The sanctuary vs. the crucible: The enduring debate on teaching children political truth

“ For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall not be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how human they are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the things that look like their kin. ”

“ Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is much beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, this completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty of finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years are added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. A bloom disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face, and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as bloom. ”

“ How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. ”

“ For we too should admit that a child must receive many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must be taught some things in a figure only, some, too, which he can hardly be expected to believe when he grows older; but we should limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the case. Plato would draw the line differently; according to him the aim of early education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a matter of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of good manners and good taste. ”

“ Truth is not instinctive in the mind, and the ideas of integrity, and of the advantages of reputation, must be very cautiously introduced, lest, by giving children too perfect a theory of morality, before they have sufficient strength of mind to adhere to it in practice, we may make them hypocrites, or else give them a fatal distrust of themselves, founded upon too early an experience of their own weakness, and too great sensibility to shame. ”

“ The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true facts—say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or John Jones—these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world.
It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. ”

“ The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth. ”

“ Truth may prove destructive; but then it will be the fault not of truth but of ourselves. Its boasted liberty is a blessing to those only who are fit for liberty; to many it may prove nothing more than a short cut to ruin. Men must be educated, not only in truth, but for truth. You can not make people free from the outside. They must achieve freedom for themselves, by inward growth. You may strike off their shackles, but this will only give a man who is a slave by nature an open chance to plunge into a still more desperate servitude. ”

“ They neither shield nor explain, but thrust them forth grimly into school or street and let them learn as they may from brutal fact. Out of this may come strength, poise, self-dependence, and out of it, too, may come bewilderment, cringing deception, and self-distrust. It is, all said, a brutal, unfair method, and in its way it is as bad as shielding and indulgence. Why not, rather, face the facts and tell the truth? Your child is wiser than you think.
The truth lies ever between extremes. ”

“ To such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of elders. Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop when their defied tyrants are dejected.
For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a mere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without knowing any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were, proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are helpless and find no stay. ”

“ Children should obey their parents. Insubordination is a growing evil, blighting the buddings of self-government. Children. Parents should teach their children, at the earliest possible period, the truths of health and holiness. They are more tractable than adults, and learn more readily to love the simple verities which will make them happy and good.
Jesus loved little children because of their freedom from wrong and their receptiveness of right. While age is halting between two opinions, or battling with false belief, youth makes easy and rapid strides toward Truth. ”

“ True, a king of Israel whose wisdom is greatly extolled, and whose writings are widely read, urged the importance of the early training of children about three thousand years ago; but the progress of truth in the world is proverbially slow. When parents and teachers, legislators and lawgivers, are at last heartily convinced of the inestimable importance of the first six years of childhood, then the plays and occupations of that formative period of life will no longer be neglected or left to chance, and the exercise of story-telling will assume its proper place as an educative influence. ”

“ And in like manner, why should you dread secular education, except that it is against you? Why impede the circulation of books which take religious views opposite to your own? Why forbid your children and scholars the free [pg 072] perusal of poems or tales or essays or other light literature which you fear would unsettle their minds? Why oblige them to know these persons and to shun those, if you think that your friends have reason on their side as fully as your opponents? Truth is bold and unsuspicious; want of self-reliance is the mark of falsehood. ”

“ In a democracy there is constant danger of forgetting that the loftiest ideals of freedom are not those associated with the political life of the nation, but are indissolubly connected with the search for the truth that alone makes its possessor free. How strange that in a nation which boasts of the freedom of its political institutions so little is done by our universities to encourage and protect the agencies which are the basis of both intellectual and individual liberty, from the paralyzing influences that follow an attempt to meet the conventional social requirements in education. ”

“ Educate the children of these people, teach them the great lesson that happiness, prosperity, and success depend upon right living (to the establishment of this truth all true education tends) , and you decrease crime.
Again, can it be denied that anatomical and physiological ignorance is the parent of disease? Or that ignorance of political economy gives birth to financial heresies, to the enactment of unjust or unwise laws, to mistaken ideas concerning real-estate tenure, to socialism, communism, and anarchism? ”

“ Then I ask of what blessing is the army to the citizen, to the people as a whole? It takes away his children; it uses up the best years in their lives,—those years in which the youth ripens into a man, and in which his character matures. It is during those years that our sons are often treated with injustice and brutality, and, as a natural consequence, they return from the army into work-a-day life, as the bitter enemies of a government which dismisses many of them as helpless cripples or as physical wrecks without ever thinking of making suitable award. ”

“ The Communists, by virtue of their superior capability in the field of propaganda, could readily pervert the issue as being a choice between national independence and French Colonial rule. Furthermore, it would be militarily infeasible to prevent widespread intimidation of voters by Communist partisans. While it is obviously impossible to make a dependable forecast as to the outcome of a free election, current intelligence leads the Joint Chiefs to the belief that a settlement based, upon free elections would be attended by almost certain loss of the Associated States to Communist control. ”

