great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in
putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the
most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation,
pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it
theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at
from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education.
Its processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and if a man were not
somebody, if he were only a sample of the race, this would be the
perfect education. As all wild beasts, all fish and insects of the same
genus and species have the same markings, so we should all be identical,
having the same tastes, the same language, the same beliefs, the same
tendencies. But man is not simply a specimen of the race, and for that
reason this sort of education is far from being simple in its results.
Men so vary from one another, that numberless methods have to be
invented to repress, stupefy, and extinguish individual thought. And one
never arrives at it then but in part, a fact which is continually
deranging everything. At each moment, by some fissure, some interior
force of initiative is making a violent way to the light, producing
explosions, upheavals, all sorts of grave disorders. And where there are
no outward manifestations, the evil lies dormant; beneath apparent order
are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made by an abnormal existence, apathy,
death.
The system is evil which produces such fruit, and however simple it may
appear, in reality it brings forth all possible complications.
* * * * *
The other system is the extreme opposite, that of bringing up children
for themselves. The rôles are reversed: the parents are there for the
child. No sooner is he born than he becomes the center. White-headed
grandfather and stalwart father bow before these curls. His lisping is
their law. A sign from him suffices. If he cries in the night, no
fatigue is of account, the whole household must be roused. The new-comer
is not long in discovering his omnipotence, and before he can walk he is
drunken with it. As he grows older all this deepens and broadens.
Parents, grandparents, servants, teachers, everybody is at his command.
He accepts the homage and even the immolation of his neighbor: he treats
like a rebellious subject anyone who does not step out of his path.
There is only himself. He is the unique, the perfect, the infallible.
Too late it is perceived that all this has been evolving a master; and
what a master! forgetful of sacrifices, without respect, even pity. He
no longer has any regard for those to whom he owes everything, and he
goes through life without law or check.
This education, too, has its social counterpart. It flourishes wherever
the past does not count, where history begins with the living, where
there is no tradition, no discipline, no reverence; where those who know
the least make the most noise; where those who stand for public order
are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great
outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory
passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two
educations--one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the
individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of
the new--and I find them equally baneful. But the most disastrous of all
is the combination of the two, which produces human beings
half-automatons, half-despots, forever vacillating between the spirit
of a sheep and the spirit of revolt or domination.
Children should be educated neither for themselves nor for their
parents: for man is no more designed to be a personage than a specimen.
They should be educated for life. The aim of their education is to aid
them to become active members of humanity, brotherly forces, free
servants of the civil organization. To follow a method of education
inspired by any other principle, is to complicate life, deform it, sow
the seeds of all disorders.
When we would sum up in a phrase the destiny of the child, the word
future springs to our lips. The child is the future. This word says
all--the sufferings of the past, the stress of to-day, hope. But when
the education of the child begins, he is incapable of estimating the
reach of this word; for he is held by impressions of the present. Who
then shall give him the first enlightenment and put him in the way he
should go? The parents, the teachers. And with very little reflection
they perceive that their work does not interest simply themselves and
the child, but that they represent and administer impersonal powers and
interests. The child should continually appear to them as a future
citizen. With this ruling idea, they will take thought for two things
that complement each other--for the initial and personal force which is
germinating in the child, and for the social destination of this force.
At no moment of their direction over him can they forget that this
little being confided to their care must become _himself_ and a
_brother_. These two conditions, far from excluding each other, never
exist apart. It is impossible to be brotherly, to love, to give one's
self, unless one is master of himself; and reciprocally, none can
possess himself, comprehend his own individual being, until he has first
made his way through the outward accidents of his existence, down to the
profound springs of life where man feels himself one with other men in
all that is most intimately his own.
