EDUCATION
later childhood. The two are, of course, inseparable;
but it will be convenient to consider them one at a time.
Let us begin by asking in what a desirable moral education
consists. Our aim, let us recall, is to train up human beings
for freedom, for justice, for peace. How shall it be done?
In his recent book, Which Way to Peace? Bertrand Russell
has written a significant paragraph on this subject. * Schools,9
he says, 'have very greatly improved during the present
century, at any rate in the countries which have remained
democratic. In the countries which have military dictator-
ships, including Russia, there has been a great retrogression
during the last ten years, involving a revival of strict
discipline, implicit obedience, a ridiculously subservient
behaviour towards teachers and passive rather than active
methods of acquiring knowledge. All this is rightly held
by the governments concerned to be a method of pro-
ducing a militaristic mentality, at once obedient and
domineering, cowardly and brutal. . . . From the practice
of the despots, we can see that they agree with the
advocates of "modern" education as regards the connec-
tion between discipline in schools and the love of war in
later life.*
Dr. Maria Montessori has developed the same theme in
a recent pamphlet: 'The child who has never learned to
act alone, to (direct his own actions, to govern his own will,
grows into an adult who is easily led and must always lean
upon others. The school child, being continually dis-
couraged and scolded, ends by acquiring that mixture of
distrust of his own powers and of fear, which is called
shyness and which later, in the grown man, takes the form
of discouragement and submissiveness, of incapacity to put
up the slightest moral resistance. The obedience which
is expected of a child both in the home and in the school
—an obedience admitting neither of reason nor of justice—
prepares the man to be docile to blind forces. The punish-
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