“A child’s mind is unconsciously autonomous, its way of observation boldly individual, its expression eagerly original. ‘Lamps o’ beauty, lamps o’ beauty,’ I have heard a small child crooning to itself as it watched some blown daffodils swinging in the twilight. Another, on first noticing a mounting lark, said ‘Look — two wings tied together, and a little bit of stick, which is its beak!’ That is how the undespoiled see and describe, the delighted perception rushing straight into live speech that cares for no canons and yet shirks no flight. But presently this wild gusto and grace are tabooed by the joint efforts of elder comrades and of the many second-rate minds to be found among teachers, along with the few that fire and guide and hearten: the little adventurer’s heart is prevailed on to fail him; he gives up his treasure of insight and power; within a few terms he may come to talk and think, and even to see, as imitatively and timidly as a committee: stock jokes, stock phrases, stock valuations, stock contempts — he is more or less forcibly fed with them, till he imbibes at last a sense of actual discomfort and distrust, instead of admiration, in the company of any one who does not see and hear by proxy and talk by rote. He has been turned, for life, into a member of a set, a creature of dim vision and savourless speech and nervous conformities. And yet he may, like the caged larks, have his moments of imaginative release into that old state of himself when no screens were put up between him and the sun. At some emotional crisis, or some propitious moment of travel, a break in the long doldrums may come and the immobilised sails may seem for an instant to feel a breeze rise as it used to do.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, The Right Place).