We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything! One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child. If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon. We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity. Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war. |