[A principle] which cannot be too strenuously insisted upon, is, that in education the process of self-development should be encouraged to the fullest extent. Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction . . . . Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school-drill, and have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own teachers. If, however, they will call to mind that the all-important knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early years is got without help–if they will remember that the child is self-taught in the use of its mother tongue–if they will estimate the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom, which every boy gathers for himself . . . they will find it a not unreasonable conclusion, that if the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance . . . . This need for perpetual telling is the result of our stupidity, not of the child’s.
- Herbert Spencer, written between 1854 and 1859.
Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical. See pp. 124-28.