Education and the good life

by Bertrand Russell

When my boy was two years and four months old, I went to America, and was absent three months. He was perfectly happy in my absence, but was wild with joy when I returned. I found him waiting impatiently by the garden gate; he seized my hand, and began showing me everything that specially interested him. I wanted to hear, and he wanted to tell; I had no wish to tell, and he had none to hear. The two impulses were different, but harmonious. When it comes to stories, he wishes to hear and I wish to tell, so that again there is harmony. Only once has this situation been reversed. When he was three years and six months old, I had a birthday, and his mother told him that everything was to be done to please me. Stories are his supreme delight; to our surprise, when the time for them came, he announced that he was going to tell me stories, as it was my birthday. He told about a dozen, then jumped down, saying “no more stories to-day”. That was three months ago, but he has never told stories again.

I come now to the wider question of affection and sympathy in general. As between parents and children, there are complications owing to the possibility of abuse of power by parents; it was necessary to deal with these complications before attacking the general question.

There is no possible method of compelling a child to feel sympathy or affection; the only possible method is to observe the conditions under which these feelings arise spontaneously, and then endeavour to produce the conditions. Sympathy, undoubtedly, is partly instinctive. Children are worried when their brothers or sisters cry, and often cry too. They will take their part vehemently against the grown-ups when disagreeable things are being done to them. When my boy had a wound on his elbow which had to be dressed, his sister (aged eighteen months) could hear him crying in another room, and was very much upset. She kept on repeating “Jonny crying, Jonny crying”, until the painful business was finished. When my boy saw his mother extracting a thorn with a needle from her foot, he said anxiously, “It doesn’t hurt, Mummy”. She said it did, wishing to give him a lesson in not making a fuss. He insisted that it didn’t hurt, whereupon she insisted that it did. He then burst into sobs, just as vehement as if it had been his own foot. Such occurrences must spring from instinctive physical sympathy. This is the basis upon which more elaborate forms of sympathy must be built. It is clear that nothing further is needed in the way of positive education except to bring home to the child the fact that people and animals can feel pain, and do feel it under certain circumstances. There is, however, a further negative condition: the child must not see people he respects committing unkind or cruel actions. If the father shoots or the mother speaks rudely to the maids, the child will catch these vices.

It is a difficult question how and when to make a child aware of the evil in the world. It is impossible to grow up ignorant of wars and massacres and poverty and preventable disease which is not prevented. At some stage, the child must know of these things, and must combine the knowledge with a firm conviction that it is a dreadful thing to inflict, or even permit, any suffering which can be avoided. We are here confronted by a problem similar to that which faces people who wish to preserve female chastity; these people formerly believed in ignorance till marriage, but now adopt more positive methods.

I have known some pacifists who wished history taught without reference to wars, and thought that children should be kept as long as possible ignorant of the cruelty in the world. But I cannot praise the “fugitive and cloistered virtue” that depends upon absence of knowledge. As soon as history is taught at all, it should be taught truthfully. If true history contradicts any moral we wish to teach, our moral must be wrong, and we had better abandon it. I quite admit that many people, including some of the most virtuous, find facts inconvenient, but that is due to a certain feebleness in their virtue. A truly robust morality can only be strengthened by the fullest knowledge of what really happens in the world. We must not run the risk that the young people whom we have educated in ignorance will turn to wickedness with delight as soon as they discover that there is such a thing. Unless we can give them an aversion from cruelty, they will not abstain from it; and they cannot have an aversion from it if they do not know that it exists.

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. 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. To choose the moment and the manner requires tact and understanding; it is not a matter which can be decided by a rule.

There are, however, certain maxims which should be followed. To begin with, stories such as Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer do not involve any knowledge of cruelty whatever, and do not raise the problems we are considering. To the child, they are purely fantastic, and he never connects them with the real world in any way. No doubt the pleasure he derives from them is connected with savage instincts, but these are harmless as mere play-impulses in a powerless child, and they tend to die down as the child grows older. But when the child is first introduced to cruelty as a thing in the real world, care must be taken to choose incidents in which he will identify himself with the victim, not with the torturer. Something savage in him will exult in a story in which he identifies himself with the tyrant; a story of this kind tends to produce an imperialist. But the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, or of the she-bears killing the children whom Elisha cursed, naturally rouses the child’s sympathy for another child. If such stories are told, they should be told as showing the depths of cruelty to which men could descend long ago. I once, as a child, heard a sermon of an hour’s duration, entirely devoted to proving that Elisha was right in cursing the children. Fortunately, I was old enough to think the parson a fool; otherwise I should have been driven nearly mad with terror. The story of Abraham and Isaac was even more dreadful, because it was the child’s father who was cruel to him. When such stories are told with the assumption that Abraham and Elisha were virtuous, they must either be ignored or utterly debase a child’s moral standards. But when told as an introduction to human wickedness, they serve a purpose, because they are vivid, remote, and untrue. The story of Hubert putting out little Arthur’s eyes, in “King John”, may be used in the same way.

Then history may be taught, with all its wars. But in telling about wars, sympathy at first should be with the defeated. 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. In this way, I believe children could be made to see the truth about war, and to realize that it is silly.

If any actual instance of unkindness or cruelty comes under the child’s notice, it should be fully discussed, with all the moral values which the adult himself attaches to the incident, and always with the suggestion that the people who acted cruelly were foolish, and did not know any better because they had not been well brought up. But I should not call the child’s attention to such things in his real world, if they were not spontaneously observed by him, until after he had grown familiar with them in history and stories. Then I should gradually introduce him to a knowledge of evil in his surroundings. But I should always give him the feeling that the evil can be combated, and results from ignorance and lack of self-control and bad education. I should not encourage him to be indignant with malefactors, but rather to regard them as bunglers, who do not know in what happiness consists.

The cultivation of wide sympathies, given the instinctive germ, is mainly an intellectual matter: it depends upon the right direction of attention, and the realization of facts which militarists and authoritarians suppress. Take, for example, Tolstoy’s description of Napoleon going round the battlefield of Austerlitz after the victory. Most histories leave the battlefield as soon as the battle is over; by the simple expedient of lingering on it for another twelve hours, a completely different picture of war is produced. This is done, not by suppressing facts, but by giving more facts. And what applies to battles applies equally to other forms of cruelty. In all cases, it should be quite unnecessary to point the moral; the right telling of the story should be sufficient. Do not moralize, but let the facts produce their own moral in the child’s mind.