It’s really more a book of philosophical advice than anything directly for being up kids. Here are my favorite portions:
Passionate beliefs produce either progress or disaster, not stability.
Education should produce 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 with 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.
Neither character nor intelligence will develop as well or as freely where the teacher is deficient in love; and love if 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 out 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 invoked in taking trouble about such matters.
I will take four characteristics which seem to me jointly fo 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.
Vitality is rather a physiological than a mental characteristic
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
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.
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 cooperative 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.
There is one more thing 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 extinguished 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 forgot instinctive joys. This can be done, but it’s 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.
There are certain things in human nature and which takes ya beyond Self without the effort. The commonest of these is love, more particularly parental love. Another is knowledge. 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.
First, to feel sympathy even 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 largely 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 someone he loves suffers from cancer. Most people are moved when they see the sufferings of unknown patients n 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 someone dear to them should acquire the dorade. 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 there 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 interest you, but only your dividends. Yet you become part of the force leading to the massacre of thousands 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 not seen the children, and an abstract stimulus cannot move you. That is the fundamental reason why large scale industrialism is so cruel. An education producing sensitiveness to abstract stimuli would make such things impossible .
When I speak of intelligence, I include both actual knowledge and receptivity to knowledge. The more a man has learnt, the easier it is for him to learn still more.
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...And without intelligence our complex modern world cannot subsist, still less can it make progress. I regard the cultivation of intelligence, therefor, as one of the major purposes of education.
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.
A free mental life cannot be as warm and comfortable and sociable as a life enveloped in a creed (Christianity, socialism, patriotism etc): 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?
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.
The child’s life is instinctively prospective: it is always directed towards the things that will become possible later on. This is part of the stimulus to the child’s efforts. To make the child retrospective, to represent the future as worse than the past, is to sap the life of the child at its source. Yet that is what heartless sentimentalists used to do by talking to the child about the joys of childhood.
You cannot avoid dying, but you can avoid dying intestate; therefore make your will, and forget that you are mortal.
Above all, give your child that wide outlook and that multiplicity of vivid interests that will prevent him, in later life, from brooding upon possibilities of personal misfortune. Only so can you make him a free citizen of the universe.
Courage must not be confounded with brutality. Brutality is pleasure in forcing one’s will upon others; courage is indifference to personal misfortunes.
We all like to effect something, but so far as the love of power is concerned we do not care what we effect. Broadly speaking, the more difficult the achievement, the more it pleases us. Men will not shoot a bird sitting, because it is easy. I take this example, because in it man has no ulterior motive beyond the pleasure of the activity. What we can do easily no longer gives us a sense of power, it is a newly-acquired skill, or the skill about which we are doubtful, that gives us the thrill of success.
In play with children, you should only illustrate to stimulate ambition and to show how the thing is done; after that they should be left to their own efforts.
A social system may be conceived in many ways; the commonest are a mould, a machine and a tree. Mould: (human nature is to be poured into a preconceived shape. Something of this idea exists in any rigid moral or social convention.
The man who conceives of society as a machine is more modern. The industrialist and the communist alike belong to this class. To them, human life is uninteresting and the ends of life are simple - usually, the maximizing of production. The purpose of social organization is to secure these simple ends. The difficulty is that actual human beings will not desire them; they persist in wanting all kinds of chaotic things which seem worthless to the tidy mind of the organizer. This drives the organizer back to the mould, in order produce human beings who desire what he thinks good.
The man who imagines a social system as a tree will have a different political outlook. A bad machine can be scrapped, and another put in its place. But if a tree is cut down, it is a long time before a new tree achieves the same strength and size.
A machine or mould is what it’s maker chooses; a tree has its specific nature.
The fear of losing valued material possessions is one of the main sources of political and economic cruelty. It is desirable that men and women should as far as possible, find their happiness in ways which are not subject to private ownership, i.e., in creative rather than defensive activities.
Do not put your child off with « you can’t understand that yet » except in difficult scientific matters. And even then, tell him rather more than he can understand, not less; the part he fails to understand will stimulate his curiosity and his intellectual ambition
On a few occasions, we have resorted to mild forms of punishment when he has persisted in demanding things we had refused him, or in interfering with his sister’s play. In such cases, when reason and exhortation have failed, we take him to a room by himself, leave the door open, and tell him he can come back as soon as he is good. In a very few minutes, after crying vigorously, he comes back and is invariably good: he understands that in coming back he has undertaken to be good.
When a child persistently interferes with other children, or spoils their pleasures, the obvious penalty is banishment. There is no use in making the refractory child feel guilty, it is much more to the purpose to make him feel that he is missing the pleasures which others are enjoying.
Neither praise nor blame of a child should be comparative. The first produces contempt, the second hatred. Blame should be given much more sparingly than praise. Praise should be given for a new development of courage or skill, or for an act of unselfishness as regards possessions. To be praised for a « difficult achievement » is one of the most delightful experiences in youth.
If he does something unkind to a younger child, do the same to him at once.!73 will protest, and you can explain that if he does not want it done to him he must not do it to others. In this way the fact that others have feelings like his own is brought vividly to his attention. It is obviously essential to this method that it should be begin early, and applied to minor forms of unkindness. And when you adopt this plan, do not let it seem that you are doing it as a punishment, but rather as an instruction. « See, that is what you did to your little sister. » when the child protests, you say: « Well, if it was unpleasant, you misent do it to her. »
All moral instruction must be immediate and concrete: it must arise out of a situation which has grown up naturally, and must not go beyond what ought to be done in this particular instance. It is much easier to grasp a concrete instance and apply analogous considerations to an analogous instance than to apprehend a general rule and proceed deductively. Do not say, in a general way, « be brave, be kind » , but urge him to some particular piece of daring, and then say, « bravo, you were a brave boy »; get him to let his little sister play with his mechanical engine, and when he sees her beaming with delight say, « that’s right, you were a kind boy. »
The conception of « moral responsibility » is responsible for much evil. Imagine two children, one of whom has the good fortune to be in a nursery school, while the other is left to un alleviated slum life. Is the second child « morally responsible » if he grows up less admirable than the first? Are his parents « morally responsible » for the ignorance and carelessness which makes them unable to educate him? Are the rich « morally responsible » for the selfishness and stupidity which have been drilled into them, and which make them prefer their own foolish luxuries to the creation of a happy community? All are victims of circumstances; all have had characters warped in infancy and intelligence stunted at school. No good purpose is served by choosing to regard them as « morally responsible » and holding them up to réprobation because they have been less fortunate than they might have been.
There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: science wielded by love. With science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive.
There are three qualities which distinguish perfect concentration: it should be intense, prolonged and voluntary. Intensity is illustrated by the story of Archimedes, who is said have never noticed when the Romans captured Syracuse and came to kill him, because he was absorbed in a mathematical problem. To be able to concentrate on the same matter for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement, and even to the understanding of any complicated or abstruse subject. Most people can concentrate on a mechanical puzzle for a long time, but this is not in itself very useful. To be really valuable, the concentration must also be within the control of the will. By this i mean that, even where some piece of knowledge is uninteresting in itself, a man can force himself to acquire it if he has an adequate motive for doing so. I doubt whether modern educational methods are successful in teaching a man to endure voluntary boredom.
It should be part of education to fire pupils with desires not easily gratified - to know the calculus, to read Homer, to perform well on the violin, or what not. Each of these involves its own kind of accuracy. Able boys and girls will go through endless tedium and submit willingly to to severe discipline in order to acquire some coveted knowledge or skill. Those who have less native ability can often be fired by similar ambitions if they are inspiringly taught. The acquisition of exact knowledge is wearisome but is essential to every king of excellence.
If children are shown a cinema representing a ship sailing round the coast they would soon know the capes. I don’t think they are worth knowing, but if they were that would be the way to teach them. All geography ought to be taught in the cinema; so ought history at first.
If you insist upon teaching a child, he will. Include that he is being asked to do something disagreeable to please you, and he will have a psychological resistance. If this exists at the start, it will perpetuate itself; at a later age, the desirability of getting through examinations may become evident, and there will be work for that purpose, but none from sheer interest in knowledge. If, on the contrary, you can first stimulate the child’s desire to know, and then as a favour, hive him the knowledge he wants , the whole situation is different. To succeed in this certain conditions are necessary: the tasks must be attractive and not too difficult. There must, at first be the example of other children at a slightly more advanced stage. There must be no other obviously pleasant occupation open to the child at the moment. There are a number of things a child may do, and he works by himself at whichever he prefers.
There are the same reasons for not teaching one’s own children as have led medical men not to treat their own families.
Initiative and individual work give the pupil the opportunity of discovery and thus afford the sense of mental adventure far more often and more keenly than is possible where everything is taught in class.
I think the good effect of literature cannot be fully obtained without learning by heart. Modern educationists give it less and less place. But I think they are mistaken, not because of any possible improvement of memory, but on account of the effect upon beauty of language in speech and writing. This should come without effort, as a spontaneous expression of thought; but in order to do so, in a community has lost the primitive aesthetic impulses, it is necessary to produce a habit of thought which I believe is only to be generated by intimate knowledge of good literature. That is why learning by heart seems to me important...learning by heart should be associated with acting, because then it is a necessary means to something which every child loves. From the age of 3 onwards children delight in acting a part; they do it spontaneously but are overjoyed when more elaborate ways of doing it are out in their way...I should confine the teaching of literature, in early years, to the learning of parts for acting. The rest should consist of voluntary reading of well-written stories, obtainable in the school library. People nowadays write silly sentimental stuff for children, which insults them by not taking them seriously. Contrast the intense seriousness of Robinson Crusoe...the best books for children are those that happen to suit them, though written for grown-up people.