To aid a child to become himself and a brother it is necessary to
protect him against the violent and destructive action of the forces of
disorder. These forces are exterior and interior. Every child is menaced
from without not only by material dangers but by the meddlesomeness of
alien wills; and from within, by an exaggerated idea of his own
personality and all the fancies it breeds. There is a great outward
danger which may come from the abuse of power in educators. The right of
might finds itself a place in education with extreme facility. To
educate another, one must have renounced this right, that is to say,
made abnegation of the inferior sentiment of personal importance, which
transforms us into the enemies of others, even of our own children. Our
authority is beneficent only when it is inspired by one higher than our
own. In this case it is not only salutary, but also indispensable, and
becomes in its turn the best guarantee against the greater peril which
threatens the child from within--that of exaggerating his own
importance. At the beginning of life the vividness of personal
impressions is so great, that to establish an equilibrium, they must be
submitted to the gentle influence of a calm and superior will. The true
quality of the office of educator is to represent this will to the
child, in a manner as continuous and as disinterested as possible.
Educators, then, stand for all that is to be respected in the world.
They give to the child impressions of that which precedes it, outruns
it, envelops it: but they do not crush it; on the contrary, their will
and all the influence they transmit, become elements nutritive of its
native energy. Such use of authority as this, cultivates that fruitful
obedience out of which free souls are born. The purely personal
authority of parents, masters and institutions is to the child like the
brushwood beneath which the young plant withers and dies. Impersonal
authority, the authority of a man who has first submitted himself to the
time-honored realities before which he wishes the individual fancy of
the child to bend, resembles pure and luminous air. True it has an
activity, and influences us in its manner, but it nourishes our
individuality and gives it firmness and stability. Without this
authority there is no education. To watch, to guide, to keep a firm
hand--such is the function of the educator. He should appear to the
child not like a barrier of whims, which, if need be, one may clear,
provided the leap be proportioned to the height of the obstacle; but
like a transparent wall through which may be seen unchanging realities,
laws, limits, and truths against which no action is possible. Thus
arises respect, which is the faculty of conceiving something greater
than ourselves--respect, which broadens us and frees us by making us
more modest. This is the law of education for simplicity. It may be
summed up in these words: to make _free_ and _reverential_ men, who
shall be _individual_ and _fraternal_.
* * * * *
Let us draw from this principle some practical applications.
From the very fact that the child is the future, he must be linked to
the past by piety. We owe it to him to clothe tradition in the forms
most practical and most fit to create a deep impression: whence the
exceptional place that should be given in education to the ancients, to
the cult of remembrance of the past, and by extension, to the history of
the domestic rooftree. Above all do we fulfil a duty toward our children
when we give the place of honor to the grandparents. Nothing speaks to a
child with so much force, or so well develops his modesty, as to see his
father and mother, on all occasions, preserve toward an old grandfather,
often infirm, an attitude of respect. It is a perpetual object lesson
that is irresistible. That it may have its full force, it is necessary
for a tacit understanding to obtain among all the grown-up members of
the family. To the child's eyes they must all be in league, held to
mutual respect and understanding, under penalty of compromising their
educational authority. And in their number must be counted the servants.
Servants are big people, and the same sentiment of respect is injured in
the child's disregard of them as in his disregard of his father or
grandfather. The moment he addresses an impolite or arrogant word to a
person older than himself, he strays from the path that a child ought
never to quit; and if only occasionally the parents neglect to point
this out, they will soon perceive by his conduct toward themselves, that
the enemy has found entrance to his heart.
We mistake if we think that a child is naturally alien to respect,
basing this opinion on the very numerous examples of irreverence which
he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral
being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire
something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets
corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion and mutual deference, we, the
grown-ups, discredit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and that of
everything worthy of respect. We inoculate in him a bad spirit whose
effects then turn against us.
