And so we come to Goodness--and at the same time to a change in our
program. After calling on the Artist as an expert to testify in regard
to Beauty, and the Philosopher to tell us about Truth, it would seem
that we should hear about Goodness from a moralist. So, no doubt,
you expected--and so I had originally intended. But it cannot have
failed to secure your notice that our experts pursued a somewhat
unconventional line of argument. The Artist told us that the way to
teach children to love Beauty was to leave them free to hate it if they
chose. The Philosopher said that the way to inculcate in children a
love of Truth was to leave them free to hold wrong opinions. Now it is
all very well to talk that way about Beauty and Truth. We might perhaps
be persuaded to take such risks, so long as only Beauty and Truth were
involved. But Goodness is a different matter. It simply would not do
for us to hear any one who proposed a similar course in regard to
conduct. Imagine any one suggesting that the way to teach children to
be good is to leave them free to be bad! But that is just what I am
afraid would happen if we called an expert on Morals to the stand. I
have observed twenty or thirty of them shuffling their notes and their
feet and waiting to be called on. But I do not trust them. No! Goodness
is not going to be treated in so irreverent a fashion while I am
running this discussion. I am going to see that this subject is treated
with becoming reverence. And as the only way of making absolutely sure
of this, I am going to address you myself.
We want children to grow up to be good men and women; and we want to
know how the school can assist in this process. First, we must define
goodness; and I shall suggest the rough outline of such a definition,
which we must presently fill up in detail, by saying that goodness
is living a really civilized life. And as one’s conduct is not to
be measured or judged except as it affects others, we may say that
goodness is a matter of civilized relationships between persons.
And furthermore, as the two most important things in life are its
preservation and perpetuation, the two fields of conduct in which it is
most necessary to be civilized are Work and Love. Let us first deal
with Work and find out what constitutes civilized conduct in that field.
We all exist, as we are accustomed to remind ourselves, in a world
where one must work in order to live. That, in a broad sense, is true;
but there are certain classes of persons exempt from any such actual
compulsion; and with respect to almost any specific individual outside
of those classes, it is generally possible for him to escape from that
compulsion if he chooses. Take any one of us here; you, for instance.
If you really and truly did not want to work, you could find a way to
avoid it; you could get your wife or your mother to support you by
taking in washing or doing stenography--or, if they refused, you could
manage to become the victim of some accident which would disable you
from useful labor and enable you to spend your days peacefully in an
institution. But you prefer to work; and the fact is that you like
work. You are unhappy because you don’t get a chance to do the work you
could do best, or because you have not yet found the work you can do
well; but you have energies which demand expression in work. And if you
turn to the classes which are exempt from any compulsion to work, you
find the rich expending their energies either in the same channels as
everybody else, or organizing their play until its standards of effort
are as exacting as those of work; you find women who are supported by
their husbands rebelling against the imprisonment of the idle home, and
seeking in all directions for employment of their energies; and as for
the third class of those who do not have to work in order to live, we
find that even idiots are happier when set at basket-weaving.
If we attempt to moralize upon the basis of these facts, we arrive at
a conclusion something like this: it is right to use one’s energies in
organized effort--the more highly organized the better. And if we ask
what is the impulse or trait or quality which makes people turn from
an easy to a hard life, from loafing to sport, from sport to work, and
which makes them contemptuous of each other and of themselves if they
neglect an opportunity or evade a challenge to go into something still
harder and more exacting--if we ask what it is that despite all our
pretensions of laziness pushes us up more and more difficult paths of
effort, we are obliged to call it Enterprise.
And when we face the fact that Enterprise is a love of difficulties
for their own sake, we realize that the normal human being has, within
certain limits, a pleasure in pain: for it is painful to run a race,
to learn a language, to write a sonnet, to put through a deal--and
pleasurable precisely because it is, within these limits, painful. If
it is too easy, there is no fun in it. The extremer sorts of enterprise
we call courage and heroism. But though we admire the fireman who
risks his life in a burning building, we would not admire the man who
deliberately set fire to his own bed in order to suffer the pangs of
torture by fire; nor, although we admire the airmen who come down
frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud a man who locked himself
in a refrigerator over the week-end in order to suffer the torture of
great cold. We would feel, in both these hypothetical cases, that there
was no relevancy of their action to the world of reality. But upon this
point our emotions are after all uncertain. We do not begrudge applause
to the football-star who is carried from the field with a broken
collar-bone, or to the movie-star who drives a motor-car off a cliff
into the sea, though it is quite clear that these actions are relevant
to and significant in the world of fantasy rather than the world of
reality. What it comes down to is the intelligibility of the action.
