E Nesbit

Wings and the Child E Nesbit

Book Excerpt: ...d to run--this was, in effect, what education meant. There was a picture in Punch, I remember--at least I have forgotten the picture, but I remember the legend: "Cissy, go and see what Bobbie's doing, and tell him not to."It did not much matter what you made a child do, so long as it was something against the grain. He was to learn, not what he with his wonderful new curiosities and aptitudes longed to learn, but what you wished to teach; you with your dulled senses--dulled in the same bitter school as that in which he was now a sad learner.[Illustration: NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE.]Generation after generation has gone on, pounding away at the old silly game, each generation anxious and eager to hurt the new one as it, in its time, was hurt. Each generation must, one would have thought, have remembered what things hurt children and how much these things hurt, and yet this intolerable cycle of bullying and punishment and repression went on and on and on. Children were bulli...