Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/19

 children of four sitting on benches for five hours a day and spending most of their time on lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. And, again, since each thought or feeling derives its significance from the whole personality of which it is an element, we must remember that the training of any special aptitude is of value only in so far as it improves the boy's life as a whole. It is an error to try and cultivate one side of a boy's mind in isolation from the rest. Yet it was two centuries before men fully realised that the intensive study of Latin grammar did not provide a complete form of mental training.

Secondly, a person has as such intrinsic value, and has therefore the right to be treated always as an end and not a means. It may, I think, be shown that our whole sense of value is ultimately derived from our consciousness that we ourselves as living persons are intrinsically valuable. "Our ultimate standard of worth," says T. H. Green, "is an ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to value for, of, or in a person."

According to this doctrine the ultimate purpose of society and its institutions, including its schools, is the increase of the personal value of its individual members. Hence in education we must aim, in the first instance, not at increasing our national efficiency, nor even at the improvement of the social order, but at promoting the right development of our boys and girls as persons. Other purposes are not excluded, but it would be wrong to treat our scholars primarily as members of society who