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 all about his views on education. He saw how most learning is mechanical, and how a child does not learn because he wants to, but in order not to be punished, or to earn a prize, or to be better than others, but very seldom from a real desire to know. This Tolstoy considered was because the child was so drilled and made to behave unnaturally, and to have a different manner in school than he had out. He was not free, and only when a child was free and natural and lively, and allowed to ask questions and to laugh and talk, could he learn with pleasure and therefore thoroughly. In Tolstoy's school there was no order as we know it: children sat on the floor or bunches of them in an arm-chair; they did just as they pleased, and ran about from place to place. They answered questions, not in turn but all together, interrupting one another or helping one another to remember. If one child left out a bit of story that he had to tell, another jumped up and put it in.

Tolstoy encouraged the children not to repeat literally what they had heard, but to tell "out of your own head." As there were very few reading books for young children, Tolstoy wrote stories for them himself, which, as they have been translated into English, we are able to read ourselves and to judge how they must have delighted his small pupils. He also read to them and explained to them Bible stories, of which he was very fond.

There was no doubt that Tolstoy had a gift for