Sri Sai Baba`S:Charters And Sayings

TWENTY-NINTH TALK 599

country you will g^t a request. Some obviously
Q-dopt the military plan, but others appeal to the
good in the <nan. , I remember, for example, reading
one sign forbidding certain unpleasant practices. It
ran : (< Gentlemen will not, and others must not " do
so and so. That was in America, which is one of
the newer countries. I thought it was rather^ well
put. There are other methods beside compulsion,
a-nd compulsion is never a good thing except in
extreme cases. There are cases where you must
assert it in the interest of your community, but it is
always better to carry their wills with you than to
drive them along against their will.

That, remember, is only very slightly understood
with regarcL to education. The idea is always: " Do
not do this, do not do that. This must not be done ;

this is forbidden ; " and so on, and they carry that
even into their ordinary teachings. They do not
engage the interest of the child in what they are
doing, but just impose it upon him. e( This is a lesson
and it must be learnt.^ If they could only make it
interesting the whole thing would go with much less
friction. That comes out in the Montessori system.
We find it, too, to some extent in the Froebel method.
People are learning all these things. The custom of
the past made things as uninteresting and as difficult
as "possible. I remember how I learned the Latin
Grammar as a boy. I had to learn a number of
rules in the Latin language. That method is not