One moment!--I take it, my friends, we are agreed in demanding of
the Philosopher that he condescend to some concrete and practical
suggestions in regard to education.--Briefly, please!
THE PHILOSOPHER. “You must draw your own conclusions. Traditional
education is based on the assumption that knowledge is a mass of
information which can be given to the child in little dabs at regular
intervals. We know, however, that the education based on this
assumption is a failure. It kills rather than stimulates curiosity;
and without curiosity, information is useless. We are thus forced to
realize that knowledge does not reside outside the child, but in the
contact of the child with the world through the medium of curiosity.
And thus the whole emphasis of education is changed. We no longer seek
to educate the child--we only attempt to give him the opportunity to
educate himself. He alone has the formula of his own specific needs;
none of us is wise enough to arrange for him the mysterious series of
beautiful and poignant contacts with reality by which alone he can
‘learn.’ This means that he must choose his own lessons. And if you
think that, left to choose, he would prefer no lessons at all, you
are quite mistaken. Let me remind you that children are notoriously
curious about everything--everything except, as you will very justly
point out, the things people want them to know. It then remains for
us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they
will be curious about everything. You may imagine that they will prefer
only the less complex kinds of knowledge; but do you regard children’s
games as simple? They are in fact exceedingly complex. And they are all
the more interesting because they are complex. We ourselves with our
adult minds, penetrate cheerfully into the complexities of baseball,
or embroidery, or the stock-market, following the lead of some natural
curiosity; and if our minds less often penetrate into the complexities
of music, or science, it is because these things have associations
which bring them within the realm of the dutiful. Evolutionary
biology is far more interesting than stamp-collecting; but it is,
unfortunately, made to seem not so delightfully useless, and hence it
is shunned by adolescent boys and girls. But postage-stamp collecting
can be made as much a bore as biology; it needs only to be put into the
schools as a formal course.
“Consider for a moment the boy stamp-collector. His interest in his
collection is in the nature of a passion. Does it astonish you that
passionateness should be the fruit of idle curiosity? Then you need
to face the facts of human psychology. The boy’s passion for his
collection of stamps is akin to the passion of the scientist and
the poet. Do you desire of children that they should have a similar
passion for arithmetic, for geography, for history? Then you must
leave them free to find out the interestingness of these things. There
is no way to passionate interest save through the gate of curiosity;
and curiosity is born of idleness. But doubtless you have a quite
wrong notion of what idleness means. Idleness is not doing nothing.
Idleness is _being free to do anything_. To be forced to do nothing
is not idleness, it is the worst kind of imprisonment. Being made to
stand in the corner with one’s face to the wall is not idleness--it
is punishment. But getting up on Saturday morning with a wonderful
day ahead in which one may do what one likes--that is idleness.
And it leads straight into tremendous expenditures of energy. There
is a saying, ‘The devil finds some mischief still for idle hands to
do.’ Yes, but why should the devil have no competition? And that, as
I understand it, is the function of education--to provide for idle
and happy children fascinating contacts with reality--through games,
tools, books, scientific instruments, gardens, and older persons with
passionate interests in science and art and handicraft.
“Such a place would in a few respects resemble the schools we know; but
the spirit would be utterly different from the spirit of traditional
education. The apparatus for arousing the child’s curiosity would be
infinitely greater than the meagre appliances of our public schools;
but however great, the child would be the centre of it all--not as the
object of a process, but as the possessor of the emotions by force of
which all these outward things become Education.
“But, you may ask, what has all this to do with truth? Simply this.
We have been forcing children to memorize alleged facts. A fact so
memorized cannot be distinguished from a falsehood similarly memorized.
And so we may very well say that we have failed to bring truth into
education. For truth is reality brought into vital contact with the
mind. It makes no difference whether we teach children that the earth
is round or flat, if it means nothing to them either way. For truth
does not reside in something outside the child’s mind; reality becomes
truth only when it is made a part of his living.
“But, you will protest--and you will protest the more loudly the more
you know of children--that their processes of thought are illogical,
fantastic and wayward. And you will ask, Do I mean that we must respect
the child’s error in order to cultivate in him a love of truth? Yes, I
do mean just that! Do I mean that we must respect the child’s belief
that the earth is flat, you ask? More than that, we must respect a
thousand obscure and pervasive childish notions, such as the notion
that a hair from a horse’s tail will turn into a pollywog if left in
the rainbarrel, or the notion that the way to find a lost ball is to
spit on the back of the hand, repeat an incantation couched in such
words as ‘Spit, Spit, tell me where the ball is!’ and then strike it
with the palm of the other hand. You can doubtless supply a thousand
instances of the kind of childhood thinking to which I refer. But
for simplicity’s sake, let us use the childish notion that the earth
is flat as a convenient symbol for them all. And I say that if we
do not respect the error, we shall not have any real success in
convincing the child of the truth. We shall easily persuade him that
the globe in the schoolroom is round--that the picture of the earth
in the geography-book is round--but not that the familiar earth upon
which he walks is anything but flat! At best, we shall teach him a
secondary, literary, schoolroom conception to put beside his workaday
one. And, in the long run, we shall place a scientific conception of
things in general beside his primitive childish superstitions--but
we shall scarcely displace them; and when it comes to a show-down in
his adult life, we shall find him acting in accordance with childish
superstitions rather than with scientific knowledge. Most of us, as
adults, are full of such superstitions, and we act accordingly, and
live feebly and fearfully; for we have never yielded to the childish
magical conception of the world the respect that is due to it as a
worthy opponent of scientific truth--we have assumed that we were
persuaded of truth, while in reality truth has never yet met error in
fair fight in our minds.
“If you wish to convince a friend of something, do you not first seek
to find out what he really thinks about it, and make him weigh your
truth and his error in the same balance? But in dealing with children,
we fail to take account of their opinions at all. We say, ‘You must
believe this because it is so.’ If they do believe it, they have only
added one more superstition to their collection. Truths are _not_ true
because somebody says so; nor even because everybody says so; they are
true only because they fit in better with all the rest of life than
what we call errors--because they bear the test of living--because they
work out. And this way of discovering truth is within the capacity
of the youngest school-child. If you can get him to state candidly
and without shame his doubtless erroneous ideas about the world, and
give him leave to prove their correctness to you, you will have set
in motion a process which is worthy to be called education; for it
will constitute a genuine matching of theory with theory in his mind,
a real training in inductive logic, and what conclusions he reaches
will be truly his. When he sees in a familiar sunset, as he will see
with a newly fascinated eye, the edge of the earth swinging up past
the sun--then astronomy will be real to him, and full of meaning--and
not a collection of dull facts that must be remembered against
examination-day.
“This means that we must treat children as our equals. Education must
embody a democratic relationship between adults and children. Children
must be granted freedom of opinion--and freedom of opinion means
nothing except the freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are
persuaded of a right one. They, moreover, must be the judges of what
constitutes persuasion. You have asked me for practical and concrete
suggestions in regard to education. I will make this one before I go:
when I find an astronomy class in the first grade engaged in earnest
debate as to whether the earth is round or flat, I will know that our
school system has begun to be concerned for the first time with the
inculcation of a love of truth. For, like Milton, I can not praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never
sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where
that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.--I
thank you for your attention!”