ABSTRACT
The hackneyed metaphors, "potter's clay", "wax tablet", "bent twig", "tender osier", are so many ways of emphasizing the high suggestibility of childhood. The stanch personality that can plough through counter-suggestions as tremorless as an ironclad in a flight of arrows we look for only in the adult. Most, though not quite all, of the moral possibilities that lie in education are bound up in some way or other with the power of suggestion. Education can help in "breaking in" the colt to the harness. But education is far from being always and everywhere a moral instrument. There are several factors which condition the appearance of a free public education. Stage of social development is one. The informing purpose of the earlier types of education — Egypt, India, China, Israel—was the shaping of human pulp in a rigid, traditional mould.
