PART II

EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE

EDUCATION

AND THE

GOOD LIFE

BERTRAND RUSSELL

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BONI & LIVERIGHT

NEW YORK MCMXXVI

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY

BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

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First printing, May, 1926

Second printing, May, 1926

Third printing, June, 1926

Fourth printing, July, 1926

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 7

PART I

EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE

CHAPTER

I. POSTULATES OF MODERN EDUCATIONAL THEORY 15

II. THE AIMS OF EDUCATION 47

PART II

EDUCATION OF CHARACTER

III. THE FIRST YEAR 87

IV. FEAR 101

V. PLAY AND FANCY 123

VI. CONSTRUCTIVENESS 136

VII. SELFISHNESS AND PROPERTY 147

VIII. TRUTHFULNESS 157

IX. PUNISHMENT 166

X. IMPORTANCE OF OTHER CHILDREN 178

XI. AFFECTION AND SYMPATHY 187

XII. SEX EDUCATION 209

XIII. THE NURSERY-SCHOOL 224

PART III

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION

XIV. GENERAL PRINCIPLES 239

XV. THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM BEFORE FOURTEEN 261

XVI. LAST SCHOOL YEARS 278

XVII. DAY SCHOOLS AND BOARDING SCHOOLS 292

XVIII. THE UNIVERSITY 301

XIX. CONCLUSION 314

INTRODUCTION

There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author,

have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as

possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of most existing

educational institutions. The difficulties of such parents are not

soluble by any effort on the part of isolated individuals. It is of

course possible to bring up children at home by means of governesses

and tutors, but this plan deprives them of the companionship which

their nature craves, and without which some essential elements of

education must be lacking. Moreover it is extremely bad for a boy or

girl to be made to feel “odd” and different from other boys and girls:

this feeling, when traced to parents as its cause, is almost certain to

rouse resentment against them, leading to a love of all that they most

dislike. The conscientious parent may be driven by these considerations

to send his boys and girls to schools in which he sees grave defects,

merely because no existing schools seem to him satisfactory--or, if any

are satisfactory, they are not in his neighbourhood. Thus the cause of

educational reform is forced upon conscientious parents, not only for

the good of the community, but also for the good of their own children.

If the parents are well-to-do, it is not necessary to the solution of

their private problem that _all_ schools should be good, but only that

there should be some good school geographically available. But for

wage-earning parents nothing suffices except reform in the elementary

schools. As one parent will object to the reforms which another parent

desires, nothing will serve except an energetic educational propaganda,

which is not likely to prove effective until long after the reformer’s

children are grown up. Thus from love for our own children we are

driven, step by step, into the wider sphere of politics and philosophy.

From this wider sphere I desire, in the following pages, to remain

aloof as far as possible. The greater part of what I have to say will

not be dependent upon the views that I may happen to hold as regards

the major controversies of our age. But _complete_ independence in

this regard is impossible. The education we desire for our children

must depend upon our ideals of human character, and our hopes as to

the part they are to play in the community. A pacifist will not desire

for his children the education which seems good to a militarist; the

educational outlook of a communist will not be the same as that

of an individualist. To come to a more fundamental cleavage: there

can be no agreement between those who regard education as a means

of instilling certain definite beliefs and those who think that it

should produce the power of independent judgment. Where such issues

are relevant, it would be idle to shirk them. At the same time, there

is a considerable body of new knowledge in psychology and pedagogy

which is independent of these ultimate questions, and has an intimate

bearing on education. Already it has produced very important results,

but a great deal remains to be done before its teachings have been

fully assimilated. This is especially true of the first five years of

life; these have been found to have an importance far greater than that

formerly attributed to them, which involves a corresponding increase

in the educational importance of parents. My aim and purpose, wherever

possible, will be to avoid controversial issues. Polemical writing is

necessary in some spheres; but in addressing parents one may assume

a sincere desire for the welfare of their offspring, and this alone,

in conjunction with modern knowledge, suffices to decide a very large

number of educational problems. What I have to say is the outcome of

perplexities in regard to my own children; it is therefore not remote

or theoretical, and may, I hope, help to clarify the thoughts of other

parents faced with a like perplexity, whether in the way of agreement

with my conclusions or the opposite. The opinions of parents are

immensely important, because, for lack of expert knowledge, parents are

too often a drag upon the best educationists. If parents desire a good

education for their children, there will, I am convinced, be no lack of

teachers willing and able to give it.

I propose, in what follows, to consider first the aims of education:

the kind of individuals, and the kind of community, that we may

reasonably hope to see produced by education applied to raw material

of the present quality. I ignore the question of the improvement

of the breed, whether by eugenics or by any other process, natural

or artificial, since this is essentially outside the problems

of education. But I attach great weight to modern psychological

discoveries which tend to show that character is determined by early

education to a much greater extent than was thought by the most

enthusiastic educationists of former generations. I distinguish between

education of character and education in knowledge, which may be called

instruction in the strict sense. The distinction is useful, though

not ultimate: some virtues are required in a pupil who is to become

instructed, and much knowledge is required for the successful practice

of many important virtues. For purposes of discussion, however,

instruction can be kept apart from education of character. I shall deal

first with education of character, because it is especially important

in early years; but I shall carry it through to adolescence, and deal,

under this head, with the important question of sex education. Finally,

I shall discuss intellectual education, its aims, its curriculum, and

its possibilities, from the first lessons in reading and writing to

the end of the university years. The further education which men and

women derive from life and the world I shall regard as lying outside my

scope; but to make men and women capable of learning from experience

should be one of the aims which early education should keep most

prominently in view.

PART I

EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE

EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE

CHAPTER I

POSTULATES OF MODERN EDUCATIONAL THEORY

In reading even the best treatises on education written in former

times, one becomes aware of certain changes that have come over

educational theory. The two great reformers of educational theory

before the nineteenth century were Locke and Rousseau. Both deserved

their reputation, for both repudiated many errors which were

wide-spread when they wrote. But neither went as far in his own

direction as almost all modern educationists go. Both, for example,

belong to the tendency which led to liberalism and democracy; yet

both consider only the education of an aristocratic boy, to which one

man’s whole time is devoted. However excellent might be the results

of such a system, no man with a modern outlook would give it serious

consideration, because it is arithmetically impossible for every child

to absorb the whole time of an adult tutor. The system is therefore

one which can only be employed by a privileged caste; in a just world,

its existence would be impossible. The modern man, though he may seek

special advantages for his own children in practice, does not consider

the theoretical problem solved except by some method of education

which could be open to all, or at least to all whose capacities render

them capable of profiting by it. I do not mean that the well-to-do

should, here and now, forego educational opportunities which, in the

existing world, are not open to all. To do that would be to sacrifice

civilization to justice. What I do mean is that the educational system

we must aim at producing in the future is one which gives to every boy

and girl an opportunity for the best that exists. The ideal system of

education must be democratic, although that ideal is not immediately

attainable. This, I think, would, nowadays, be pretty generally

conceded. In this sense, I shall keep democracy in view. Whatever

I shall advocate will be capable of being universal, though the

individual should not meantime sacrifice his children to the badness

of what is common, if he has the intelligence and the opportunity to

secure something better. Even this very attenuated form of democratic

principle is absent from the treatises of Locke and Rousseau. Although

the latter was a disbeliever in aristocracy, he never perceived the

implications of his disbelief where education was concerned.

This matter of democracy and education is one as to which clarity

is important. It would be disastrous to insist upon a dead level of

uniformity. Some boys and girls are cleverer than others, and can

derive more benefit from higher education. Some teachers have been

better trained or have more native aptitude than others, but it is

impossible that everybody should be taught by the few best teachers.

Even if the highest education were desirable for all, which I doubt,

it is impossible that all should have it at present, and therefore a

crude application of democratic principles might lead to the conclusion

that none should have it. Such a view, if adopted, would be fatal to

scientific progress, and would make the general level of education a

hundred years hence needlessly low. Progress should not be sacrificed

to a mechanical equality at the present moment; we must approach

educational democracy carefully, so as to destroy in the process as

little as possible of the valuable products that happen to have been

associated with social injustice.

But we cannot regard a method of education as satisfactory if it is one

which could not possibly be universal. The children of rich people

often have, in addition to their mother, a nurse, a nurserymaid,

and a share in the other domestic servants; this involves an amount

of attention which could never, in any social system, be given to

all children. It is very doubtful whether carefully tended children

really gain by being made unnecessarily parasitic, but in any case

no impartial person can recommend special advantages for the few,

except for special reasons, such as feeble-mindedness or genius. The

wise parent, at the present day, is likely to choose, if he can, some

method of education for his children which is not in fact universal,

and for the sake of experiment it is desirable that parents should

have the opportunity of trying new methods. But they ought to be such

as could be made universal, if found to produce good results, not

such as must from their very nature be confined to a privileged few.

Fortunately, some of the best elements in modern educational theory

and practice have had an extremely democratic origin; for example,

Madame Montessori’s work began with nursery-schools in slums. In

higher education, exceptional opportunity for exceptional ability is

indispensable, but otherwise there is no reason why any child should

suffer from the adoption of systems which might be adopted by all.

