ABSTRACT
Professional educationists and, along with them, certain psychologists, have been inclined to exaggerate the efficacy of childhood training and the accidents of early life. Good education will be fully effective only when there are good social conditions and, among individuals, good beliefs and feelings; but social conditions, and the beliefs and feelings of individuals will not be altogether satisfactory until there is good education. The traditional education is a training for life in a hierarchical, militaristic society, in which people are abjectly obedient to their superiors and inhuman to their inferiors. In the first half of the nineteenth century, secondary education for the middle classes was enormously extended; in the second half, primary education was made universally compulsory. The two types of education, education for freedom and responsibility, education for bullying and subordination, coexist in the democracies of the West, where nursery schools belong to the first and most other schools to the second type.
