Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/346

332 more and more; so also educators apparently strive for only one thing,—how the process of development may not cease; and if they think of harmony at all, then they always strive to attain it, approaching the unknown prototype in the future, receding from the prototype in the past and present. However irregular the education of a child has been, there still remain in it the primitive features of harmony. Still modifying, at least not helping, the development, we may hope to attain some nearness to regularity and harmony.

But we are so self-confident, so dreamily given over to the false ideal of mature perfection, so impatient are we toward the anomalous near us, and so firmly confident in our power of correcting them, so little are able to understand and appreciate the primitive beauty of a child, that we make all possible haste to rouse the child, to correct all the irregularities that come under our observation; we regulate, we educate: First, we must bring up one side even with the other, then the other with the first. They keep developing the child more and more, and removing it farther and farther from the old and abolished prototype, and ever more and more impossible becomes the attainment of the imaginary ideal of the perfectibility of the adult man.

Our ideal is behind us and not before us.

Education spoils and does not improve a man. The more the child is spoiled, the less it is necessary to educate him, the greater is the freedom he requires. To teach and educate a child is impossible and senseless on the simple ground that the child stands nearer than I do, nearer than any adult does, to that ideal of harmony, truth, beauty, and goodness to which, in my pride, I wish to lead him.

The consciousness of this ideal is stronger in him than in me. All he needs of me is material for filling out harmoniously and on all sides. As soon as I gave him perfect freedom, ceased to teach him, he wrote this poetic tale, the like of which is not to be found in Russian literature. And therefore, according to my notion, it is impossible for us to teach children, and especially