This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more force than in the relations
between masters and servants, as we have made them. Our social errors,
our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back upon the heads of our
children. There are certainly few people of the middle classes who
understand that it is better to part with many thousands of dollars than
to lead their children to lose respect for servants, who represent in
our households the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strictly as
you will conventions and distances,--that demarkation of social
frontiers which permits each one to remain in his place and to observe
the law of differences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, but on
condition of never forgetting that those who serve us are men and women
like ourselves. You require of your domestics certain formulas of speech
and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the respect they owe you. Do
you also teach your children and use yourselves manners toward your
servants which show them that you respect their dignity as individuals,
as you desire them to respect yours? Here we have continually in our
homes an excellent ground for experiment in the practice of that mutual
respect which is one of the essential conditions of social sanity. I
fear we profit by it too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but
we fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case that we get only
hypocrisy and this supplementary result, all unexpected,--the
cultivation of pride in our children. These two factors combined heap up
great difficulties for that future which we ought to be safeguarding. I
am right then in saying that the day when by your own practices you have
brought about the lessening of respect in your children, you have
suffered a sensible loss.
Why should I not say it? It seems to me that the greater part of us
labor for this loss. On all sides, in almost every social rank, I notice
that a pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of reciprocal
contempt. Here, those who have calloused hands and working-clothes are
disdained; there, it is all who do not wear blue jeans. Children
educated in this spirit make sad fellow-citizens. There is in all this
the want of that simplicity which makes it possible for men of good
intentions, of however diverse social standing, to collaborate without
any friction arising from the conventional distance that separates them.
If the spirit of caste causes the loss of respect, partisanship, of
whatever sort, is quite as productive of it. In certain quarters
children are brought up in such fashion that they respect but one
country--their own; one system of government--that of their parents and
masters; one religion--that which they have been taught. Does anyone
suppose that in this way men can be shaped who shall respect country,
religion and law? Is this a proper respect--this respect which does not
extend beyond what touches and belongs to ourselves? Strange blindness
of cliques and coteries, which arrogate to themselves with so much
ingenuous complacence the title of schools of respect, and which,
outside themselves, respect nothing. In reality they teach: "Country,
religion, law--we are all these!" Such teaching fosters fanaticism, and
if fanaticism is not the sole anti-social ferment, it is surely one of
the worst and most energetic.
* * * * *
If simplicity of heart is an essential condition of respect, simplicity
of life is its best school. Whatever be the state of your fortune, avoid
everything which could make your children think themselves more or
better than others. Though your wealth would permit you to dress them
richly, remember the evil you might do in exciting their vanity.
Preserve them from the evil of believing that to be elegantly dressed
suffices for distinction, and above all do not carelessly increase by
their clothes and their habits of life, the distance which already
separates them from other children: dress them simply. And if, on the
contrary, it would be necessary for you to economize to give your
children the pleasure of fine clothes, I would that I might dispose you
to reserve your spirit of sacrifice for a better cause. You risk seeing
it illy recompensed. You dissipate your money when it would much better
avail to save it for serious needs, and you prepare for yourself, later
on, a harvest of ingratitude. How dangerous it is to accustom your sons
and daughters to a style of living beyond your means and theirs! In the
first place, it is very bad for your purse; in the second place it
develops a contemptuous spirit in the very bosom of the family. If you
dress your children like little lords, and give them to understand that
they are superior to you, is it astonishing if they end by disdaining
you? You will have nourished at your table the declassed--a product
which costs dear and is worthless.
Any fashion of instructing children whose most evident result is to
lead them to despise their parents and the customs and activities among
which they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective for nothing but
to produce a legion of malcontents, with hearts totally estranged from
their origin, their race, their natural interests--everything, in short,
that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. Once detached from the
vigorous stock which produced them, the wind of their restless ambition
drives them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in the end be
heaped up to ferment and rot together.
Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by an evolution slow
and certain. In preparing a career for our children, let us imitate her.
Let us not confound progress and advancement with those violent
exercises called somersaults. Let us not so bring up our children that
they will come to despise work and the aspirations and simple spirit of
their fathers: let us not expose them to the temptation of being ashamed
of our poverty if they themselves come to fortune. A society is indeed
diseased when the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the fields,
when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of
working-men, in the hope of being taken for heiresses, prefer to walk
the streets alone rather than beside their honest parents. A society is
healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members applies himself to
doing very nearly what his parents have done before him, but doing it
better, and, looking to future elevation, is content first to fulfill
conscientiously more modest duties.[C]
[C] This would be the place to speak of work in general, and of its
tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the subject in my
books _Justice_, _Jeunesse_, and _Vaillanos_. I must limit myself to
referring the reader to them.
