EDUCATION
independence, responsibility and co-operation. The iin-,
portant thing is to avoid extremes—the extreme of too
much liberty and responsibility on the one hand and, on
the other, of too much restriction, above all too much
restriction of the wrong sort. For the fixed framework
may just as well be a bad code as a good one. Children
may derive just as comforting a sense of security from the
moral code, say, of militarism as from that of non-
attachment. But the results of an upbringing within a
framework of militaristic morality will be quite different
from the results of an upbringing in the ethic of non-
attachment.
Coming back to the world as we know it, we have to
ask ourselves an important question. Even if we were to
prolong the nursery-school type of training—training, that t
is to say, for self-government and responsible co-operation
—if we were to continue it far into adolescence, would we,
in the existing world, succeed in making any conspicuous
change for the better in society or the individuals composing
it ? Practical life is the most efficient of all teachers. Take
adolescents trained for self-government and co-operation
and turn them loose into a hierarchical, competitive, success-
worshipping society: what will happen ? Will the effects
of the conditioning received in school survive? Probably
not. Most likely, there will be a period of bewilderment
and distress; then, in the majority of cases, readjustment
to the circumstances of life. Which shows, yet once more,
that life is a whole and that desirable changes in one
department will not produce the results anticipated from
them, unless they are accompanied by desirable changes in
all other departments.
In the preceding paragraph I have suggested that a good
education is not that infallible cure of all our ills which
some enthusiasts have supposed it to be. Or rather that it
can become such a cure only when it is associated with
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