There is another modern tendency in education, which is connected

with democracy, but perhaps somewhat more open to question--I mean

the tendency to make education useful rather than ornamental. The

connection of the ornamental with aristocracy has been set forth

searchingly in Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”, but it is

only the educational aspect of this connection that concerns us. In

male education, the matter is bound up with the controversy between

a classical and a “modern” education; in the education of girls,

it is part of the conflict between the ideal of the “gentlewoman”

and the desire to train girls to be self-supporting. But the whole

educational problem, where women are concerned, has been distorted by

the desire for sex equality: there has been an attempt to acquire the

same education as that given to boys, even where it was by no means

good in itself. Consequently women educators have aimed at giving to

their girls such “useless” knowledge as is given to boys of the same

class, and have been bitter opponents of the notion that some part

of female education should be a technical training for motherhood.

These cross-currents make the tendency that I am considering in some

respects less definite where women are concerned, though the decay of

the ideal of the “fine lady” is one of the most noteworthy examples of

the tendency. In order to avoid confusing the issue, I shall for the

moment confine myself to male education.

Many separate controversies, in all of which other questions arise, are

in part dependent upon our present question. Should boys learn mainly

classics or mainly science? Among other considerations, one is that the

classics are ornamental and science is useful. Should education as soon

as possible become technical instruction for some trade or profession?

Again the controversy between the useful and the ornamental is

relevant, though not decisive. Should children be taught to enunciate

correctly and to have pleasant manners, or are these mere relics of

aristocracy? Is appreciation of art a thing of any value except in

the artist? Should spelling be phonetic? All these and many other

controversies are argued in part in terms of the controversy between

the useful and the ornamental.

Nevertheless, I believe the whole controversy to be unreal. As soon

as the terms are defined, it melts away. If we interpret “useful”

broadly and “ornamental” narrowly, the one side has it; in the contrary

interpretation, the other side has it. In the widest and most correct

sense of the word, an activity is “useful” when it has good results.

And these results must be “good” in some other sense than merely

“useful”, or else we have no true definition. We cannot say that a

useful activity is one which has useful results. The essence of what

is “useful” is that it ministers to some result which is not merely

useful. Sometimes a long chain of results is necessary before the final

result is reached which can be called simply “good”. A plough is useful

because it breaks up the ground. But breaking up the ground is not good

on its own account: it is in turn merely useful because it enables seed

to be sown. This is useful because it produces grain, which is useful

because it produces bread, which is useful because it preserves life.

But life must be capable of some intrinsic value: if life were merely

useful as a means to other life, it would not be useful at all. Life

may be good or bad according to circumstances; it may therefore also be

useful, when it is a means to good life. Somewhere we must get beyond

the chain of successive utilities, and find a peg from which the chain

is to hang; if not, there is no real usefulness in any link of the

chain. When “useful” is defined in this way, there can be no question

whether education should be useful. Of course it should, since the

process of educating is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But

that is not quite what the advocates of utility in education have in

mind. What they are urging is that the _result_ of education should be

useful: put crudely, they would say that an educated man is a man who

knows how to make machines. If we ask what is the use of machines, the

answer is ultimately that they produce necessaries and comforts for the

body--food, clothing, houses, etc. Thus we find that the advocate of

utility, in the sense in which his view is questionable, is a man who

attaches intrinsic value only to physical satisfactions: the “useful”,

for him, is that which helps us to gratify the needs and desires of

the body. When this is what is really meant, the advocate of utility

is certainly in the wrong if he is enunciating an ultimate philosophy,

though in a world where many people are starving he may be right as

a politician, since the satisfaction of physical needs may be at the

moment more urgent than anything else.

Much the same sort of dissection is necessary in considering the other

side of this controversy. To call the other side “ornamental” is, of

course, to concede a point to the advocate of utility, since “ornament”

is understood to be more or less trivial. The epithet “ornamental”

is quite justified as applied to the traditional conception of a

“gentleman” or a “lady”. The eighteenth-century gentleman spoke with a

refined accent, quoted the classics on appropriate occasions, dressed

in the fashion, understood punctilio and knew when a duel would

advance his reputation. There is a man in “The Rape of the Lock” who was

of amber snuff-box justly vain,

And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.

His education had been ornamental in the narrowest sense, and in our

age few of us are rich enough to be content with his accomplishments.

The ideal of an “ornamental” education in the old sense is

aristocratic: it presupposes a class with plenty of money and no need

to work. Fine gentlemen and fine ladies are charming to contemplate in

history; their memoirs and their country houses give us a certain kind

of pleasure which we no longer provide for our posterity. But their

excellences, even when real, were by no means supreme, and they were an

incredibly expensive product: Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” gives a vivid idea

of the price that was paid for them. No one nowadays would advocate an

ornamental education in this narrow sense.

But that is not the real issue. The real issue is: should we, in

education, aim at filling the mind with knowledge which has direct

practical utility, or should we try to give our pupils mental

possessions which are good on their own account? It is useful to know

that there are twelve inches in a foot, and three feet in a yard,

but this knowledge has no intrinsic value; to those who live where

the metric system is in use, it is utterly worthless. To appreciate

“Hamlet”, on the other hand, will not be much use in practical life,

except in those rare cases where a man is called upon to kill his

uncle; but it gives a man a mental possession which he would be sorry

to be without, and makes him in some sense a more excellent human

being. It is this latter sort of knowledge that is preferred by the man

who argues that utility is not the sole aim of education.

There appear to be three different substantial issues wrapped up in

the debate between advocates of a utilitarian education and their

opponents. There is first a form of the debate between aristocrats

and democrats, the former holding that the privileged class should be

taught to employ its leisure in ways that are agreeable to itself,

while the subordinate class should be taught to employ its labour in

ways that are useful to others. The opposition of the democrats to

this view tends to be somewhat confused: they dislike the teaching of

what is useless to the aristocrat, and at the same time argue that

the wage-earner’s education should not be confined to what is useful.

Thus we find a democratic opposition to the old-fashioned classical

education in the public schools, combined with a democratic demand

that working men should have opportunities for learning Latin and

Greek. This attitude, even though it may imply some lack of theoretical

clarity, is on the whole right in practice. The democrat does not

wish to divide the community into two sections, one useful and one

ornamental; he will therefore give more merely useful knowledge to

the hitherto merely ornamental classes, and more merely delightful

knowledge to the hitherto merely useful classes. But democracy, _per

se_, does not decide the proportions in which these ingredients should

be mixed.

The second issue is between men who aim only at material goods and

men who care for mental delights. Most modern well-to-do Englishmen

and Americans, if they were transported by magic into the age of

Elizabeth, would wish themselves back in the modern world. The society

of Shakespeare and Raleigh and Sir Philip Sydney, the exquisite

music, the beauty of the architecture would not console them for the

absence of bath-rooms, tea and coffee, motor-cars, and other material

comforts of which that age was ignorant. Such men, except in so far

as they are influenced by conservative tradition, tend to think that

the main purpose of education is to increase the number and variety of

commodities produced. They may include medicine and hygiene, but they

will not feel any enthusiasm for literature or art or philosophy.

Undoubtedly such men have provided a great part of the driving force

for the attack upon the classical curriculum established at the

renaissance.

I do not think it would be fair to meet this attitude by the mere

assertion that mental goods are of more value than such as are purely

physical. I believe this assertion to be true, but not the whole truth.

For, while physical goods have no very high value, physical evils may

be so bad as to outweigh a great deal of mental excellence. Starvation

and disease, and the ever-present fear of them, have overshadowed the

lives of the great majority of mankind since foresight first became

possible. Most birds die of starvation, but they are happy when food

is abundant, because they do not think about the future. Peasants

who have survived a famine will be perpetually haunted by memory and

apprehension. Men are willing to toil long hours for a pittance rather

than die, while animals prefer to snatch pleasure when it is available,

even if death is the penalty. It has thus come about that most men have

put up with a life almost wholly devoid of pleasure, because on any

other terms life would be brief. For the first time in history, it is

now possible, owing to the industrial revolution and its by-products,

to create a world where everybody shall have a reasonable chance of

happiness. Physical evil can, if we choose, be reduced to very small

proportions. It would be possible, by organization and science, to

feed and house the whole population of the world, not luxuriously, but

sufficiently to prevent great suffering. It would be possible to combat

disease, and to make chronic ill-health very rare. It would be possible

to prevent the increase of population from outrunning improvements in

the food supply. The great terrors which have darkened the subconscious

mind of the race, bringing cruelty, oppression, and war in their train,

could be so much diminished as to be no longer important. All this

is of such immeasurable value to human life that we dare not oppose

the sort of education which will tend to bring it about. In such an

education, applied science will have to be the chief ingredient.

Without physics and physiology and psychology, we cannot build the

new world. We can build it without Latin and Greek, without Dante and

Shakespeare, without Bach and Mozart. That is the great argument in

favour of a utilitarian education. I have stated it strongly, because I

feel it strongly. Nevertheless, there is another side to the question.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one

remembers how to use them? The war against physical evil, like every

other war, must not be conducted with such fury as to render men

incapable of the arts of peace. What the world possesses of ultimate

good must not be allowed to perish in the struggle against evil.

