The evil arises, in the schools as in the churches, from believing and acting as if there were something in the system itself.

If human nature were a fixed quantity, if any two children were alike, or anywhere nearly alike, if a certain act done for a child always brought forth the same result, then it might be possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry.  But the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any other of Nature’s laboratories.

A chemist will distil for you the odor of a blown rose, or catch and hold captive the breath of the morning meadow, and do it always just the same, and ever with like results; but there is no art by which anything analogous can be wrought in human life.  Here a new element comes in that entirely changes that economy of Nature in this regard.  The individuality of every human soul is this new factor, and because of it, of its infinite variability—­because no two atoms that are cast into the crucible of life are ever the same, or can be wrought into character by the same means—­because of this, no fixed rules can ever be laid down for evolving a definite result, in the realm of soul, by never-varying means.

And this is where many teachers are at fault.  They put their faith in a system, a mill through which all children shall be run, and in passing through which each child shall receive the same treatment, and from which they shall all emerge, stamped with the seal of the institution, “uniformity.”

This is the prime idea that lies at the foundation of the popular system of education—­to make children uniform.  This very thing that God and Nature have set themselves against—­no two faces, or forms, or statures; no two minds, or hearts, or souls being alike, as designed by the Creator, and as fashioned by Nature’s hand—­to make all these alike was the aim of the system under which Dodd began to be evolved, and with which he began to clash at once.

But it is not the system only which is at fault.  Hot with the indignation bred from a discussion of its shortcomings, the author turns suddenly upon the parents of the innumerable Dodds in the schools of the country: 

And for you, who send your six-year-olds to school with a single hook, and grumble because you have to buy even so much of an outfit, what are you going to do about it when your boy drains all the life out of the little volume in a couple of weeks or a month?  He knows the stories by heart, and after that he says them over, day by day, because he must, and not in the least because he cares to.

What are you going to do about this?  It is largely your business.  You cannot shirk it and say that you send the boy to school, and it is the teacher’s business to take care of him.