Knowledge for its own sake

"We are hardly aware how children lap up lessons of life like a thirsty dog at a water trough, because they know without being told that their chief business is to learn how to think and how to live; comment and explanation are usually distracting.  By the way, I think there is one point about which we elders must be careful; it is easy to make children intolerable little prigs by giving a personal bearing to their work.  It is bad enough to overhear a mother say: 'All the mothers care about in a school is that they shall be well looked after; it's the fathers who want some sort of education for the boys so that they can go into business; but I've told these boys that if they want a motor-car they'll have to work!'  We see the materialism of such a view and are properly shocked; but a child is in a far worse case who suspects that to read Alcibiades, King Alfred, Sir Galahad, should be to his advantage.  The first thing that this school is designed to teach is a love of knowledge for its own sake, and this I think the children get; they learn that last accomplishment of noble minds, to delight in books for themselves; but any hint that a poem or a personage is administered to a child by way of a pill or a poultice, to do him good, is fatal to the slow, still operation of knowledge upon his personality."

From "The Parents' Union School" 1912