This brings me to the third issue involved in our controversy. Is it

true that only useless knowledge is intrinsically valuable? Is it true

that any intrinsically valuable knowledge is useless? For my part, I

spent in youth a considerable proportion of my time upon Latin and

Greek, which I now consider to have been almost completely wasted.

Classical knowledge afforded me no help whatever in any of the problems

with which I was concerned in later life. Like ninety-nine per cent

of those who are taught the classics, I never acquired sufficient

proficiency to read them for pleasure. I learned such things as the

genitive of “supellex”, which I have never been able to forget. This

knowledge has no more intrinsic value than the knowledge that there

are three feet to a yard; and its utility, to me, has been strictly

confined to affording me the present illustration. On the other hand,

what I learned of mathematics and science has been not only of immense

utility, but also of great intrinsic value, as affording subjects of

contemplation and reflection, and touchstones of truth in a deceitful

world. This is, of course, in part a personal idiosyncrasy; but I

am sure that a capacity to profit by the classics is a still rarer

idiosyncrasy among modern men. France and Germany also have valuable

literatures; their languages are easily learnt, and are useful in many

practical ways. The case for French and German, as against Latin and

Greek, is therefore overwhelming. Without belittling the importance of

the sort of knowledge which has no immediate practical utility, I think

we may fairly demand that, except in the education of specialists,

such knowledge shall be given in ways that do not demand an immense

expenditure of time and energy on technical apparatus such as grammar.

The sum of human knowledge and the complexity of human problems are

perpetually increasing; therefore every generation must overhaul its

educational methods if time is to be found for what is new. We must

preserve the balance by means of compromises. The humanistic elements

in education must remain, but they must be sufficiently simplified to

leave room for the other elements without which the new world rendered

possible by science can never be created.

I do not wish to suggest that the humanistic elements in education are

less important than the utilitarian elements. To know something of

great literature, something of world history, something of music and

painting and architecture, is essential if the life of imagination is

to be fully developed. And it is only through imagination that men

become aware of what the world might be; without it, “progress” would

become mechanical and trivial. But science, also, can stimulate the

imagination. When I was a boy, astronomy and geology did more for me

in this respect than the literatures of England, France and Germany,

many of whose masterpieces I read under compulsion without the faintest

interest. This is a personal matter: one boy or girl will derive

stimulus from one source, another from another. What I suggest is that,

where a difficult technique is indispensable to the mastering of a

subject, it is better, except in training specialists, that the subject

should be useful. In the time of the renaissance, there was little

great literature in modern languages; now there is a great deal. Much

of the value of the Greek tradition can be conveyed to people who do

not know Greek; and as for the Latin tradition, its value is not really

very great. I should, therefore, where boys and girls without special

aptitudes are concerned, supply the humanistic elements of education

in ways not involving a great apparatus of learning; the difficult

part of education, in the later years, I should, as a rule, confine to

mathematics and science. But I should make exceptions wherever a strong

bent or special ability pointed in other directions. Cast-iron rules

are above all things to be avoided.

In a mechanistic civilization, there is grave danger of a crude

utilitarianism, which sacrifices the whole æsthetic side of life to

what is called “efficiency”. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I must

confess that I view with alarm the theory that language is merely a

means of communication, and not also a vehicle of beauty. This tendency

is world-wide, but naturally it has advanced in America. In a more or

less authoritative book published by the Children’s Foundation,[1] I

find some remarks on the teaching of English which seem to exemplify

the tendency I deplore. For example:

“Twenty-five years ago pupils learnt from ten to fifteen thousand

words, but as a result of investigations carried on during the past

two decades, it has been found that the typical graduate of a high

school does not need in his school work, and will not need in later

life, to spell more than three thousand words at the outside, unless

he engages in some technical pursuit, when it may be necessary for him

to master a special and technical vocabulary. The typical American in

his correspondence rarely employs more than fifteen hundred different

words; many of us never use more than half this number. In view of

these facts, the course of spelling in the schools to-day is being

constructed on the principle that the words that will be actually

used in daily life should be mastered so that they can be spelled

automatically, and the technical and unusual words that were formerly

taught but that will probably never be used are being eliminated” (p.

384).

This seems to me a most singular inversion. It is still thought that

a man should know how to spell a word he is going to use, although

Shakespeare and Milton could not spell, and the importance of spelling

is purely and solely conventional. But for this trivial purpose there

is a willingness to sacrifice the teaching of a large vocabulary,

without which it is impossible to write well, or even to understand

good writing. The important thing is not to know how to _spell_ words,

but how to _use_ them; evidently this was not taught in the days

when boys learned to spell 15,000 words but men only used 1,500. The

way to learn to _use_ words is to read some good literature often

and carefully, intensively, not extensively. But careful reading is

positively discouraged. The same book says of school-children: “They

are trained to read as rapidly as possible so that they will not be

halted in the gaining of meaning by giving attention to separate words,

since explicit awareness of separate words in one’s reading delays and

often confuses the process of interpreting the thought contained in the

reading” (p. 420). I wonder what pupils so trained would make of

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.

No doubt it will be said that the modern man has no time for such

trivialities as the appreciation of great poetry. Yet the very men who

say this are prepared to set aside a great deal of time in order to

teach young men how to kill each other scientifically. This is surely

the _reductio ad absurdum_ of a utilitarian philosophy.

So far, we have been considering what sort of knowledge should be

imparted. I come now to a different set of problems, concerned partly

with methods of teaching, partly with moral education and the training

of character. Here we are no longer concerned with politics, but with

psychology and ethics. Psychology was, until fairly lately, a merely

academic study, with very little application to practical affairs.

This is all changed now. We have, for instance, industrial psychology,

clinical psychology, educational psychology, all of the greatest

practical importance. We may hope and expect that the influence of

psychology upon our institutions will rapidly increase in the near

future. In education, at any rate, its effect has already been great

and beneficent.

Let us take first the question of “discipline”. The old idea of

discipline was simple. A child or boy was ordered to do something

he disliked, or abstain from something he liked. When he disobeyed,

he suffered physical chastisement, or, in extreme cases, solitary

confinement on bread and water. Read, for example, the chapter in “The

Fairchild Family” about how little Henry was taught Latin. He was told

that he could never hope to become a clergyman unless he learned that

language, but in spite of this argument the little boy did not apply

himself to his book as earnestly as his father desired. So he was shut

up in an attic, given only bread and water, and forbidden to speak to

his sisters, who were told that he was in disgrace and they must have

nothing to do with him. Nevertheless, one of them brought him some

food. The footman told on her, and she got into trouble too. After a

certain period in prison, the boy, we are told, began to love Latin and

worked assiduously ever after. Contrast with this Chekov’s story about

his uncle who tried to teach a kitten to catch mice. He brought a mouse

into the room where the kitten was, but the kitten’s hunting instinct

was not yet developed, and it paid no attention to the mouse. So he

beat it. The next day the same process was repeated, and the next and

the next. At last the Professor became persuaded that it was a stupid

kitten, and quite unteachable. In later life, though otherwise normal,

it could never see a mouse without sweating in terror and running away.

“Like the kitten,” Chekov concludes, “I had the honour of being taught

Latin by my uncle.” These two stories illustrate the old discipline and

the modern revolt against it.

But the modern educationist does not simply eschew discipline; he

secures it by new methods. On this subject, those who have not studied

the new methods are apt to have mistaken ideas. I had always understood

that Madame Montessori dispensed with discipline, and I had wondered

how she managed a roomful of children. On reading her own account of

her methods, I found that discipline still held an important place, and

that there was no attempt to dispense with it. On sending my little boy

of three to spend his mornings in a Montessori school, I found that he

quickly became a more disciplined human being, and that he cheerfully

acquiesced in the rules of the school. But he had no feeling whatever

of external compulsion: the rules were like the rules of a game, and

were obeyed as a means of enjoyment. The old idea was that children

could not possibly _wish_ to learn, and could only be compelled to

learn by terror. It has been found that this was entirely due to

lack of skill in pedagogy. By dividing what has to be learnt--for

instance, reading and writing--into suitable stages, every stage can

be made agreeable to the average child. And when children are doing

what they like, there is of course no reason for external discipline.

A few simple rules--no child must interfere with another child, no

child must have more than one sort of apparatus at a time--are easily

apprehended, and felt to be reasonable, so that there is no difficulty

in getting them observed. The child thus acquires self-discipline,

which consists partly of good habits, partly of the realization, in

concrete instances, that it is sometimes worth while to resist an

impulse for the sake of some ultimate gain. Everybody has always known

that it is easy to obtain this self-discipline in games, but no one had

supposed that the acquisition of knowledge could be made sufficiently

interesting to bring the same motives into operation. We now know

that this is possible, and it will come to be done, not only in the

education of infants, but at all stages. I do not pretend that it is

easy. The pedagogical discoveries involved have required genius, but

the teachers who are to apply them do not require genius. They require

only the right sort of training, together with a degree of sympathy and

patience which is by no means unusual. The fundamental idea is simple:

that the right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but

in habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than

undesirable activities. What is astonishing is the great success in

finding technical methods of embodying this idea in education. For

this, Madame Montessori deserves the highest praise.

