The best education is that which trains and disciplines and fortifies the mind. To be sure, certain materials will have to be used; but these will not be selected for their own sake, nor for their informational or ideal character. They will be selected wholly for their formal or formative values, for their worth and use in forming the mind, in disciplining the desires, and in bringing all the elements of the nature under the control of reason. If mathematics and grammar are chosen for these purposes, that choice does not rest on the same grounds as would dictate the choice of the same material by a classical realist. He would choose grammar, for example, because grammar is the gateway into the world of literature. Locke would choose it, however, because its nature makes it a peculiarly fine instrument for forming the mind.

The Basis of Discipline.-At its best this doctrine of mental discipline is the noblest theory of education ever stated. At its worst, it is the most outrageous instrument for the deformation of the child's possibilities. Whether it shall be the one or the other depends upon the psychological theory that surrounds the disciplinary process. A disciplined mind is the sort of mind needed in facing the urgencies and emergencies of the world of action. But there is present in the world a fundamental fallacy of this sort: "Here is a man who through his interest in a certain task, through his loyalty to a central aim, through his enthusiasm for a future good, has secured the finest sort of mental discipline; therefore let us now put before all children these same certain tasks, central aims, and future goods, and we shall thus secure the same splendid mental discipline for all individuals." The fallacy is one which will not be grasped without some special appreciation of the psychology of the case. It is of the same sort as that made by the later humanists when they tried to make the

classics serve as a universal curriculum and so brought about the development of Ciceronianism. Such fallacies are, of course, evidences of a prepsychological age; if they exist to-day, they are survivals from such an age.

The more genuine basis of discipline will appear in later stages of our discussion. Although the doctrines of Locke have been much disputed and in large measure discredited; although the educational movement which Locke fathered became the most influential factor in the development of educational practice in England and America and fixed upon both countries a conception which, in its baser form, became the excuse for all sorts of brutalities, including the famous dictum of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster" that "lickin' an' larnin' go together"; although at the present time the greatest educational task is that of escaping from the hard clutches of this conception of discipline without falling over into the equally undesirable doctrines of recent soft pedagogy-despite all these things, this disciplinary doctrine of Locke represents a real advance upon the past, a genuine stage in the development of the thinking-out of the educational problem. For through Locke's work educational discussion crosses over from the consideration of materials to the consideration of mind; the mind actually enters into educational discussion, and that is a great gain! To be sure, this mind is a curious sort of entity; but it is here. Despite all the efforts of the educational materialists, it will remain, first as one of the elements to be taken into account in the solution of the problem of education, and finally as the one central factor around which all other aspects of the case revolve.

For Locke himself the mind is at first simply a clean surface, a tabula rasa, on which nothing has been written, on which experience will slowly write the story of life. This writing will take place entirely through the senses.

"There is nothing in the mind which has not previously been in the senses." In this the mind is not primarily active, but passive. Learning is taking on impressions; mastery comes through large accumulation of impressions, as if bulk of information should be so impressive as to compel respect. There is little of feeling that the mind is to have any creative part in the making of the world. The whole of education is the formation of habit, especially habit of thought. Locke would have education be the "moral discipline of the intellect." "The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it." Yet there is a curious turning of the outlook here in Locke's thinking, as there is in all discussions of the disciplinary following. It is rather naïvely assumed that the mind can be put through these passive performances for a number of years, during which these habits will have been built up; and that at some time undetermined, by some method or magic unexplained, the mind will become free, capable, inventive, masterful, even creative. "Would you have a man reason well, you must use him (make him used) to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connection of ideas and following them in train." For the purposes of this habit-forming exercise of the mind nothing is better than mathematics, "which therefore I think should be taught all those who have the time and opportunity, not so much to make them mathematicians as to make them reasonable creatures. . . . I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should go deep into mathematics, but that having got the way of reasoning which that study necessarily brings the mind

to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge as they shall have occasion.'

It will be seen from these quotations that though the mind rather definitely emerges from its age-long submergence in old materials, yet Locke intends that it shall have no easy time of it. "I do say that inuring children gently to suffer some degrees of pain without shrinking is a way to gain firmness to their minds and lay a foundation for courage and resolution in the future part of their lives." But it is a great gain to have given the mind even this hard chance. Eventually it will emerge into full expression. And this rather harsh attitude toward old knowledges and systems, which was expressed in the Enlightenment and in this doctrine of discipline in education, became the motive to revolt on the part of the leaders of the so-called "romantic" movement, out of which came a more human, a more natural conception of living and of education. This more natural ideal of life and education found its most vigorous expression in Rousseau. To him we turn for the statement of the next phase of this winding argument.

CHAPTER XXIX

EDUCATION AS NATURAL GROWTH FROM WITHIN:

ROUSSEAU

WE have already seen that there has been a fundamental conflict all through history as to the real nature of experience. Two parties have stood forth now and again. The one represents the world as complete, intellectual, factual, in which education consists of taking on certain of these completed intellectual systems; the other represents the world as incomplete, changing, non-intellectual at the beginning, and in which education consists of the gradual development from within of an experience that can be depended upon to direct and control the destiny of the individual in the midst of changing conditions. The former seems to have been illustrated by the work of Plato, and especially by the structure of the world in the Middle Ages; the latter seems to have been illustrated by the conceptions of Socrates and the ideals of primitive Christianity. We also come upon it again in the educational theory of Rousseau. That is to say, the general bearing of the doctrines of Rousseau is much the same as the bearing of the Socratic doctrine, or the simpler Christian teaching that life depends upon growth from within, rather than external institutionalizing.

The Doctrines of Rousseau.-Rousseau (1712-1778) was born into a world that was already beginning to seethe with the underground impulses of revolution. His life was one long struggle to understand and to be understood. He never experienced anything of the nature of what