we must also check in ourselves the tendency to overflow into being amateur professionals, so to speak, spoiling the future work of the professional teacher by premature and amateurish teaching.
Many parents seem to think that all the time is wasted for their children which is not spent in taking in consciously some special idea which some adult already understands. We must get rid of this notion entirely. A writer on education[1] has said that a human being comes into the world not chiefly to acquire knowledge or to develop his faculties, but to establish relations; and I would add that a child comes into science, not only to learn facts and to develop the faculty for doing things, but primarily to establish relations with the laws of nature, by which we mean—if we truly mean anything—the laws according to which the world is governed. And in order that relations may be properly established, the adults who are directing the child must, at proper times, keep silence even from good words.
I fear we are in some danger of forgetting, in the rush of modern education, that conscious mental effort rather interferes with the work of establishing relations. The time for establishing relations is the Sabbath of the I Am, the Jubilee