The change in educational methods has been very much influenced by the

decay of the belief in original sin. The traditional view, now nearly

extinct, was that we are all born Children of Wrath, with a nature full

of wickedness; before there can be any good in us, we have to become

Children of Grace, a process much accelerated by frequent castigation.

Most moderns can hardly believe how much this theory influenced the

education of our fathers and grandfathers. Two quotations from the

life of Dr. Arnold by Dean Stanley will show that they are mistaken.

Dean Stanley was Dr. Arnold’s favourite pupil, the good boy Arthur in

“Tom Brown’s School Days”. He was a cousin of the present writer, who

was shown over Westminster Abbey by him as a boy. Dr. Arnold was the

great reformer of our public schools, which are viewed as one of the

glories of England, and are still conducted largely according to his

principles. In discussing Dr. Arnold, therefore, we are dealing, not

with something belonging to the remote past, but with something which

to this day is efficacious in moulding upper-class Englishmen. Dr.

Arnold diminished flogging, retaining it only for the younger boys,

and confining it, so his biographer tells us, to “moral offences, such

as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness”. But when a liberal journal

suggested that flogging was a degrading punishment, which ought to be

abolished altogether, he was amazingly indignant. He replied in print:

I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates

in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither

reasonable nor Christian, but essentially barbarian. It visited

Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening

us now with those of Jacobinism.... At an age when it is almost

impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or

faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the

degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more

adverse to the simplicity, sobriety and humbleness of mind, which are

the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood?

The pupils of his disciples, not unnaturally, believe in flogging

natives of India when they are deficient in “humbleness of mind”.

There is another passage, already quoted in part by Mr. Strachey in

“Eminent Victorians”, but so apt that I cannot forbear to quote it

again. Dr. Arnold was away on a holiday, enjoying the beauties of the

Lake of Como. The form his enjoyment took is recorded in a letter to

his wife, as follows:

It is almost awful to look at the overwhelming beauty around me, and

then think of moral evil; it seems as if heaven and hell, instead of

being separated by a great gulf from one another, were absolutely on

each other’s confines, and indeed not far from every one of us. Might

the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as my delight in external

beauty, for in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in

anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God! It is not so much to

admire moral good; that we may do, and yet not be ourselves conformed

to it; but if we really do abhor that which is evil, not the persons

in whom evil resides, but the evil which dwelleth in them, and much

more manifestly and certainly to our own knowledge, in our own

hearts--this is to have the feeling of God and of Christ, and to have

our Spirit in sympathy with the Spirit of God. Alas! how easy to see

this and say it--how hard to do it and to feel it! Who is sufficient

for these things? No one, but he who feels and really laments his

own insufficiency. God bless you, my dearest wife, and our beloved

children, now and evermore, through Christ Jesus.

It is pathetic to see this naturally kindly gentleman lashing himself

into a mood of sadism, in which he can flog little boys without

compunction, and all under the impression that he is conforming to

the religion of Love. It is pathetic when we consider the deluded

individual; but it is tragic when we think of the generations of

cruelty that he put into the world by creating an atmosphere of

abhorrence of “moral evil”, which, it will be remembered, includes

habitual idleness in children. I shudder when I think of the wars, the

tortures, the oppressions, of which upright men have been guilty, under

the impression that they were righteously castigating “moral evil”.

Mercifully, educators no longer regard little children as limbs of

Satan. There is still too much of this view in dealings with adults,

particularly in the punishment of crime; but in the nursery and the

school it has almost disappeared.

There is an opposite error to Dr. Arnold’s, far less pernicious, but

still scientifically an error, and that is the belief that children

are naturally virtuous, and are only corrupted by the spectacle of

their elders’ vices. This view is traditionally associated with

Rousseau; perhaps he held it in the abstract, but when one reads

“Emile” one finds that the pupil stood in need of much moral training

before he became the paragon that the system was designed to produce.

The fact is that children are not naturally either “good” or “bad”.

They are born with only reflexes and a few instincts; out of these,

by the action of the environment, habits are produced, which may be

either healthy or morbid. Which they are to be, depends chiefly upon

the wisdom of mothers or nurses, the child’s nature being, at first,

almost incredibly malleable. In the immense majority of children,

there is the raw material of a good citizen, and also the raw material

of a criminal. Scientific psychology shows that flogging on weekdays

and sermons on Sundays do not constitute the ideal technique for the

production of virtue. But it is not to be inferred that there is no

technique for this purpose. It is difficult to resist Samuel Butler’s

view that the educators of former times took a pleasure in torturing

children; otherwise it is hard to see how they can have persisted

so long in inflicting useless misery. It is not difficult to make a

healthy child happy, and most children will be healthy if their minds

and bodies are properly tended. Happiness in childhood is absolutely

necessary to the production of the best type of human being. Habitual

idleness, which Dr. Arnold regarded as a form of “moral evil”, will not

exist if the child is made to feel that its education is teaching it

something worth knowing.[2] But if the knowledge imparted is worthless,

and those who impart it appear as cruel tyrants, the child will

naturally behave like Chekov’s kitten. The spontaneous wish to learn,

which every normal child possesses, as shown in its efforts to walk and

talk, should be the driving force in education. The substitution of

this driving force for the rod is one of the great advances of our time.

This brings me to the last point which I wish to notice in this

preliminary survey of modern tendencies--I mean, the greater attention

paid to infancy. This is closely connected with the change in our

ideas as to the training of character. The old idea was that virtue

depends essentially upon _will_: we were supposed to be full of bad

desires, which we controlled by an abstract faculty of volition. It

was apparently regarded as impossible to root out bad desires; all we

could do was to control them. The situation was exactly analogous to

that of the criminal and the police. No one supposed that a society

without would-be criminals was possible; the most that could be done

was to have such an efficient police force that most people would be

afraid to commit crimes, and the few exceptions would be caught and

punished. The modern psychological criminologist is not content with

this view; he believes that the impulse to crime could, in most cases,

be prevented from developing by suitable education. And what applies to

society applies also to the individual. Children, especially, wish to

be liked by their elders and their companions; they have, as a rule,

impulses which can be developed in good or bad directions according

to the situations in which they find themselves. Moreover they are at

an age at which the formation of new habits is still easy; and good

habits can make a great part of virtue almost automatic. On the other

hand, the older type of virtue, which left bad desires rampant, and

merely used will-power to check their manifestations, has been found to

afford a far from satisfactory method of controlling bad conduct. The

bad desires, like a river which has been dammed, find some other outlet

which has escaped the watchful eye of the will. The man who, in youth,

would have liked to murder his father, finds satisfaction later on in

flogging his son, under the impression that he is chastising “moral

evil”. Theories which justify cruelty almost always have their source

in some desire diverted by the will from its natural channel, driven

underground, and at last emerging unrecognized as hatred of sin or

something equally respectable. The control of bad desires by the will,

therefore, though necessary on occasion, is inadequate as a technique

of virtue.

These considerations bring us to the province of psycho-analysis. There

is much in the detail of psycho-analysis which I find fantastic, and

not supported by adequate evidence. But the general method appears to

me very important, and essential to the creation of right methods of

moral training. The importance which many psycho-analysts attach to

early infancy appears to me exaggerated; they sometimes talk as if

character were irrevocably fixed by the time a child is three years

old. This, I am sure, is not the case. But the fault is a fault on the

right side. Infant psychology was neglected in the past; indeed, the

intellectualist methods in vogue made it almost impossible. Take such

a matter as sleep. All mothers wish their children to sleep, because

it is both healthy and convenient when they do. They had developed a

certain technique: rocking the cradle and singing lullabys. It was left

for males who investigated the matter scientifically to discover that

this technique is ideally wrong, for though it is likely to succeed on

any given day, it creates bad habits. Every child loves to be made a

fuss of, because its sense of self-importance is gratified. If it finds

that by not sleeping it secures attention, it will soon learn to adopt

this method. The result is equally damaging to health and character.

The great thing here is the formation of habit: the association of

the cot with sleep. If this association has been adequately produced,

the child will not lie awake unless it is ill or in pain. But the

production of the association requires a certain amount of discipline;

it is not to be achieved by mere indulgence, since that causes

pleasurable associations with lying awake. Similar considerations apply

to the formation of other good and bad habits. This whole study is

still in its infancy, but its importance is already very great, and

almost sure to become greater. It is clear that education of character

must begin at birth, and requires a reversal of much of the practice of

nurses and ignorant mothers. It is also clear that definite instruction

can begin earlier than was formerly thought, because it can be made

pleasant and no strain upon the infant’s powers of attention. In both

these respects educational theory has been radically transformed in

recent years, with beneficent effects which are likely to become more

and more evident as the years go by. Accordingly I shall begin, in

what follows, with a fairly detailed consideration of the training of

character in infancy, before discussing the instruction to be given in

later years.

CHAPTER II

THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

Before considering how to educate, it is well to be clear as to the

sort of result which we wish to achieve. Dr. Arnold wanted “humbleness

of mind”, a quality not possessed by Aristotle’s “magnanimous man”.

