Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/355

Rh work? I think the first condition of a good education is that the child should know that all he uses does not fall from heaven ready-made but is produced by other people's labour. To understand that all he lives on comes from the labour of other people who neither know nor love him, is too much for a child (God grant he may understand it when he is grown up); but to understand that the chamber-pot he uses is emptied and wiped, without any pleasure, by a nurse or a housemaid, and that the boots and goloshes he always puts on clean are cleaned in the same way—not out of love for him, but for some other reason quite unintelligible to him—is something he can and should understand, and of which he should be ashamed. If he is not ashamed and if he continues to use them, that is the very worst commencement of an education, and leaves the deepest traces for his whole life. To avoid that, however, is very simple, and is just what (to use poetic language), standing on the threshold of the grave, I beseech you to do for your children. Let them do all they can for themselves: carry out their own slops, fill their own jugs, wash up, arrange their rooms, clean their boots and clothes, lay the table, etc. Believe me that, unimportant as these things may seem, they are a hundred times more important for your children's happiness than a knowledge of French, or of history, etc. It is true that here the chief difficulty crops up: children do willingly only what their parents do, and therefore I beg of you, do these things. This will effect two objects at once: it makes it possible to learn less, by filling the time in the most useful and natural way, and it trains the children to simplicity, to work, and to self-dependence. Please do this. You will be gratified from the first month, and the children yet more so. If to this you can add work on the land, if it be but a kitchen-garden, that will be well; though it too often becomes a mere pastime. The necessity of attending to one's own needs and carrying out one's own slops is admitted by all the best schools, such as Bedales, where the director of the school himself takes a share in such