ABSTRACT
If what we said in the last chapter is more or less on the right lines, it is an extremely striking fact that these lines are (as I shall show) rarely followed. There should be, after all, no insuperable intellectual difficulty about grasping what we mean by 'education', seeing the necessity of the enterprise for human beings, and proceeding to investigate what it involves. The chances are, not that we have failed in being clever enough to set the subject on a sound footing, but rather that we have been driven by various temptations or idées fixes into making elementary mistakes: and that these temptations will continue to exercise their baleful influence until we can see them clearly for what they are. In this chapter, therefore, I propose to take a look at some of these mistakes (and show that they are mistakes), so that we can proceed on firmer methodological ground.