Nietzsche’s ideal is not that of Christianity. No more is Kant’s: for

while Christ enjoins love, Kant teaches that no action of which love

is the motive can be truly virtuous. And even people who agree as to

the ingredients of a good character may differ as to their relative

importance. One man will emphasize courage, another learning, another

kindliness, and another rectitude. One man, like the elder Brutus, will

put duty to the State above family affection; another, like Confucius,

will put family affection first. All these divergences will produce

differences as to education. We must have some conception of the kind

of person we wish to produce, before we can have any definite opinion

as to the education which we consider best.

Of course an educator may be foolish, in the sense that he produces

results other than those at which he was aiming. Uriah Heep was the

outcome of lessons in humility at a Charity School, which had had an

effect quite different from what was intended. But in the main the

ablest educators have been fairly successful. Take as examples the

Chinese literati, the modern Japanese, the Jesuits, Dr. Arnold, and the

men who direct the policy of the American public schools. All these,

in their various ways, have been highly successful. The results aimed

at in the different cases were utterly different, but in the main the

results were achieved. It may be worth while to spend a few moments on

these different systems, before attempting to decide what we should

ourselves regard as the aims which education should have in view.

Traditional Chinese education was, in some respects, very similar to

that of Athens in its best days. Athenian boys were made to learn

Homer by heart from beginning to end; Chinese boys were made to learn

the Confucian classics with similar thoroughness. Athenians were

taught a kind of reverence for the gods which consisted in outward

observances, and placed no barrier in the way of free intellectual

speculation. Similarly the Chinese were taught certain rites connected

with ancestor-worship, but were by no means obliged to have the

beliefs which the rites would seem to imply. An easy and elegant

scepticism was the attitude expected of an educated adult: anything

might be discussed, but it was a trifle vulgar to reach very positive

conclusions. Opinions should be such as could be discussed pleasantly

at dinner, not such as men would fight for. Carlyle calls Plato “a

lordly Athenian gentleman, very much at his ease in Zion”. This

characteristic of being “at his ease in Zion” is also found in Chinese

sages, and is, as a rule, absent from the sages produced by Christian

civilizations, except when, like Goethe, they have deeply imbibed the

spirit of Hellenism. The Athenians and the Chinese alike wished to

enjoy life, and had a conception of enjoyment which was refined by an

exquisite sense of beauty.

There were, however, great differences between the two civilizations,

owing to the fact that, broadly speaking, the Greeks were energetic

and the Chinese were lazy. The Greeks devoted their energies to art

and science and mutual extermination, in all of which they achieved

unprecedented success. Politics and patriotism afforded practical

outlets for Greek energy: when a politician was ousted, he led a band

of exiles to attack his native city. When a Chinese official was

disgraced, he retired to the hills and wrote poems on the pleasures of

country life. Accordingly the Greek civilization destroyed itself, but

the Chinese civilization could only be destroyed from without. These

differences, however, seem not wholly attributable to education, since

Confucianism in Japan never produced the indolent cultured scepticism

which characterized the Chinese literati, except in the Kyoto nobility,

who formed a kind of Faubourg Saint Germain.

Chinese education produced stability and art; it failed to produce

progress or science. Perhaps this may be taken as what is to be

expected of scepticism. Passionate beliefs produce either progress or

disaster, not stability. Science, even when it attacks traditional

beliefs, has beliefs of its own, and can scarcely flourish in an

atmosphere of literary scepticism. In a pugnacious world which has

been unified by modern inventions, energy is needed for national

self-preservation. And without science, democracy is impossible: the

Chinese civilization was confined to the small percentage of educated

men, and the Greek civilization was based on slavery. For these

reasons, the traditional education of China is not suited to the modern

world, and has been abandoned by the Chinese themselves. Cultivated

eighteenth-century gentlemen, who in some respects resembled Chinese

literati, have become impossible for the same reasons.

Modern Japan affords the clearest illustration of a tendency which is

prominent among all the Great Powers--the tendency to make national

greatness the supreme purpose of education. The aim of Japanese

education is to produce citizens who shall be devoted to the State

through the training of their passions, and useful to it through

the knowledge they have acquired. I cannot sufficiently praise the

skill with which this double purpose has been pursued. Ever since

the advent of Commodore Perry’s squadron, the Japanese have been in

a situation in which self-preservation was very difficult; their

success affords a justification of their methods, unless we are to hold

that self-preservation itself may be culpable. But only a desperate

situation could have justified their educational methods, which would

have been culpable in any nation not in imminent peril. The Shinto

religion, which must not be called in question even by university

professors, involves history which is just as dubious as Genesis; the

Dayton trial pales into insignificance beside the theological tyranny

in Japan. There is an equal ethical tyranny: nationalism, filial piety,

Mikado-worship, etc., must not be called in question, and therefore

many kinds of progress are scarcely possible. The great danger of a

cast-iron system of this sort is that it may provoke revolution as the

sole method of progress. This danger is real, though not immediate, and

is largely caused by the educational system.

We have thus in modern Japan a defect opposite to that of ancient

China. Whereas the Chinese literati were too sceptical and lazy, the

products of Japanese education are likely to be too dogmatic and

energetic. Neither acquiescence in scepticism nor acquiescence in dogma

is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief

that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that

much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be

more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care

and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious

where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our

beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult:

it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional

atrophy. But though difficult it is not impossible; it is in fact the

scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult,

but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the sceptic

denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when

wide-spread, produce social disaster.

The Jesuits, like the modern Japanese, made the mistake of

subordinating education to the welfare of an institution--in their

case, the Catholic Church. They were not concerned primarily with the

good of the particular pupil, but with making him a means to the good

of the Church. If we accept their theology, we cannot blame them: to

save souls from hell is more important than any merely terrestrial

concern, and is only to be achieved by the Catholic Church. But those

who do not accept this dogma will judge Jesuit education by its

results. These results, it is true, were sometimes quite as undesired

as Uriah Heep: Voltaire was a product of Jesuit methods. But on the

whole, and for a long time, the intended results were achieved: the

counter-reformation, and the collapse of Protestantism in France, must

be largely attributed to Jesuit efforts. To achieve these ends, they

made art sentimental, thought superficial, and morals loose; in the

end, the French Revolution was needed to sweep away the harm that they

had done. In education, their crime was that they were not actuated by

love of their pupils, but by ulterior ends.

Dr. Arnold’s system, which has remained in force in English public

schools to the present day, had another defect, namely that it was

aristocratic. The aim was to train men for positions of authority

and power, whether at home or in distant parts of the empire. An

aristocracy, if it is to survive, needs certain virtues; these were

to be imparted at school. The product was to be energetic, stoical,

physically fit, possessed of certain unalterable beliefs, with high

standards of rectitude, and convinced that it had an important mission

in the world. To a surprising extent, these results were achieved.

Intellect was sacrificed to them, because intellect might produce

doubt. Sympathy was sacrificed, because it might interfere with

governing “inferior” races or classes. Kindliness was sacrificed for

the sake of toughness; imagination, for the sake of firmness. In an

unchanging world, the result might have been a permanent aristocracy,

possessing the merits and defects of the Spartans. But aristocracy

is out-of-date, and subject populations will no longer obey even the

most wise and virtuous rulers. The rulers are driven into brutality,

and brutality further encourages revolt. The complexity of the modern

world increasingly requires intelligence, and Dr. Arnold sacrificed

intelligence to “virtue”. The battle of Waterloo may have been won

on the playing-fields of Eton, but the British Empire is being lost

there. The modern world needs a different type, with more imaginative

sympathy, more intellectual suppleness, less belief in bulldog courage

and more belief in technical knowledge. The administrator of the

future must be the servant of free citizens, not the benevolent ruler

of admiring subjects. The aristocratic tradition embedded in British

higher education is its bane. Perhaps this tradition can be eliminated

gradually; perhaps the older educational institutions will be found

incapable of adapting themselves. As to that, I do not venture an

opinion.

The American public schools achieve successfully a task never before

attempted on a large scale: the task of transforming a heterogeneous

selection of mankind into a homogeneous nation. This is done so ably,

and is on the whole such a beneficent work, that on the balance great

praise is due to those who accomplish it. But America, like Japan, is

placed in a peculiar situation, and what the special circumstances

justify is not necessarily an ideal to be followed everywhere and

always. America has had certain advantages and certain difficulties.

Among the advantages were: a higher standard of wealth; freedom from

the danger of defeat in war; comparative absence of cramping traditions

inherited from the Middle Ages. Immigrants found in America a generally

diffused sentiment of democracy and an advanced stage of industrial

technique. These, I think, are the two chief reasons why almost all

of them came to admire America more than their native countries. But

actual immigrants, as a rule, retain a dual patriotism: in European

struggles they continue to take passionately the side of the nation

to which they originally belonged. Their children, on the contrary,

lose all loyalty to the country from which their parents have come,

and become merely and simply Americans. The attitude of the parents is

attributable to the general merits of America; that of the children

is very largely determined by their school education. It is only the

contribution of the school that concerns us.

In so far as the school can rely upon the genuine merits of America,

there is no need to associate the teaching of American patriotism with

the inculcation of false standards. But where the Old World is superior

to the New, it becomes necessary to instil a contempt for genuine

excellences. The intellectual level in Western Europe and the artistic

level in Eastern Europe are, on the whole, higher than in America.

