Bertrand Russell

“ I fear lest those readers who have hitherto accepted my principles may suspect them when they are applied in this sphere; they may have admitted readily enough that fearlessness and freedom are good for a child, and yet desire, where sex is concerned, to impose slavery and terror. I cannot so limit principles which I believe to be sound, and I shall treat sex exactly as I have treated the other impulses which make up a human character.
There is one respect in which, quite independently of taboos, sex is peculiar, and that is the late ripening of the instinct. ”

“ Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit. Dreams are only to be condemned when they are a lazy substitute for an effort to change reality; when they are an incentive, they are fulfilling a vital purpose in the incarnation of human ideals. To kill fancy in childhood is to make a slave to what exists, a creature tethered to earth and therefore unable to create heaven.
This is all very well, you may say, but what has it to do with giants eating children, or Bluebeard cutting off his wives’ heads? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above all, if you wish to dispel fear in your children, be fearless yourself. If you are afraid of thunderstorms, the child will catch your fear the first time he hears thunder in your presence. If you express a dread of social revolution, the child will feel a fright all the greater for not knowing what you are talking about. If you are apprehensive about illness, so will your child be. Life is full of perils, but the wise man ignores those that are inevitable, and acts prudently but without emotion as regards those that can be avoided. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In politics, we conceal the vices of eminent statesmen of our own party. In theology, we conceal the sins of Popes if we are Catholics, and the sins of Luther and Calvin if we are Protestants. In matters of sex, we pretend before young people that virtue is much commoner than it is. In all countries, even adults are not allowed to know certain kinds of facts which the police consider undesirable, and the censor, in England, does not allow plays to be true to life, since he holds that the public can only be cajoled into virtue by deceit. This whole attitude implies a certain feebleness. ”

“ He should be occupied, rather, in the pursuit of a vision, in capturing and giving permanence to something which he has first seen dimly for a moment, which he has loved with such ardour that the joys of this world have grown pale by comparison. All great art and all great science springs from the passionate desire to embody what was at first an unsubstantial phantom, a beckoning beauty luring men away from safety [313] and ease to a glorious torment. ”

“ And it destroys that relation of open confidence which ought to exist between parents and children, as well as between teachers and pupils. The modern parent wants his children to be as unconstrained in his presence as in his absence; he wants them to feel pleasure when they see him coming; he does not want a fictitious Sabbath calm while he is watching, succeeded by pandemonium as soon as he turns his back. To win the genuine affection of children is a joy as great as any that life has to offer. ”

“ It is they, much more than the insurgent democracy, who are the enemies of pure learning. “Useless” learning, like “art for art’s sake”, is an aristocratic, not a plutocratic, ideal; where it lingers, it is because the renaissance tradition is not yet dead. I regret the decay of this ideal profoundly; pure learning was one of the best things associated with aristocracy. But the evils of aristocracy were so great as easily to outweigh this merit. In any case, industrialism must kill aristocracy, whether we desire it or not. ”

“ This is collective Quixotism: they are resolved not to be told that the helmet is less good than they wish to believe. Such an attitude of abject funk is unworthy of free men and women. In my school, no obstacle to knowledge shall exist of any sort or kind. I shall seek virtue by the right training of passions and instincts, not by lying and deceit. In the virtue that I desire, the pursuit of knowledge, [289] without fear and without limitation, is an essential element, in the absence of which the rest has little value. ”

“ Love cannot be a duty, because it is not subject to the will. It is a gift from heaven, the best that heaven has to bestow. Those who shut it up in a cage destroy the beauty and joy which it can only display while it is free and spontaneous. Here, again, fear is the enemy. He who fears to lose what makes the happiness of his life has already lost it. In this, as in other things, fearlessness is the essence of wisdom. ”

“ The great incentive to effort, all through life, is experience of success after initial difficulties. The difficulties must not be so great as to cause discouragement, or so small as not to stimulate effort. From birth to death, this is a fundamental principle. It is by what we do ourselves that we learn. What grown-up people can do is to perform some simple action that the child would like to perform, such as rattling a rattle, and then let the child find out how to do it. What others do is merely a stimulus to ambition; it is never in itself an education. ”

“ But I should not urge my own views upon the pupils. What I should do is to put before them the ideal of a scientific attitude to practical questions. I should expect them to produce arguments that are arguments, and facts that are facts. In politics, especially, this habit is as rare as it is valuable. Every vehement political party generates a cocoon of myth, within which its mentality peacefully slumbers. Passion, too often, kills intellect; in intellectuals, on the contrary, intellect not infrequently kills passion. My aim would be to avoid both these misfortunes. ”

“ I should begin with battles in which it is natural to feel on the side of the beaten party—for instance, the battle of Hastings in teaching an English boy. I should emphasize always the wounds and suffering produced. I should gradually lead the child to feel no partisanship in reading about wars, and to regard both sides as silly men who had lost their tempers, and ought to have had nurses to put them to bed till they were good. I should assimilate wars to quarrels among the children in the nursery. ”

“ Do not let a child always refuse the use of its own toys to other children. Whenever it has more than it can actually use, it should not be allowed to protest if another child plays with those that it is not using. But here I should except toys which the other child is likely to break, and toys out of which their owner has constructed some edifice which is a source of pride. Until the edifice is forgotten, it should, if possible, be allowed to stand, as a reward of industry. Subject to these provisos, do not let the child develop a dog-in-the-manger attitude ”

“ Where there is competition for a pleasure which can only be enjoyed by one at a time, such as a ride in a wheelbarrow, it will be found that the children readily understand justice. Their impulse, of course, is to demand the pleasure for themselves to the exclusion of the others, but it is surprising how quickly this impulse is overcome when the grown-ups institute the system of a turn for each. I do not believe that a sense of justice is innate, but I have been astonished to see how quickly it can be created. ”

“ I was about fourteen when I first read “Oliver Twist”, but it filled me with emotions of horror which I could scarcely have borne at an earlier age. Dreadful things should not be known to young people until they are old enough to face them with a certain poise. This moment will come sooner with some children than with others: those who are imaginative or timid must be sheltered longer than those who are stolid or endowed with natural courage. A mental habit of fearlessness due to expectation of kindness should be firmly established before the child is made to face the existence of unkindness. ”

“ The mind and body of a child demand a great deal of play, and after the first years play can hardly be satisfactory except with other boys and girls. Without play, a child becomes strained and nervous; it loses the joy of life and develops anxieties. It is, of course, possible to bring up a child as John Stuart Mill was brought up, to begin Greek at the age of three, and never know any ordinary childish fun. From the mere standpoint of acquiring knowledge, the results may be good, but taken all round I cannot admire them. ”

“ Throughout education, from the first day to the last, there should be a sense of intellectual adventure. The world is full of puzzling things which can be understood by sufficient effort. The sense of understanding what had been puzzling is exhilarating and delightful; every good teacher should be able to give it. Madame Montessori describes the delight of her children when they find they can write; I remember a sense almost of intoxication when I first read Newton’s deduction of Kepler’s Second Law from the law of gravitation. ”

“ There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive. All that has been done to improve the education of little children has been done by those who loved them; all has been done by those who knew all that science could teach on the subject. This is one of the benefits we derive from the higher education of women: in former days, science and love of children were much less likely to coexist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [75] 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. ”

“ The feeling of inferiority is very strong in children; when they are normal and rightly educated, it is a stimulus to effort, but if they are repressed it may become a source of unhappiness.
In play, we have two forms of the will to power: the form which consists in learning to do things, and the form which consists in fantasy. Just as the balked adult may indulge in daydreams that have a sexual significance, so the normal child indulges in pretences that have a power-significance. He likes to be a giant, or a lion, or a train; in his make-believe, he inspires terror. ”

“ Nevertheless, the right way of giving children a knowledge of evil is not easily found. Of course, those who live in the slums of big cities get to know early all about drunkenness, quarrels, wife-beating, and so on. Perhaps this does them no harm, if it is counteracted by other influences; but no careful parent would deliberately expose a very young child to such sights. I think the great objection is that they rouse fear so vividly as to colour the whole of the rest of life. A child, being defenceless, cannot help feeling terror when it first understands that cruelty to children is possible. ”

“ The conception is that of the human race as a whole, fighting against chaos without and darkness within, the little tiny lamp of reason growing gradually into a great light by which the night is dispelled. The divisions between races, nations and creeds should be treated as follies, distracting us in the battle against Chaos and Old Night, which is our one truly human activity. ”