And all the time there
is comfort to the easy-going average in the consciousness of how many
there are behind them.
The necessity for organization and foresight in detail among large
numbers is also unfavourable to individual development. For children
to find everything prepared for them, to feel no friction in the
working of the machinery, so that all happens as it ought to, without
effort and personal trouble on their part, to be told what to do, and
only have to follow the bells for the ordering of their time--all this
tends to diminish their resourcefulness and their patience with the
unforeseen checks and cross-purposes and mistakes that they will have
to put up with on leaving school. As a matter of fact the more perfect
the school machinery, the smoother its working, the less does it
prepare for the rutty road afterwards, and in this there is some
consolation when school machinery jars from time to time in the
working; if it teaches patience it is not altogether regrettable, and
the little trouble which may arise in the material order is perhaps
more educating than the regularity which has been disturbed.
We are beginning to believe what has never ceased to be said, that
lessons in lesson-books are not the whole of education.
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