Some ten or twelve years ago, when Egeria took charge of the school, the children were dull, lifeless, listless, resourceless.
Now they are bright, intelligent, happy, responsive, overflowing with life, interested in many things, full of ability and resource.

How has this change been wrought?
Not by veneering or even inoculating the children with good qualities, but simply by allowing their better and higher nature to evolve itself freely, naturally, and under favourable conditions.
That the child's better and higher nature is his real nature, is the assumption--let me rather say, the profound conviction--on which Egeria's whole system of education has been based.

In basing it on this assumption, she has made a bold departure from the highway which has been blindly followed for many centuries.

We have seen that the basis of education in this country, as in Christendom generally, is the doctrine of original sin.

It is taken for granted by those who train the child that his nature, if allowed to develop itself freely, will grow in the wrong direction, and will therefore lead him astray; and that it is the function of education to counteract this tendency, to do violence to the child's nature, to compel it by main force to grow (or make a pretence of growing) in the right direction, to subject it to perpetual repression and constraint.