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For a decade the Chicago school teachers, or rather a majority of them who were organized into the Teachers' Federation, had been engaged in a conflict with the Board of Education both for more adequate salaries and for more self-direction in the conduct of the schools.
There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand on the whole for the principle of freedom of rational self-direction. Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range of our control.
By this, concentration of purpose, subordination to a common impulse, ceases to be an effort, becoming the second nature of the man; and concentration of action, not merely in great operations but in the inner spirit, is the secret of success in war. Individual, intelligent self-direction is not, however, thereby excluded.
And since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence," is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the service of a master.
And for Baltimore to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much as to say that his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights and capacities were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy can possess except the one thing that constitutes democracy; that is, absolute self-direction.
Where the forms of self-government or of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion of an irresponsible authority. Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals of the Fatherland is to be impugned.
The kindergarten can remedy these intellectual difficulties, beside giving the child an impulse toward moral self-direction, and a capacity for working out his original ideas in visible and permanent form, which will make him almost a new creature.
An eminent critic says, "Genius always lights its own fire," and this constant double process of mind, one of self-direction and self-control, the other of absolute abandonment and identification, each the more complete for the other, the dramatic poet, the impassioned orator, and the great interpretative actor, all know, whenever the whole mind and nature are in their highest action. Mr.
But when the boy or girl comes to school with the dawning capacity for independent self-direction and personal application, then it is that the problem of the motor scholar becomes critical. The "let-alone" method puts a premium upon the development of his tendencies and the eventual playing out of his mental possibilities in mere motion.
As has just been remarked, the negative form so often taken by these demands is something of an historical accident, due to the fact that these modern peoples came into their highly esteemed system of Natural Liberty out of an earlier system of positive checks on self-direction and initiative; a system, in effect, very much after the fashion of that Imperial jurisdiction that still prevails in the dynastic States as, e.g., Germany or Japan whose projected dominion is now the immediate object of apprehension and repugnance.
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