by reason and a sense of right; not ignorant of the difficulties to be
met, but practised and equipped to overcome them.

It is easy thus to state in general terms the objects of education,
and the need for discipline. To apply these principles to the
individual is a task, the immeasurable difficulty of which we are only
beginning to appreciate with the failure of thirty years of compulsory
education before us. A recent writer[2] gives it as his opinion that
the aim of education is to equip a child with ideals, and that this
task should not be difficult, because the lower savages successfully
subject all the members of their tribe to the most ruthless
discipline. Their lives, he says, "are lived in fear, in restraint, in
submission, in suffering, subject to galling, unreasoning,
unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary
duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary. They
endure painful mutilations, they submit to painful sacrifices.... How
are these wild, unstable, wayward, impulsive, passionate natures
brought to submit to such a rigorous and cruel discipline? By
education; by the inculcation from infancy of these ideals. In these
ideals they have been brought up, and to them they cling with the
utmost tenacity." One might as well contend that it was easy to teach
all men to live the self-denying life of earnest Christians because
some savage tribe was successful in maintaining among its members a
universal and orthodox worship of idols. The ideals set before the
child are too high and too complex to be inculcated by physical force,
or even by force of public opinion. A rigid discipline, with many
stripes and with terrible threats of a still worse punishment in the
world to come, was the almost invariable lot of children until the
last century was well advanced. Yet has this drastic treatment of
young children fulfilled its purpose? Were the men of fifty years ago