The Century of the Child

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G. P. Putnams̓ sons, 1909 - Education - 339 pages
 

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Page 121 - The still living instincts of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity. Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most valuable. The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard results in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part...
Page 84 - According to my method of thinking, and that of many others, not woman but the mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so precious that society advances its own highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.
Page 203 - The modern school has succeeded in doing something which, according to the law of physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once existent matter. The desire for knowledge, the capacity for acting by oneself, the gift of observation, all qualities children bring with them to school, have, as a rule, at the close of the school period disappeared.
Page 3 - Child, by Ellen Key, who writes (English translation, p. 2) : " My conviction is that the transformation of human nature will take place, not when the whole of humanity becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the consciousness of the ' holiness of generation.' This consciousness will make the central work of Society the new race, its origin, its management, and its education ; about these all morals, all laws, all social arrangements will be grouped.
Page 104 - I recognise fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively. From this general, not from the individual standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
Page 203 - Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. Ibid., Ch. 5 9 I wrote in the sand [at age ten], "God is dead.

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