The important principle in education is not so much formation of habits as the power of their re-formation. The power of breaking up habits is by far the more essential factor of a good education. It is in this power of breaking down habits that we can find the key for the unlocking of the otherwise inaccessible stores of subconscious reserve energy. The cultivation of the power of habit-disintegration is what constitutes the proper education of man’s genius.[[1]]
| [1] | A well known editor of one of the academic Journals on Educational Psychology writes to me as follows: “Your remarks on the avoidance of routine would be like a red rag to a bull for a number of educators who are emphasizing the importance of habit formation in education at present.” |
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The power of breaking down or dissolving habits depends on the amount and strength of the aqua fortis of the intellect. The logical and critical activities of the individual should be cultivated with special care. The critical self, as we may put it, should have control over the automatic and the subconscious. For the subconscious has been shown to form the fertile soil for the breeding of the most dangerous germs of mental disease, epidemics, plagues and pestilences in their worst forms. We should try to develop the individual’s critical abilities in early childhood, not permitting the suggestible subconsciousness to predominate, and to become overrun with noxious weeds and pests.
We should be very careful with the child’s critical self, as it is weak and has little resistance. We should, therefore, avoid all dominating authority and categorical imperative commands. Autocratic authority cultivates in the child the predisposition to abnormal suggestibility, to hypnotic states, and leads towards the dominance of the subconscious with its train of pernicious tendencies and deleterious results.
There is a period in the child’s life between the ages of five and ten when he is very inquisitive, asking all kinds of questions. It is the age of discussion in the child. This inquisitiveness and discussion should by all means be encouraged and fostered. We should aid the development of the spirit of inquisitiveness and curiosity in the child. For this is the acquisition of control over the stored-up, latent energies of man’s genius.
We should not arrest the child’s questioning spirit, as we are often apt to do, but should strongly encourage the apparently meddlesome and troublesome searching and prying and scrutinizing of whatever interests the child. Everything should be open to the child’s searching interest; nothing should be suppressed and tabooed as too sacred for examination. The spirit of inquiry, the genius of man, is more sacred than any abstract belief, dogma and creed.
A rabbi came to ask my advice about the education of his little boy. My advice was: “Teach him not to be a Jew.” The man of God departed and never came again. The rabbi did not care for education, but for faith. He did not wish his boy to become a man, but to be a Jew.
The most central, the most crucial part of the education of man’s genius is the knowledge, the recognition of evil in all its protean forms and innumerable disguises, intellectual, æsthetic and moral, such as fallacies, sophisms, ugliness, deformity, prejudice, superstition, vice and depravity. Do not be afraid to discuss these matters with the child. For the knowledge, the recognition of evil does not only possess the virtue of immunization of the child’s mind against all evil, but furnishes the main power for habit-disintegration with consequent release and control of potential reserve energy, of manifestations of human genius. When a man becomes contented and ceases to notice the evils of life, as is done by some modern religious sects, he loses his hold on the powers of man’s genius, he loses touch with the throbbing pulse of humanity, he loses hold on reality and falls into subhuman groups.