Young teacher, I am setting before you a difficult task, the art of controlling without precepts, and doing everything without doing anything at all.  This art is, I confess, beyond your years, it is not calculated to display your talents nor to make your value known to your scholar’s parents; but it is the only road to success.  You will never succeed in making wise men if you do not first make little imps of mischief.  This was the education of the Spartans; they were not taught to stick to their books, they were set to steal their dinners.  Were they any the worse for it in after life?  Ever ready for victory, they crushed their foes in every kind of warfare, and the prating Athenians were as much afraid of their words as of their blows.

When education is most carefully attended to, the teacher issues his orders and thinks himself master, but it is the child who is really master.  He uses the tasks you set him to obtain what he wants from you, and he can always make you pay for an hour’s industry by a week’s complaisance.  You must always be making bargains with him.  These bargains, suggested in your fashion, but carried out in his, always follow the direction of his own fancies, especially when you are foolish enough to make the condition some advantage he is almost sure to obtain, whether he fulfils his part of the bargain or not.  The child is usually much quicker to read the master’s thoughts than the master to read the child’s feelings.  And that is as it should be, for all the sagacity which the child would have devoted to self-preservation, had he been left to himself, is now devoted to the rescue of his native freedom from the chains of his tyrant; while the latter, who has no such pressing need to understand the child, sometimes finds that it pays him better to leave him in idleness or vanity.

Take the opposite course with your pupil; let him always think he is master while you are really master.  There is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is taken captive.  Is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy?  Are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him?  Cannot you make of him what you please?  His work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control?  No doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do.  He should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell.

Then he can devote himself to the bodily exercises adapted to his age without brutalising his mind; instead of developing his cunning to evade an unwelcome control, you will then find him entirely occupied in getting the best he can out of his environment with a view to his present welfare, and you will be surprised by the subtlety of the means he devises to get for himself such things as he can obtain, and to really enjoy