The Discovery Of The Child

DISCIPLINE IN THE CHILDREN'S HOUSE 373

Real co-ordination of movement is the result of a perfectionment
of the total personality.

These were therefore not children who had learned how to
move, they were disciplined because they had reached a superior
degree of development of their personality and which they had
done by means of a free choice of their occupations.

It is not wonderful, but really most natural, that the child
should have disciplined himself by these exercises, however great
may be the muscular unstability natural to his age. In fact, he is
responding to a natural urge when he is moving, but as his move-
ments are infused with a purpose they no longer look like disorder
but like work. Here we have the discipline which represents an
aim which is attained through a multitude of victories; the child
disciplined in this way is not the child of other days who could
* be good/ but is an individual who has trained himself, who has
progressed beyond the usual limits of his age, who has made a
leap forward; in mastering th,e present he has mastered his own
future. He has grown up. He will not need anyone to be
constantly near him telling him repeatedly to keep still, to
be good—commands embodying two contradictory ideas. The
goodness which he has acquired can no longer make him keep
still in idleness; his goodness now is wholly expressed in
movement.

In truth, the ' good' are those who move forward towards
the goodness which has been built up by their own efforts, and
by their orderly activity in external work.

The external work in our case constitutes the means for attain-
ing internal progress, and appears as the explanation o,f it; the
two factors are interwoven. Work leads to internal progress in
the child, but the child who has improved himself works better;
the improved work fascinates him; therefore he continues to develop
his inward powers.

Discipline, therefore, is not a fact, but a way> in the course
of which the child masters with a precision, which one might call
scientific, the idea of goodness.