Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/37

 personal interests. It involves hardship and self-renunciation. The man who chooses the life of thought and wisdom, says Socrates in the Philebus, it may be lives without pleasure; and who knows whether this may not be the most divine life of all? "The higher, yet obvious and dominant experience," says Dr. Bosanquet, "carries you at least as far as, for example, strength and endurance, love and sacrifice, the making and achievement of souls."

Perhaps you will now object that this statement at any rate is an example of the abstract theorisings which have little bearing on the boy's actual life at school. On the contrary I believe that school life ought to be literally the making and achieving of souls, and we fail to recognise it as such partly because our conception of the boy's personality and interests is too abstract, and we do not realise the significance of the details of his daily life and work. Consider, for example, the average boy in an elementary school who in later life will be an artisan. How can the school in his case do what we claim? Now I fully admit that complete success is not to be expected, if only for the reason that the classes are usually too large and the boy escapes too soon from all educational control. But this does not alter the essential character of the work which the school is called upon to do, and that work is to help the boy to become in the true sense a person. How this is to be accomplished we cannot discuss in detail; I can only mention one or two points by way of illustration. Cannot, for instance, the school help the boy to feel