A Dominie in Doubt

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

Parents and teachers fail because they cannot see the world as the child sees it. The child of three is a frank egoist. He cares for no one but himself, and the world is his. Anger him and he would have you drawn and quartered if he had the power. His instincts prompt him to master his environment, and to begin with, when he is a few weeks old, his environment and his own person are indistinguishable.

Homer Lane gives a delightful description of the child's first efforts and how they are frustrated by ignorant adults.

"At a very early age the child becomes aware through various processes that his own hand which he has seen moving across his line of vision is a part of himself, and that he can move it himself. He has discovered power. He then enters upon his career. The same motive that will govern his behaviour for the rest of his life comes into operation, and he wants to use this new-found power for some purpose that will increase his enjoyment of life. Up to this time he has had only one pleasure, and that was to do with the commissariat. Having discovered power over his fist he therefore wants to put it in his mouth . . . a difficult task requiring much practice and patient perseverance.

"As he goes on working he learns that his power increases with effort, and now his motive is modified. At first it was purely materialistic; he wanted to have his fist in his mouth. Now he wants to put it there. His interest is in doing the thing rather than in having it.

"This is the spiritual element in his present desire, and now comes the first mistake in education. The mother, analysing the behaviour of the child, has noticed his complaint at the difficulty of the task as fatigue sets in, and, misunderstanding the motive of the child she helps him to put his fist in his mouth. But that is just what the child did not want, and he protests violently against this interference with his purpose in life.

"The mother again makes a false analysis of the situation, and concludes that his protest is the result of his disappointment that there is no nourishment in the fist. She then gives him food or paregoric, whatever may be her method of dealing with the spiritual unrest of her child, and thus drugs his creative faculties."

I have said that the infant is an egoist. If his egoism is allowed full scope he will enter upon the next stage of life, the self-assertive stage, with a huge capacity for being altruistic. This stage comes on about the age of six or seven. But if the child has had parents who believe in moulding character he will have had many severe lectures about his selfishness. These lectures will not have cured his selfishness; they will have driven it underground for the moment. The selfishness of adults is one result of the moral lecture in childhood, for no wish or emotion will remain buried for ever.

The age of self-assertion is the rowdy age, and naturally it is now that father uses his authority. The child is still ego-centric, but in a different way. At the age of three he was the king of the world; at the age of seven he is the king of the other boys who play with him. He is now reckoning with society, and he uses society as a background against which he may play the hero. Thus be bleeds Jack's nose for no reason in the world other than that he thus asserts himself. If he plays horses with the boy next door he insists upon being the driver.

It is at this period that he should be free from authority. If authority in the shape of father or teacher or policeman steps in to suppress his self-assertion the boy becomes an enemy of all authority and very often anti-social. The "rebel" in the Socialist camp is a good specimen of the man whose self-assertive period was injured by authority, and I suspect that the truculent drunk is letting off the steam that he should have let off at the age of eight.

The third stage in the evolution of a child is the adolescent stage. For the first time the boy becomes a unit in society. Hitherto he has played for his own hand; his games have been games in which personal prowess was the desired aim. Now he feels that he is one of a team. Even before puberty the team-forming impulse is seen; Putter, for instance, in The Boy and his Gang, gives ten to sixteen as the gang age.