So it is
that many a man carries about a burden of wrong notions all his life
long--crotchets, whims, fancies, prejudices, which at last become
fixed ideas. The fact is that he has never tried to form his
fundamental ideas for himself out of his own experience of life, his
own way of looking at the world, because he has taken over his ideas
ready-made from other people; and this it is that makes him--as it
makes how many others!--so shallow and superficial.
Instead of that method of instruction, care should be taken to educate
children on the natural lines. No idea should ever be established in a
child's mind otherwise than by what the child can see for itself, or
at any rate it should be verified by the same means; and the result of
this would be that the child's ideas, if few, would be well-grounded
and accurate. It would learn how to measure things by its own standard
rather than by another's; and so it would escape a thousand strange
fancies and prejudices, and not need to have them eradicated by the
lessons it will subsequently be taught in the school of life. The
child would, in this way, have its mind once for all habituated
to clear views and thorough-going knowledge; it would use its own
judgment and take an unbiased estimate of things.
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