ABSTRACT
AT the root of the whole question lies the conviction that the religion of the spirit should pervade and control and add significance to life. It may be that the attempt to carry this into educational practice has in times past followed too much the line of restriction and repression. We have aimed at “a guarded education.” If so, the danger today is all the other way. Faced with the belief in freedom, self-expression (that ambiguous and question-begging word), the need of linking conduct to active instincts, the danger of crushing the native forces of the soul, the value of the self-discerning and self-legislative spiritfaced with these things, the educator who believes in an ethical objective has a task of supreme difficulty. But his purpose should not be weakened. He will be no priggish, omniscient dictator; he will reverence his material and its varied potentialities. But there is such a thing as the good. It is the method that has to be modified and adapted; the aim was never more urgent. Emancipate by all means: use the dramatic instinct and evoke the love of beauty as you will. But the good remains supreme. If in some ways
the teacher’s duty is to efface himself, it is only that the end-not the rigidly preconceived end that was once accepted, but still the end-may be the better compassed. His personality is not of less importance, but more, when no mechanical treatment is possible but all the subtler influences of character and mental alertness and integrity come into play in contact with the free spirit of the pupil.
