While fine words are spoken about individual development,
children are treated as if their personality had no purpose of
its own, as if they were made only for the pleasure, pride, and
comfort of their parents; and as these aims are best advanced
when children become like every one else, people usually begin
by attempting to make them respectable and useful members of
society.

But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's
education in becoming a social human being is concerned, is to
treat him as such, while strengthening his natural disposition
to become an individual human being.

The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach
the child by degrees his place in the great orderly system of
existence; teach him his responsibility towards his
environment. But in other respects, none of the individual
characteristics of the child expressive of his life will be
suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or
others. The right balance must be kept between Spencer's
definition of life as an adaptation to surrounding conditions,
and Nietzsche's definition of it as the will to secure power.

In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but
individual exercise of power is just as important. Through
adaptation life attains a fixed form; through exercise of
power, new factors.

Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal