“THE FIRST principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught. The teacher is not an instructor or taskmaster, they are helpers and guides. Their business is to suggest and not to impose. They do not actually train the pupil's mind, they only show the pupil how to perfect their instruments of knowledge and helps and encourages them in the process.
The teacher does not impart knowledge to the pupil, they shows the pupil how to acquire knowledge for themselves. The teacher does not call forth the knowledge that is within; they only shows them where it lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface. The distinction that reserves this principle for the teaching of adolescent and adult minds and denies its application to the child, is a conservative and unintelligent doctrine.
THE SECOND principle is that the mind has to be consulted in its own growth. The idea of hammering the child into the shape desired by the parent or teacher is barbarous and ignorant superstition…
To force the nature to abandon its own dharma is to do it permanent harm, mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. It is a selfish tyranny over a human soul and a wound to the nation, which loses the benefit of the best that a man could have given it…
THE THIRD principle of education is to work from the near to the far, from that which is, to that which shall be…. We must not take up the nature by the roots from the earth in which it must grow or surround the mind with images and ideas of a life which is alien to that in which it must physically move. If anything has to be brought in from outside, it must be offered, not forced on the mind. A free and natural growth is the condition of genuine development.”