Throughout Western Europe, except in Spain and Portugal, there is

less theological superstition than in America. In almost all European

countries the individual is less subject to herd domination than in

America: his inner freedom is greater even where his political freedom

is less. In these respects, the American public schools do harm. The

harm is essential to the teaching of an exclusive American patriotism.

The harm, as with the Japanese and the Jesuits, comes from regarding

the pupils as means to an end, not as ends in themselves. The teacher

should love his children better than his State or his Church; otherwise

he is not an ideal teacher.

When I say that pupils should be regarded as ends, not as means, I

may be met by the retort that, after all, everybody is more important

as a means than as an end. What a man is as an end perishes when he

dies; what he produces as a means continues to the end of time. We

cannot deny this, but we can deny the consequences deduced from it. A

man’s importance as a means may be for good or for evil; the remote

effects of human actions are so uncertain that a wise man will tend to

dismiss them from his calculations. Broadly speaking, good men have

good effects, and bad men bad effects. This, of course, is not an

invariable law of nature. A bad man may murder a tyrant because he has

committed crimes which the tyrant intends to punish; the effects of

his act may be good, though he and his act are bad. Nevertheless, as a

broad general rule, a community of men and women who are intrinsically

excellent will have better effects than one composed of people who are

ignorant and malevolent. Apart from such considerations, children

and young people feel instinctively the difference between those who

genuinely wish them well and those who regard them merely as raw

material for some scheme. Neither character nor intelligence will

develop as well or as freely where the teacher is deficient in love;

and love of this kind consists essentially in _feeling_ the child as an

end. We all have this feeling about ourselves: we desire good things

for ourselves without first demanding a proof that some great purpose

will be furthered by our obtaining them. Every ordinarily affectionate

parent feels the same sort of thing about his or her children. Parents

want their children to grow, to be strong and healthy, to do well at

school, and so on, in just the same way in which they want things for

themselves; no effort of self-denial and no abstract principle of

justice is involved in taking trouble about such matters. This parental

instinct is not always strictly confined to one’s own children. In

its diffused form, it must exist in any one who is to be a good

teacher of little boys and girls. As the pupils grow older, it grows

less important. But only those who possess it can be trusted to draw

up schemes of education. Those who regard it as one of the purposes

of male education to produce men willing to kill and be killed for

frivolous reasons are clearly deficient in diffused parental feeling;

yet they control education in all civilized countries except Denmark

and China.

But it is not enough that the educator should love the young; it

is necessary also that he should have a right conception of human

excellence. Cats teach their kittens to catch mice and play with them;

militarists do likewise with the human young. The cat loves the kitten,

but not the mouse; the militarist may love his own son, but not the

sons of his country’s enemies. Even those who love all mankind may err

through a wrong conception of the good life. I shall try, therefore,

before going any further, to give an idea of what I consider excellent

in men and women, quite without regard to practicality, or to the

educational methods by which it might be brought into being. Such a

picture will help us afterwards, when we come to consider the details

of education; we shall know the direction in which we wish to move.

We must first make a distinction: some qualities are desirable in

a certain proportion of mankind, others are desirable universally.

We want artists, but we also want men of science. We want great

administrators, but we also want ploughmen and millers and bakers. The

qualities which produce a man of great eminence in some one direction

are often such as might be undesirable if they were universal. Shelley

describes the day’s work of a poet as follows:

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The honey-bees in the ivy bloom,

Nor heed nor see what things they be.

These habits are praiseworthy in a poet, but not--shall we say--in a

postman. We cannot therefore frame our education with a view to giving

every one the temperament of a poet. But some characteristics are

universally desirable, and it is these alone that I shall consider at

this stage.

I make no distinction whatever between male and female excellence. A

certain amount of occupational training is desirable for a woman who

is to have the care of babies, but that only involves the same sort

of difference as there is between a farmer and a miller. It is in no

degree fundamental, and does not demand consideration at our present

level.

I will take four characteristics which seem to me jointly to form

the basis of an ideal character: vitality, courage, sensitiveness,

and intelligence. I do not suggest that this list is complete, but I

think it carries us a good way. Moreover I firmly believe that, by

proper physical, emotional and intellectual care of the young, these

qualities could all be made very common. I shall consider each in turn.

Vitality is rather a physiological than a mental characteristic; it

is presumably always present where there is perfect health, but it

tends to ebb with advancing years, and gradually dwindles to nothing

in old age. In vigorous children it quickly rises to a maximum before

they reach school age, and then tends to be diminished by education.

Where it exists, there is pleasure in feeling alive, quite apart

from any specific pleasant circumstance. It heightens pleasures and

diminishes pains. It makes it easy to take an interest in whatever

occurs, and thus promotes objectivity, which is an essential of sanity.

Human beings are prone to become absorbed in themselves, unable to

be interested in what they see and hear or in anything outside their

own skins. This is a great misfortune to themselves, since it entails

at best boredom and at worst melancholia; it is also a fatal barrier

to usefulness, except in very exceptional cases. Vitality promotes

interest in the outside world; it also promotes the power of hard

work. Moreover it is a safeguard against envy, because it makes one’s

own existence pleasant. As envy is one of the great sources of human

misery, this is a very important merit in vitality. Many bad qualities

are of course compatible with vitality--for example, those of a

healthy tiger. And many of the best qualities are compatible with its

absence: Newton and Locke, for example, had very little. Both these

men, however, had irritabilities and envies from which better health

would have set them free. Probably the whole of Newton’s controversy

with Leibniz, which ruined English mathematics for over a hundred

years, would have been avoided if Newton had been robust and able to

enjoy ordinary pleasures. In spite of its limitations, therefore, I

reckon vitality among the qualities which it is important that all men

should possess.

Courage--the second quality on our list--has several forms, and all

of them are complex. Absence of fear is one thing, and the power of

controlling fear is another. And absence of fear, in turn, is one thing

when the fear is rational, another when it is irrational. Absence

of irrational fear is clearly good; so is the power of controlling

fear. But absence of rational fear is a matter as to which debate is

possible. However, I shall postpone this question until I have said

something about the other forms of courage.

Irrational fear plays an extraordinarily large part in the instinctive

emotional life of most people. In its pathological forms, as

persecution mania, anxiety complex, or what not, it is treated by

alienists. But in milder forms it is common among those who are

considered sane. It may be a general feeling that there are dangers

about, more correctly termed “anxiety”, or a specific dread of things

that are not dangerous, such as mice or spiders.[3] It used to be

supposed that many fears were instinctive, but this is now questioned

by most investigators. There are apparently a few instinctive

fears--for instance, of loud noises--but the great majority arise

either from experience or from suggestion. Fear of the dark, for

example, seems to be entirely due to suggestion. Most vertebrates,

there is reason to think, do not feel instinctive fear of their natural

enemies, but catch this emotion from their elders. When human beings

bring them up by hand, the fears usual among the species are found to

be absent. But fear is exceedingly infectious: children catch it from

their elders even when their elders are not aware of having shown it.

Timidity in mothers or nurses is very quickly imitated by children

through suggestion. Hitherto, men have thought it attractive in women

to be full of irrational terrors, because it gave men a chance to seem

protective without incurring any real danger. But the sons of these

men have acquired the terrors from their mothers, and have had to be

afterwards trained to regain a courage which they need never have lost

if their fathers had not desired to despise their mothers. The harm

that has been done by the subjection of women is incalculable; this

matter of fear affords only one incidental illustration.

I am not at the moment discussing the methods by which fear and anxiety

may be minimized; that is a matter which I shall consider later. There

is, however, one question which arises at this stage, namely: can we

be content to deal with fear by means of repression, or must we find

some more radical cure? Traditionally, aristocracies have been trained

not to show fear, while subject nations, classes, and sexes have been

encouraged to remain cowardly. The test of courage has been crudely

behavioristic: a man must not run away in battle; he must be proficient

in “manly” sports; he must retain self-command in fires, shipwrecks,

earthquakes, etc. He must not merely do the right thing, but he must

avoid turning pale, or trembling, or gasping for breath, or giving

any other easily observed sign of fear. All this I regard as of great

importance: I should wish to see courage cultivated in all nations,

in all classes, and in both sexes. But when the method adopted is

repressive, it entails the evils always associated with that practice.

Shame and disgrace have always been potent weapons in producing the

appearance of courage; but in fact they merely cause a conflict of

terrors, in which it is hoped that the dread of public condemnation

will be the stronger. “Always speak the truth except when something

frightens you” was a maxim taught to me in childhood. I cannot admit

the exception. Fear should be overcome not only in action, but in

feeling; and not only in conscious feeling, but in the unconscious

as well. The purely external victory over fear, which satisfies the

aristocratic code, leaves the impulse operative underground, and

produces evil twisted reactions which are not recognized as the

offspring of terror. I am not thinking of “shell-shock”, in which the

connection with fear is obvious. I am thinking rather of the whole

system of oppression and cruelty by which dominant castes seek to

retain their ascendancy. When recently in Shanghai a British officer

ordered a number of unarmed Chinese students to be shot in the back

without warning, he was obviously actuated by terror just as much as

a soldier who runs away in battle. But military aristocracies are not

sufficiently intelligent to trace such actions to their psychological

source; they regard them rather as showing firmness and a proper spirit.

