Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/447

 Rh adults possess as a result of the exercise of play tendencies when they normally appeared. On the other hand, when that cruelty instinct, which almost invariably appears at a certain age in every child, is put into a favorable environment, so that it functions and is fastened as a permanent characteristic upon the individual, no matter under how wholesome moral influences he may be thrown in later life, there is there a tendency to cruelty which can hardly be eradicated. It is likely because this instinct is allowed to function in so many children that there are so many cruelties exercised and murders committed in adult life.

Those instincts and tendencies of the child in its various stages of development are not indications of what the ideal individual ought to be, but are, on the other hand, a portrayal of the history of the race. They appear in the order in which they functioned virtually, and were, therefore, seized upon by natural selection in the order in which their possessors were rendered superior to their fellows as a result of their functioning.

As a result of conditions which are inevitable in a civilized community, such as prevail where there is sympathy and conscience, the intellectually and morally, as well as physically, fit raise the level of the less fit and unfit, so that they all are enabled to have offspring and to have their descendents maintained, natural selection ceases to function and physical, mental and moral evolution in the race consequently ceases. All the instincts, or at least many of them, continue to appear, just as the physical disharmonies continue to appear; and as surgery must get rid of these disharmonies (such as the appendix) in each individual, so must education rid the individual (and each individual) of these tendencies which throw him out of harmony with the present mental and moral environment.

Now the third essential qualification of the teacher, that of understanding the dynamic nature of society and progress, is indispensable. In planning and deciding what sort of a man I want my boy to be, if he is to be completely adjusted to his environment, and consequently to get the most out of life, I must in all respects be able to see into the future and to anticipate the conditions when he is to be an adult. I must, in other words, understand the nature of the change which conditions undergo in the meantime. To illustrate, suppose I am living at a time when typesetting is a good vocation. A typesetter has shorter hours and better remuneration than any other artisan. I plan to make my boy a typesetter. He, as a result of my careful training, develops into an efficient typesetter. He obtains a place and good wages. He marries and by the time he has a good-sized family depending upon him, some one comes along and invents a typesetting machine. He loses his position. He is obliged to serve as an unskilled laborer,