And here it is well to question our own hearts deeply to make sure that we really wish, honestly, without mental reservations, to stimulate the will-power of our children--their will-power, be it remembered, not our own. Is there, in the motives which actuate our attempts at securing obedience from children, a trace of the animal-trainer’s instinct? For, though it is true that children are little animals, and that they can be successfully trained by the method of the animal-trainer, it is not to be forgotten that they are trained by those methods only to feats of exactly the same moral and intellectual caliber as those performed by trick dogs and cats. They are forced to struggle blindly, and wholly without aid, towards whatever human achievements they may later accomplish, with the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servility, according to their temperaments.
The end and aim of the horse-breaker’s effort is to create an animal who will obey literally, with no volition of his own, any command of any human being. The conscientious parent who faces squarely this ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer’s system, must see that his own aim, being entirely opposed to that, must be attained by very different means; and that, since his final goal is to produce a being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner the child can be induced to begin the exercise of the faculty of self-government, the more seasoned in experience it will be when vital things begin to depend on it.
It is highly probable that in the heart of the modern parent of the best type, if there is still some of the animal-trainer’s instinct, he is quite and honestly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of it if he recognized it. I think most of us can say sincerely that we have no conscious wish for anything but the child’s best welfare. But in saying this, we admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle and complicated than the horse-breaker’s, and that we are in need of every ray of light from any source possible.
The particular, vivifying truth which we must imprint on our minds in this connection is that spontaneity of action is the absolute prerequisite for any moral or intellectual advance on the part of any human being. Nor is this, though so constantly insisted upon by Dr. Montessori, any new invention of hers. Dimly felt, it has regulated more or less the best action of the best preachers, the best teachers and lawgivers since the beginning of the world. Pestalozzi formulated it in the hard saying, all the more poignant because it came from a man who had devoted himself with such passionate affection to his pupils, “I have found that no man in God’s wide earth is able to help any other man. Help must come from the bosom alone.” Froebel, in all his general remarks on education, states this principle clearly. Finally, it has been crystallized in the homely adage of old wives, “Every child’s got to do its own growing.”