From the point of view of psychology and physiology, fear and rage are

closely analogous emotions: the man who feels rage is not possessed

of the highest kind of courage. The cruelty invariably displayed in

suppressing negro insurrections, communist rebellions, and other

threats to aristocracy, is an offshoot of cowardice, and deserves the

same contempt as is bestowed upon the more obvious forms of that vice.

I believe that it is possible so to educate ordinary men and women that

they shall be able to live without fear. Hitherto, only a few heroes

and saints have achieved such a life; but what they have done others

could do if they were shown the way.

For the kind of courage which does not consist in repression, a number

of factors must be combined. To begin with the humblest: health and

vitality are very helpful, though not indispensable. Practice and

skill in dangerous situations are very desirable. But when we come to

consider, not courage in this and that respect, but universal courage,

something more fundamental is wanted. What is wanted is a combination

of self-respect with an impersonal outlook on life. To begin with

self-respect: some men live from within, while others are mere mirrors

of what is felt and said by their neighbours. The latter can never have

true courage: they must have admiration, and are haunted by the fear

of losing it. The teaching of “humility”, which used to be thought

desirable, was the means of producing a perverted form of this same

vice. “Humility” suppressed self-respect, but not the desire for the

respect of others; it merely made nominal self-abasement the means

of acquiring credit. Thus it produced hypocrisy and falsification of

instinct. Children were taught unreasoning submission, and proceeded

to exact it when they grew up; it was said that only those who have

learned to obey know how to command. What I suggest is that no one

should learn how to obey, and no one should attempt to command. I do

not mean, of course, that there should not be leaders in co-operative

enterprises; but their authority should be like that of a captain of

a football team, which is suffered voluntarily in order to achieve

a common purpose. Our purposes should be our own, not the result of

external authority; and our purposes should never be forcibly imposed

upon others. This is what I mean when I say no one should command and

no one should obey.

There is one thing more required for the highest courage, and that

is what I called just now an impersonal outlook on life. The man

whose hopes and fears are all centred upon himself can hardly view

death with equanimity, since it extinguishes his whole emotional

universe. Here, again, we are met by a tradition urging the cheap

and easy way of repression: the saint must learn to renounce Self,

must mortify the flesh and forego instinctive joys. This can be done,

but its consequences are bad. Having renounced pleasure for himself,

the ascetic saint renounces it for others also, which is easier. Envy

persists underground, and leads him to the view that suffering is

ennobling, and may therefore be legitimately inflicted. Hence arises

a complete inversion of values: what is good is thought bad, and what

is bad is thought good. The source of all the harm is that the good

life has been sought in obedience to a negative imperative, not in

broadening and developing natural desires and instincts. There are

certain things in human nature which take us beyond Self without

effort. The commonest of these is love, more particularly parental

love, which in some is so generalized as to embrace the whole human

race. Another is knowledge. There is no reason to suppose that Galileo

was particularly benevolent, yet he lived for an end which was not

defeated by his death. Another is art. But in fact every interest

in something outside a man’s own body makes his life to that degree

impersonal. For this reason, paradoxical as it may seem, a man of

wide and vivid interests finds less difficulty in leaving life than

is experienced by some miserable hypochondriac whose interests are

bounded by his own ailments. Thus the perfection of courage is found

in the man of many interests, who _feels_ his ego to be but a small

part of the world, not through despising himself, but through valuing

much that is not himself. This can hardly happen except where instinct

is free and intelligence is active. From the union of the two grows

a comprehensiveness of outlook unknown both to the voluptuary and to

the ascetic; and to such an outlook personal death appears a trivial

matter. Such courage is positive and instinctive, not negative and

repressive. It is courage in this positive sense that I regard as one

of the major ingredients in a perfect character.

Sensitiveness, the third quality in our list, is in a sense a

corrective of mere courage. Courageous behaviour is easier for a man

who fails to apprehend dangers, but such courage may often be foolish.

We cannot regard as satisfactory any way of acting which is dependent

upon ignorance or forgetfulness: the fullest possible knowledge and

realization are an essential part of what is desirable. The cognitive

aspect, however, comes under the head of intelligence; sensitiveness,

in the sense in which I am using the term, belongs to the emotions. A

purely theoretical definition would be that a person is emotionally

sensitive when many stimuli produce emotions in him; but taken thus

broadly the quality is not necessarily a good one. If sensitiveness is

to be good, the emotional reaction must be in some sense _appropriate_:

mere intensity is not what is needed. The quality I have in mind is

that of being affected pleasurably or the reverse by many things, and

by the right things. What are the right things, I shall try to explain.

The first step, which most children take at the age of about five

months, is to pass beyond mere pleasures of sensation, such as food

and warmth, to the pleasure of social approbation. This pleasure, as

soon as it has arisen, develops very rapidly: every child loves praise

and hates blame. Usually the wish to be thought well of remains one of

the dominant motives throughout life. It is certainly very valuable

as a stimulus to pleasant behaviour, and as a restraint upon impulses

of greed. If we were wiser in our admirations, it might be much more

valuable. But so long as the most admired heroes are those who have

killed the greatest number of people, love of admiration cannot alone

be adequate to the good life.

The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness

is sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child

will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose,

affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements

that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer

is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the

suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The

second of these enlargements depends mainly upon intelligence. It may

only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly

and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so

far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This

capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important. Almost

everybody is deeply affected when some one he loves suffers from

cancer. Most people are moved when they see the sufferings of unknown

patients in hospitals. Yet when they read that the death-rate from

cancer is such-and-such, they are as a rule only moved to momentary

personal fear lest they or some one dear to them should acquire the

disease. The same is true of war: people think it dreadful when their

son or brother is mutilated, but they do not think it a million

times as dreadful that a million people should be mutilated. A man

who is full of kindliness in all personal dealings may derive his

income from incitement to war or from the torture of children in

“backward” countries. All these familiar phenomena are due to the fact

that sympathy is not stirred, in most people, by a merely abstract

stimulus. A large proportion of the evils in the modern world would

cease if this could be remedied. Science has greatly increased our

power of affecting the lives of distant people, without increasing

our sympathy for them. Suppose you are a shareholder in a company

which manufactures cotton in Shanghai. You may be a busy man, who has

merely followed financial advice in making the investment; neither

Shanghai nor cotton interests you, but only your dividends. Yet you

become part of the force leading to massacres of innocent people, and

your dividends would disappear if little children were not forced into

unnatural and dangerous toil. You do not mind, because you have never

seen the children, and an abstract stimulus cannot move you. That is

the fundamental reason why large-scale industrialism is so cruel, and

why oppression of subject races is tolerated. An education producing

sensitiveness to abstract stimuli would make such things impossible.

Cognitive sensitiveness, which should also be included, is practically

the same thing as a habit of observation, and this is more naturally

considered in connection with intelligence. Æsthetic sensitiveness

raises a number of problems which I do not wish to discuss at this

stage. I will therefore pass on to the last of the four qualities we

enumerated, namely, intelligence.

One of the great defects of traditional morality has been the low

estimate it placed upon intelligence. The Greeks did not err in this

respect, but the Church led men to think that nothing matters except

virtue, and virtue consists in abstinence from a certain list of

actions arbitrarily labelled “sin”. So long as this attitude persists,

it is impossible to make men realize that intelligence does more good

than an artificial conventional “virtue”. When I speak of intelligence,

I include both actual knowledge and receptivity to knowledge. The two

are, in fact, closely connected. Ignorant adults are unteachable;

on such matters as hygiene or diet, for example, they are totally

incapable of believing what science has to say. The more a man has

learnt, the easier it is for him to learn still more--always assuming

that he has not been taught in a spirit of dogmatism. Ignorant people

have never been compelled to change their mental habits, and have

stiffened into an unchangeable attitude. It is not only that they are

credulous where they should be sceptical; it is just as much that they

are incredulous where they should be receptive. No doubt the word

“intelligence” properly signifies rather an aptitude for acquiring

knowledge than knowledge already acquired; but I do not think this

aptitude is acquired except by exercise, any more than the aptitude

of a pianist or an acrobat. It is, of course, possible to impart

information in ways that do not train intelligence; it is not only

possible, but easy, and frequently done. But I do not believe that it

is possible to train intelligence without imparting information, or at

any rate causing knowledge to be acquired. And without intelligence our

complex modern world cannot subsist; still less can it make progress. I

regard the cultivation of intelligence, therefore, as one of the major

purposes of education. This might seem a commonplace, but in fact it is

not. The desire to instil what are regarded as correct beliefs has made

educationists too often indifferent to the training of intelligence.

To make this clear, it is necessary to define intelligence a little

more closely, so as to discover the mental habits which it requires.

For this purpose I shall consider only the aptitude for acquiring

knowledge, not the store of actual knowledge which might legitimately

be included in the definition of intelligence.

