The wild whoops to which children so often give vent, when released from school, show that a period of unnatural tension has come to an end; and in these, and in the further conduct of the released child--in the roughness, rudeness, and bad language, of which the passer-by (especially in towns) not infrequently has to complain--we see a rebound from this state of tension, an instinctive protest against the constraint to which he has been subjected for so many hours.

The result of all this is that the child leads two lives, a life of unnatural repression and constraint in school, and a life--also unnatural, though it is supposed to be the expression of his nature--of reaction and protest out of school.

Such a dislocation of the child's daily life is not likely to conduce to his well-being; while the teacher's assumption that his _role_ in school is essentially active, and that of the child essentially passive, will lead at last to his turning his back on the root-idea of growth, to his forgetting that the child is a living and therefore a growing organism, to his regarding the child as clay in his hands, to be "remoulded" by him "to his heart's desire," or even as a _tabula rasa_, on which he is to inscribe words and other symbols at his will.
In Utopia the training which the child receives may be said to be based on the doctrine of original goodness.

It is taken for granted by Egeria that the child is neither a lump of clay nor a _tabula rasa_, but a "living soul"; that growth is of the very essence of his being; and that the normal child, if allowed to make natural growth under reasonably favourable conditions, will grow happily and well.

It is taken for granted that the potencies of his nature are well worth realising; that the end of his being--the ideal type towards which the natural course of his development tends to take him--is intrinsically good; in fine, that he is _by nature_ a "child of God" rather than a "child of wrath." It is therefore taken for granted that growth is in itself a good thing, a move in the right direction; and that to foster growth, to make its conditions as favourable as possible, to give it the food, the guidance, and the stimulus that it needs, is the best thing that education can do for the child.
It is further taken for granted that the many-sided effort to grow which is of the essence of the child's nature is the mainspring of, and expresses itself in, certain typical instincts which no one who studies the child with any degree of care can fail to observe; and that by duly cultivating these instincts,--_expansive_ instincts, as one may perhaps call them, since each of them tends to take the child away from his petty self,--the teacher will make the best possible provision for the growth of the child's nature as a whole.
Above all, it is taken for granted that the growth which the child makes must come from within himself; that no living thing can grow vicariously; that the rings of soul-growth, like the rings of tree-growth, must be evolved from an inner life; that the teacher must therefore content himself with giving the child's expansive instincts fair play and free play; and that, for the rest, he must as far as possible efface himself, bearing in mind that not he, but the child, is the real actor in the drama of school life.
But though so much is left to the child in Utopia, and so much demanded of him, it is not feared that the effort to grow will be repugnant to him.