Congratulations to you — con-gratulations, congratulations...

Words sent forth by scores of mouths, with the tenderest of smiles, whenever a new child is born — since the most ancient of ages, since man learned the mean-ing of fatherhood and woman the meaning of motherhood; that is, since the family was born of human life. This mother poured her whole soul into her daughter, and so the daughter — the family — came forth a faithful mirror of her mother — life.

Our story today, then, is not about this man or that woman; it is the story of every individual of the human generations that have passed, that pass, and that will pass. It is the story of each one of us — the story of the newborn child until he becomes a man. How many faces beam at his birth, how many delegations come to congratulate, how many trays are offered! Yet amid this flood of rejoicing, do the eyes look upon this child of ours as upon a living being — a human being? Or... does the child need nothing more than a bath, sleep, clothes, and food? I do not believe so. The child needs education. And his education begins from the very first moment in which he is born. He is, before all else, a living creature who feels pain and pleasure; the mother who accustoms her child to sleeping in the light has sown fear in his soul without knowing it. Just so, he learns the meaning of love and the meaning of joy from his mother's glances, his father's laughter, and his brother's kisses.

The child's soul is not an empty cupboard that we must fill with sermons, instructions, and sciences. No — he is a living

being, possessed of mind, sense, feeling, and instincts; and it is for us to walk with the stages of his growth step by step, offering him at each stage his bodily, psychological, and mental needs. And I do not know by what right the educator exploits his educational authority to mold the child as he himself wishes, or as the head of the state wishes. No: this child is a trust laid upon our necks, with which life has girded

us. Our duty is to acquaint him with life, and our first aim in educating him is to prepare him for a complete life: by providing him with the conditions that help him grow naturally in body and in thought, and by leaving him to use his senses in discovering what surrounds him, encouraging him toward independent thinking and inference. How then, in God's name, can we ask of a child who has known nothing from his parents but orders and the duty of obedience, and heard nothing from his teacher but lectures and sciences swallowed under compul-sion just as they are — how can we ask him to become a man who is master of himself and captain of his own life? If we want the child to become a complete human being, we must treat him as a human being, with a mind,

a heart, and instincts, from the moment of his birth — for a very simple reason: that life brought him into existence a human being. By what right, then, do we enslave him to ends of our own??!!

In the light of this, we can con-clude that education is a matter that touches the very heart of human life; it is the nourishment of society's soul. "Just as food and reproduction preserve the life of the body down the generations, so social life cannot stay alive with-out education and instruction."

And it is a great error to throw the responsibility for edu-cation upon mothers, fathers, and teachers alone. This means that education's place is not only the home and the school; rather, the child draws it from life itself — from home and school, and from every person he sees and every event that surrounds him. Indeed, I very much doubt that the child is the only one among us in need of education; every one of us needs education and instruction to the very last moment of his life. As individuals in a society, we cannot live without the social bonds that tie us together — and how can these bonds remain firm and strong without education? No wonder, then, that a servant should educate his master, or a child his grandfather.

One example of this is a vendor, or a ticket-taker on a bus or a tram. If he is well-mannered, gentle in his questions, glad to help, cheerful despite his stream-ing sweat — does his personality not stir the noblest feelings in the soul of every passenger? He is no schoolmaster and no university professor; he is a ticket-taker — yet he is the greatest of educators in the performance of duty, in patience, and in optimism; that is, in the meaning of life itself.

Thank God, the age of feudalism and the nobility is over, and the twentieth century has dropped the curtain on the farce of the master and his slave. This means that we