The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, which

is found among animals in its elementary forms. Intelligence demands an

alert curiosity, but it must be of a certain kind. The sort that leads

village neighbours to try to peer through curtains after dark has no

very high value. The wide-spread interest in gossip is inspired, not by

a love of knowledge, but by malice: no one gossips about other people’s

secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most

gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbours’

sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do

not stop to scrutinize the evidence closely. Curiosity properly so

called, on the other hand, is inspired by a genuine love of knowledge.

You may see this impulse, in a moderately pure form, at work in a

cat which has been brought to a strange room, and proceeds to smell

every corner and every piece of furniture. You will see it also in

children, who are passionately interested when a drawer or cupboard,

usually closed, is open for their inspection. Animals, machines,

thunderstorms, and all forms of manual work, arouse the curiosity of

children, whose thirst for knowledge puts the most intelligent adult

to shame. This impulse grows weaker with advancing years, until at

last what is unfamiliar inspires only disgust, with no desire for a

closer acquaintance. This is the stage at which people announce that

the country is going to the dogs, and that “things are not what they

were in my young days”. The thing which is not the same as it was in

that far-off time is the speaker’s curiosity. And with the death of

curiosity we may reckon that active intelligence, also, has died.

But although curiosity lessens in intensity and in extent after

childhood, it may for a long time improve in quality. Curiosity

about general propositions shows a higher level of intelligence than

curiosity about particular facts; broadly speaking, the higher the

order of generality the greater is the intelligence involved. (This

rule, however, must not be taken too strictly.) Curiosity dissociated

from personal advantage shows a higher development than curiosity

connected (say) with a chance of food. The cat that sniffs in a new

room is not a wholly disinterested scientific inquirer, but probably

also wants to find out whether there are mice about. Perhaps it is not

quite correct to say that curiosity is best when it is disinterested,

but rather that it is best when the connection with other interests is

not direct and obvious, but discoverable only by means of a certain

degree of intelligence. This point, however, it is not necessary for us

to decide.

If curiosity is to be fruitful, it must be associated with a certain

technique for the acquisition of knowledge. There must be habits of

observation, belief in the possibility of knowledge, patience and

industry. These things will develop of themselves, given the original

fund of curiosity and the proper intellectual education. But since our

intellectual life is only a part of our activity, and since curiosity

is perpetually coming into conflict with other passions, there is need

of certain intellectual virtues, such as open-mindedness. We become

impervious to new truth both from habit and from desire: we find it

hard to disbelieve what we have emphatically believed for a number of

years, and also what ministers to self-esteem or any other fundamental

passion. Open-mindedness should therefore be one of the qualities that

education aims at producing. At present, this is only done to a very

limited extent, as is illustrated by the following paragraph from “The

Daily Herald”, July 31, 1925:

A special committee, appointed to inquire into the allegations of

the subversion of children’s minds in Bootle schools by their school

teachers, has placed its findings before the Bootle Borough Council.

The Committee was of opinion that the allegations were substantiated,

but the Council deleted the word “substantiated”, and stated that

“the allegations gave cause for reasonable inquiry”. A recommendation

made by the Committee, and adopted by the Council, was that in future

appointments of teachers, they shall undertake to train the scholars

in habits of reverence towards God and religion, and of respect for

the civil and religious institutions of the country.

Thus whatever may happen elsewhere, there is to be no open-mindedness

in Bootle. It is hoped that the Borough Council will shortly send a

deputation to Dayton, Tennessee, to obtain further light upon the

best methods of carrying out their programme. But perhaps that is

unnecessary. From the wording of the resolution, it would seem as if

Bootle needed no instruction in obscurantism.

Courage is essential to intellectual probity, as well as to physical

heroism. The real world is more unknown than we like to think; from the

first day of life we practise precarious inductions, and confound our

mental habits with laws of external nature. All sorts of intellectual

systems--Christianity, Socialism, Patriotism, etc.--are ready, like

orphan asylums, to give safety in return for servitude. A free mental

life cannot be as warm and comfortable and sociable as a life enveloped

in a creed: only a creed can give the feeling of a cosy fireside while

the winter storms are raging without.

This brings us to a somewhat difficult question: to what extent

should the good life be emancipated from the herd? I hesitate to use

the phrase “herd instinct”, because there are controversies as to

its correctness. But, however interpreted, the phenomena which it

describes are familiar. We like to stand well with those whom we feel

to be the group with which we wish to co-operate--our family, our

neighbours, our colleagues, our political party, or our nation. This is

natural, because we cannot obtain any of the pleasures of life without

co-operation. Moreover, emotions are infectious, especially when they

are felt by many people at once. Very few people can be present at

an excited meeting without getting excited: if they are opponents,

their opposition becomes excited. And to most people such opposition

is only possible if they can derive support from the thought of a

different crowd in which they will win approbation. That is why the

Communion of Saints has afforded such comfort to the persecuted. Are

we to acquiesce in this desire for co-operation with a crowd, or shall

our education try to weaken it? There are arguments on both sides, and

the right answer must consist in finding a just proportion, not in a

whole-hearted decision for either party.

I think myself that the desire to please and to co-operate should be

strong and normal, but should be capable of being overcome by other

desires on certain important occasions. The desirability of a wish to

please has already been considered in connection with sensitiveness.

Without it, we should all be boors, and all social groups, from the

family upwards, would be impossible. Education of young children would

be very difficult if they did not desire the good opinion of their

parents. The contagious character of emotions also has its uses,

when the contagion is from a wiser person to a more foolish one. But

in the case of panic fear and panic rage it is of course the very

reverse of useful. Thus the question of emotional receptivity is by

no means simple. Even in purely intellectual matters, the issue is

not clear. The great discoverers have had to withstand the herd, and

incur hostility by their independence. But the average man’s opinions

are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in

science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

I think that in the life of a man whose circumstances and talents are

not very exceptional there should be a large sphere where what is

vaguely termed “herd instinct” dominates, and a small sphere into which

it does not penetrate. The small sphere should contain the region of

his special competence. We think ill of a man who cannot admire a woman

unless everybody else also admires her: we think that, in the choice

of a wife, a man should be guided by his own independent feelings, not

by a reflection of the feelings of his society. It is no matter if his

judgments of people in general agree with those of his neighbours, but

when he falls in love he ought to be guided by his own independent

feelings. Much the same thing applies in other directions. A farmer

should follow his own judgment as to the capacities of the fields

which he cultivates himself, though his judgment should be formed

after acquiring a knowledge of scientific agriculture. An economist

should form an independent judgment on currency questions, but an

ordinary mortal had better follow authority. Wherever there is special

competence, there should be independence. But a man should not make

himself into a kind of hedgehog, all bristles to keep the world at a

distance. The bulk of our ordinary activities must be co-operative,

and co-operation must have an instinctive basis. Nevertheless, we

should all learn to be able to think for ourselves about matters that

are particularly well known to us, and we ought all to have acquired

the courage to proclaim unpopular opinions when we believe them to be

important. The application of these broad principles in special cases

may, of course, be difficult. But it will be less difficult than it

is at present in a world where men commonly have the virtues we have

been considering in this chapter. The persecuted saint, for instance,

would not exist in such a world. The good man would have no occasion

to bristle and become self-conscious; his goodness would result

from following his impulses, and would be combined with instinctive

happiness. His neighbours would not hate him, because they would not

fear him: the hatred of pioneers is due to the terror they inspire, and

this terror would not exist among men who had acquired courage. Only a

man dominated by fear would join the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascisti. In

a world of brave men, such persecuting organizations could not exist,

and the good life would involve far less resistance to instinct than

it does at present. The good world can only be created and sustained

by fearless men, but the more they succeed in their task the fewer

occasions there will be for the exercise of their courage.

A community of men and women possessing vitality, courage,

sensitiveness, and intelligence, in the highest degree that education

can produce, would be very different from anything that has hitherto

existed. Very few people would be unhappy. The main causes of

unhappiness at present are: ill-health, poverty, and an unsatisfactory

sex-life. All of these would become very rare. Good health could

be almost universal, and even old age could be postponed. Poverty,

since the industrial revolution, is only due to collective stupidity.

Sensitiveness would make people wish to abolish it, intelligence would

show them the way, and courage would lead them to adopt it. (A timid

person would rather remain miserable than do anything unusual.) Most

people’s sex-life, at present, is more or less unsatisfactory. This is

partly due to bad education, partly to persecution by the authorities

and Mrs. Grundy. A generation of women brought up without irrational

sex fears would soon make an end of this. Fear has been thought the

only way to make women “virtuous”, and they have been deliberately

taught to be cowards, both physically and mentally. Women in whom love

is cramped encourage brutality and hypocrisy in their husbands, and

distort the instincts of their children. One generation of fearless

women could transform the world, by bringing into it a generation of

fearless children, not contorted into unnatural shapes, but straight

and candid, generous, affectionate, and free. Their ardour would

sweep away the cruelty and pain which we endure because we are lazy,

cowardly, hard-hearted and stupid. It is education that gives us these

bad qualities, and education that must give us the opposite virtues.

Education is the key to the new world.

But it is time to have done with generalities and come to the concrete

detail in which our ideals are to be embodied.

PART II

EDUCATION OF CHARACTER