At any cost the imagination of the child should be encouraged and developed. It is the richest vein in the whole mental machinery of man, the faculty within which genius most frequently lurks, and where it can be most easily and permanently destroyed. Grown-up people should remember that an indiscreet answer to a childish question, or a snub administered to an inquiring mind, is often sufficient to check thought. It should be mainly the care of the parent to encourage the imagination in young children, recollecting that up to a certain age its development depends upon all the absurdities and fantastic notions of childhood which the average adult is so fond of repressing.
By the exercise of prudence and some show of sympathy, it would then be possible to bring a child up to the age of seven or eight without damaging its mind or destroying its faculties. From that point onwards the child's education ought to depend upon the individual himself. There should be no such thing as instruction, in the sense which implies the cramming of the brain with information, or such mental gymnastics as conjugating irregular verbs and hunting for the least common multiple.
The position of teacher and pupil would have to be practically reversed. The pupil would lead, and the teacher follow. In fact, the latter should become an adviser rather than instructor, the child selecting those studies, or those arts or crafts, which are to be made the principal objective of its education, whilst to the mentor would fall the rôle of encouraging and assisting the course of study or practice at a morally safe distance.
Boys and girls would then not learn, but investigate. The process of learning should be got rid of altogether, being a clumsy, dronish way of acquiring knowledge, and one that tends to keep the brain in a perpetual state of dependence.
Ignorance, one ought to remember, is a valuable incentive to investigation. Young people should be left as much as possible to find things out for themselves. Education should resemble a person groping forward in the dark; and only so much light ought to be let in upon the process as seems desirable in each individual case. In that way, at least, the pupil would learn to think for himself; and even if little more were accomplished than this, it would be of ten thousand times greater value to the individual, and to the community at large, than the acquisition of a large stock of facts at the price of losing all power of reflection and initiative.