* * * * *
Education should make independent men. If you wish to train your
children for liberty, bring them up simply, and do not for a moment fear
that in so doing you are putting obstacles in the way of their
happiness. It will be quite the contrary. The more costly toys a child
has, the more feasts and curious entertainments, the less is he amused.
In this there is a sure sign. Let us be temperate in our methods of
entertaining youth, and especially let us not thoughtlessly create for
them artificial needs. Food, dress, nursery, amusements--let all these
be as natural and simple as possible. With the idea of making life
pleasant for their children, some parents bring them up in habits of
gormandizing and idleness, accustom them to sensations not meant for
their age, multiply their parties and entertainments. Sorry gifts these!
In place of a free man, you are making a slave. Gorged with luxury, he
tires of it in time; and yet when for one reason or another his
pleasures fail him, he will be miserable, and you with him: and what is
worse, perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will be ready--you
and he together--to sacrifice manly dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer
sloth.
Let us bring up our children simply, I had almost said rudely. Let us
entice them to exercise that gives them endurance--even to privations.
Let them belong to those who are better trained to fatigue and the earth
for a bed than to the comforts of the table and couches of luxury. So we
shall make men of them, independent and staunch, who may be counted on,
who will not sell themselves for pottage, and who will have withal the
faculty of being happy.
A too easy life brings with it a sort of lassitude in vital energy. One
becomes blasé, disillusioned, an old young man, past being diverted. How
many young people are in this state! Upon them have been deposited, like
a sort of mold, the traces of our decrepitude, our skepticism, our
vices, and the bad habits they have contracted in our company. What
reflections upon ourselves these youths weary of life force us to make!
What announcements are graven on their brows!
These shadows say to us by contrast that happiness lies in a life true,
active, spontaneous, ungalled by the yoke of the passions, of unnatural
needs, of unhealthy stimulus; keeping intact the physical faculty of
enjoying the light of day and the air we breathe, and in the heart, the
capacity to thrill with the love of all that is generous, simple and
fine.
* * * * *
The artificial life engenders artificial thought, and a speech little
sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact
with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a
slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is
unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood
to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural
disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is
synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's
own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how
rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the
perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for
being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck
down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything
conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people
wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of
us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons:
when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of
originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are
the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let
our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or
muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if
only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not
covered their sin.
To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our solicitude as educators.
Let us have for this comrade of childhood--a trifle uncivilized, it is
true, but so gracious and friendly!--all possible regard. We must not
frighten it away: when it has once fled, it so rarely comes back!
Ingenuousness is not simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the
individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and
educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called,
who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret
out naïve things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from
life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of
dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent
their being children at all;--as if before the ripe fruit of autumn,
flowers did not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, and all
the fairy springtime.
I ask indulgence for everything naïve and simple, not alone for the
innocent conceits that flutter round the curly heads of children, but
also for the legend, the folk song, the tales of the world of marvel and
mystery. The sense of the marvellous is in the child the first form of
that sense of the infinite without which a man is like a bird deprived
of wings. Let us not wean the child from it, but let us guard in him the
faculty of rising above what is earthy, so that he may appreciate later
on those pure and moving symbols of vanished ages wherein human truth
has found forms of expression that our arid logic will never replace.
XIV
CONCLUSION
I think I have said enough of the spirit and manifestations of the
simple life, to make it evident that there is here a whole forgotten
world of strength and beauty. He can make conquest of it who has
sufficient energy to detach himself from the fatal rubbish that trammels
our days. It will not take him long to perceive that in renouncing some
surface satisfactions and childish ambitions, he increases his faculty
of happiness and his possibilities of right judgment.