is so often defended. There must
be despotism here if need be. There will always be many who
will have to be forced to go to school, coaxed, hired, threatened,
flogged, trepanned almost to learn when they are there, and con stantly watched and withheld from every evasion or way of es cape. Some can respond to no motives but love, praise, and
reward, and would be spoiled by coercion, while others, in whom
these main-springs of action do not exist and cannot be devel oped, respond readily and naturally only to a rod of the liberal
dimensions prescribed by German school laws. Moral freedom
is attained only in so far as the highest motives are spon taneously and autonomously acted upon, and as lower selfish
motives are disregarded. This real freedom is the end of education, and if it be assumed at the beginning education is impossible.
There are now abundant indications that we are again beginning to realize that the three R's, or indeed intellectual
training alone, is not all that is meant by education, as is so
often implied by current educational rhetoric. When we speak
of loving knowledge for its own sake we mean for the sake
of its effect on our characters as distinguished from all material advantages which may result from it. Strictly speaking,
love of knowledge for its own sake is a psychological impossibility. It cannot exist without affecting conduct and character,
and its value is measured by the way and the degree in which it
does so. That knowledge can have any intrinsic value in and of
itself alone is, indeed, the superstition of rationalism and &claircissement, and is no less misleading than is the merely commercial view of it. Like light, knowledge, it is well said, is good to
see by rather than to see. Without exerting or ripening into
ethical potency, knowledge is not power but weakness, and is
nearly as likely to arm the bad as the good elements of the soul
and of society. German educators at least have little respect
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