“ American thinking and policy-making was dominated by the tendency to view communism in monolithic terms. The Viet Minh was, therefore, seen as part of the Southeast Asia manifestation of the world-wide communist expansionary movement. French resistance to Ho Chi Minh, in turn, was thought to be a crucial link in the containment of communism. This strategic perception of the communist threat was supported by the espousal of the domino principle: the loss of a single nation in Southeast Asia to communism would inexorably lead to the other nations of the area falling under communist control. ”

“ You can't suppress the natural yearning of the human heart for freedom and well-being, however much terror and murder governments may resort to. You can't stifle the demand of the toiler for better conditions. The struggle goes on and will continue in spite of everything law, government, and capital may do. But that the workers may not be wasting their energy and efforts in the wrong direction, they must clearly understand that they can no more hope for justice from the courts, from law and government, than they can expect wage slavery to be abolished by their masters. ”

“ Is it not as important that children should be taught the dangers to the mental faculties, when over-excited on the one hand, or left unoccupied on the other, as to teach them the conflicting theories of political economy, or the speculations of metaphysicians? For ourselves, we have always found children, especially girls, peculiarly ready to listen to what they saw would prepare them for future duties. The truth, that education should be a preparation for actual, real life, has the greatest force with children. ”

“ On the other hand, the proponents of revision, conscious of an “agitation for the reintroduction of parochial patriotism into the schools and colleges,” have entered a plea for “the truth” in school histories and for the writing and teaching of history by scholars unaffected by the demands of “politicians.” [641] To them, the true fount of patriotism does not arise from textbooks of history which are “nationalistic rather than impartial.” ”

“ Any time teachers or administrators promote political agendas in the classroom, they abuse their platform and dishonor every family who trusts them with their children’s education and moral development.
“Law and liberty cannot rationally become the object of our love,” wrote founding father James Wilson, “unless they first become the objects of our knowledge.” Students who are taught to understand America’s exceptional principles and America’s powerful history grow into strong citizens who respect the rule of law and protect the country they know and love. ”

“ Political passions die—History lives; and in an enlightened age like this, it must be written in simple truth, or the clear-sighted generations that follow us will detect the sophistry and falsehood. Impartial history demands honest facts. ”

“ The Communist Party has no other interests but those of the working class. It differs from the general mass of the workers in that it takes a general view of the whole historical march of the working class, and at all the turns of the road it endeavours to defend the interests, not of separate groups or professions, but those of the working class as a whole. The Communist Party is the organized political lever by means of which the more advanced part of the working class directs the whole mass of workers in the right direction. ”

“ At the time it was a bold innovation, the delight of all freethinkers and men of progress, of all who desired to serve the future. This book, which will soon celebrate its five- [four-] hundredth anniversary, is still the chief book of instruction for German children. True, its contents already are so antiquated that parents reject almost every sentence of it for themselves; true, the man of today understands its language only with difficulty—what of it, the children must gulp down the moldy, musty food. ”

“ That meant that the older children had to mark time during the most critical years of their life, making them tired of routine, and all desire to continue education died of sheer inanition. The average teacher into whose soul had entered the iron evil of tradition could rid himself of much routine, to the advantage of himself and his pupils. Given a sympathetic Government and a sympathetic local authority, teachers might do much as they pleased in the way of striking out new paths for themselves, it is averred. The aid of the film may be one of the “new paths” to knowledge. ”

“ Children must be granted freedom of opinion—and freedom of opinion means nothing except the freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are persuaded of a right one. They, moreover, must be the judges of what constitutes persuasion. You have asked me for practical and concrete suggestions in regard to education. I will make this one before I go: when I find an astronomy class in the first grade engaged in earnest debate as to whether the earth is round or flat, I will know that our school system has begun to be concerned for the first time with the inculcation of a love of truth. ”

“ If we look at the downright ethical significance of the methods of training and discipline in many families and schools, we see that they are positively degrading. We appoint more and more "monitors" instead of training the "inward monitor" in each child, make truth-telling difficult instead of easy, punish trivial and grave offenses about in the same way, practice open bribery by promising children a few cents a day to behave themselves, and weaken their sense of right by giving them picture cards for telling the truth and credits for doing the most obvious duty. ”

“ Such films are not “towards the education of your daughters,” as Shakespeare writes. The Public can be its own Censor. In the meantime educationists and social-reformers can strive to guide public opinion.
“I have hope that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed,” said a German writer once; and the reform of the film will come about possibly only by the people educating the film-producers to the view that it requires something else than the “adults only” brand. ”

“ The truth is, we are in the throes of an educational revolution; we are emerging from chaos rather than about to plunge into it; we are beginning to recognise that education is the applied science of life, and that we really have existing material in the philosophy of the ages and the science of the day to formulate an educational code whereby we may order the lives of our children and regulate our own. ”