The Century of the Child: Ellen Key

"Here I wish to sketch, in brief, my dreams and hopes for the school of the future, a place where a child's soul can grow freely and fully."

With these words in The Century of the Child, Ellen Key introduced her vision of the School of the Future.

The book was published in 1902, more than a century ago, and it speaks to us now with remarkable clarity.

A handful of passages show how little our thinking about education has changed. What we seek and what we dream of remains universal.

"Only life itself educates us for life, the life of nature and the life of humankind. What the natural world and the human world offer in form, beauty, and ways of working can, through biology, geography, history, art, and literature, bestow true value, teach our minds to observe, distinguish, and judge, and kindle warmth that unites us with what we learn. Only this is education. In short, the home and the school must give the child reality, a reality that flows toward children like a great, rich, and warm river."

A hundred years ago Ellen Key envisioned the schools we might one day build. Sadly, even now, those visions often remain dreams.

"In school, fear and the restless urge to perform will fade. A calm atmosphere will give the young a foundation of confidence and will persuade them that a person's highest achievement lies not in deeds but in being."

"To see clearly in nature, in humanity, and in art, and to read well, these are the two great aims of education at home and at school. If a child masters these, the child can learn almost everything else independently."

"Perhaps the schools I dream of will emerge, where the young first and foremost observe life and learn to love it, and where their abilities are consciously nurtured as the greatest good and the highest value."

"A pedagogy ruled by prefabricated prescriptions will yield to an individual, gentle approach that plays with children while honoring their nature, lives alongside them, learns from them, longs for them, and in each school seeks its own method."

She also writes about raising children:

"Only those who know how to play with children are able to teach them anything. To become as children are is the first prerequisite for educating them. Yet this does not mean childish antics or babble, which a child quickly sees through and deeply dislikes. It means allowing oneself to be permeated by the child just as life permeates the child; it means relating to the child as to someone truly equal, showing the same reserve, the same trust, and the same feelings we show adults. It means that we shall not try to shape the child by insisting on what we wish the child to be, but shall be guided by a keen sense of who the child truly is. It follows that we will never be sly or forceful with a child, but serious and sincere."

She wrote about parenthood:

"If a mother feels reverence for the unknown worlds she meets in a child's gaze, just as she reveres the worlds that scatter white blossoms across the dark blue sky, and if a father sees in his child the king's son to whom he will humbly devote all his strength, then the child will receive the rights that are the child's due!"

These are not rights that allow a child to trouble others with shifting moods, but the right to live a full personal life as a child in the presence of a mother and father who themselves live fully as persons. From their vitality and strength the child draws nourishment needed for growth.