Does it relate to any world, of reality or of fantasy, which we can
understand, which has any significance for us?
When we turn to the child, we find that normally he has no lack of
enterprise. But his enterprise is relevant to a world of childish
dreaming to which we have lost the key. His activities are largely
meaningless to us--that is why we are so annoyed by them. And, in the
same way, our kinds of enterprise are largely meaningless to him.
That is why he usually objects so strongly to lessons and tasks. They
interrupt and interfere with the conduct of his own affairs. He is as
outraged at having to stop his play to put a shovelful of coal on the
furnace, as a sober business man would be at being compelled, by some
strange and tyrannical infantile despotism, to stop dictating letters
and join, at some stated hour, in a game of ring-around-the-rosy. Most
of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion
against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism into their
lives.
Nevertheless, it is our adult world that they are going to have to
live in, and they must learn to live in it. And it is true, moreover,
that much of their enterprise is capable of finding as satisfactory
employment in what we term the world of reality as in their world of
dreams. What we commonly do, however, is to convince them by punishment
and scolding that our world of reality is unpleasant. What we ought to
do is to make it more agreeable, more interesting, more fascinating,
than their world of dreams. Our friend the Artist has already told us
how this may be done, and our friend the Philosopher has given some
oblique hints on the same subject. I merely note here that the school
is the place in which the transition from the world of dreams to the
world of realities may be best effected.
But there are various kinds of enterprise in our adult world. It is
undoubtedly enterprising to hold up a pay-train, a la Jesse James.
But though when the act involves real daring, we cannot withhold an
instinctive admiration, yet we know that it is wrong. Why wrong?
Because such acts disorganize and discourage, and if unchecked would
ruin, the whole elaborate system of enterprise by which such trains
are despatched and such money earned. It is obvious that train-robbery
and wage-labor cannot fairly compete with one another; that if
train-robbery goes on long enough, nobody will do wage-labor, and there
will eventually cease to be pay-trains to rob. The law does not take
cognizance of these reasons, but punishes train-robbery as a crime
against property. Yet if we look into the matter for a moment, we
realize that loyalty to any property system ultimately rests upon the
conviction that its destruction would result in the total frustration
of the finer sorts of human enterprise; it is for this reason that
conservative people always persuade themselves that any change in the
economic arrangements of society, from a new income-tax to communism,
is a kind of train-robbery, bound to end in universal piracy and ruin.
And this moral indignation, whether in any given instance appropriate
or not--or whether, as in the case of many piratical kinds of business
enterprise, left for long in abeyance--is the next step in our human
morality. If we ask ourselves, why should not human enterprise turn
into a welter of primitive piracy, with all the robbers robbing each
other, we are compelled to answer that in the long run it would not be
interesting. For, although destruction is temporarily more exciting,
it is only construction that is permanently interesting. And if we ask
why it is more interesting, we find that it is because it is harder. It
is too easy to destroy. Destruction may be occasionally a good thing,
as a tonic, something to give to individuals or populations a sense of
power; but their most profound instinct is toward creation.
But the child, by reason of the primitive stage of his development,
tends to engage rather more enthusiastically in destruction as a
mode of enterprise than in creation. He tires of building, and it
is a question whether or not the pleasure he takes in knocking over
his houses of blocks does not exceed his pleasure in building them.
He prefers playing at hunting and war to playing at keeping house.
And his imagination responds more readily to the robber-exploits of
Robin Hood than to the Stories of Great Inventors. This is a fact,
but it need not discourage us. What is necessary is for him to learn
the interestingness of creation. If what he builds is not a house of
blocks on the nursery floor, but a wigwam in the woods, his destructive
energies are likely to be satisfied in cutting down the saplings with
which to build it. This simply means that his destructive energies have
become subordinated to his constructive ones, as they are in adult
life. But they cannot become so subordinated until what he constructs
is wholly the result of his own wishes, and until moreover it is more
desirable as the starting-point of new creative activities than as
something to destroy. Those conditions are fulfilled whenever a group
of children play together and have free access to the materials with
which to construct. And that is what the school is for--to provide
the materials, and the freedom, and be the home of a process by which
children learn that it is more fun to create than to destroy.