The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and
perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of
self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour, habits
that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. Where the
faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we
strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow
the camels of grown people.

The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of
children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate
interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's
whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the
child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed
to go on by itself. But educators who, day in and day out, are
consciously transforming the environment and themselves are
still a rare product. Most people live on the capital and
interest of an education, which perhaps once made them model
children, but has deprived them of the desire for educating
themselves. Only by keeping oneself in constant process of
growth, under the constant influence of the best things in
one's own age, does one become a companion half-way good enough
for one's children.

To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand,
setting one's feet on a narrow path, it means never placing
ourselves in danger of meeting the cold look on the part of the
child that tells us without words that he finds us insufficient
and unreliable. It means the humble realisation of the truth
that the ways of injuring the child are infinite, while the
ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does the