The child’s whole educational opportunity is contained in two factors; the personality it brings and the environment it gets.  Generations of educationists have disputed their relative importance:  but neither party can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed.  Even great inborn powers atrophy if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable:  a result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life.  We must have opportunity and encouragement to try our powers and inclinations, be helped to understand their nature and the way to use them, unless we are to begin again, each one of us, in the Stone Age of the soul.  So too, even small powers may be developed to an astonishing degree by suitable surroundings and wise education—­witness the results obtained by the expert training of defective children—­and all this is as applicable to the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life.  That life is quick to respond to the demands made on it:  to take every opportunity of expression that comes its way.  If you make the right appeal to any human faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow.  Thus it is that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, first in the home and then in the school, shapes the child during his most malleable years.  We, therefore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the environment, the tradition, the customs we are instrumental in providing for the infant future:  to ask ourselves whether we are sure the tradition is right, the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold up complete.  The child, whatever his powers, cannot react to something which is not there; he can’t digest food that is not given to him, use faculties for which no objective is provided.  Hence the great responsibility of our generation, as to providing a complete, balanced environment now, a fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physical, mental and spiritual, for the generation preparing to succeed us.  Such education as this has been called a preparation for citizenship.  But this conception is too narrow, unless the citizenship be that of the City of God; and the adjustments involved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body and the mind.

Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse of being a spiritual philosopher, was accustomed to group the essentials of a right education under four heads:[146]

First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in all senses:  how to keep the body and the mind healthy and efficient, how to be self-supporting, how to protect oneself against external dangers and encroachments.

Next, we must train the growing creature in its duties towards the life of the future:  parenthood and its responsibilities, understood in the widest sense.

Thirdly; we must prepare it to take its place in the present as a member of the social order into which it is born.