The truth is, we do not realize the importance of early training. We begin education late in the child’s life, when dispositions have become formed and habits have become rigid. This delay seriously injures the growth of the child by lowering the level of mental activity. The critical points of formation of mental interests are allowed to slip by, leaving the individual irresponsive to mental, æsthetic, and moral interests. The critical turning points, when the best energies could be brought out, are not taken care of at the right moment.
The mental functions become prematurely atrophied and degenerated. When we later on attempt to awaken those functions, we are surprised to find them absent. We labor under the false impression that the child is naturally inapt and deficient. To make up for this apparent deficiency we force the child’s mind into narrow channels, crippling and deforming it into mean mediocrity. The child is run into the rigid moulds of home, school, and college with the result of permanent mutilation of originality and genius. The individual is deformed, because the critical spirit of inquiry and originality is racked on the Procrustes’ bed of home and school. The unfortunate thing about it is the firm belief that the crippled spirit of the child is a congenital mediocrity. Instead of shouldering the fault, we put the burden on Heredity. Darwinism with its spontaneous variation and hereditary transmission, Austro-Germanic Mendelism, accompanied by a widespread propaganda of Eugenics, have blotted out from view the far more fundamental factors of environment and education which play such a paramount rôle in man’s life.
We may profit by recent studies in Psychopathology. In my investigations I have shown the important rôle which early child experience plays in the patient’s life. Psychopathic affections can be traced to child fears which become afterwards reinforced by unfavorable conditions of life. This is formulated in my works on Psychopathology. Psychopathology clearly brings out the significant fact that a good start in early childhood is of the utmost consequence to the individual. Only a good education in early life can save man from the innumerable psychopathic maladies to which he is subject. The seeds of vicious habits and of criminal tendencies can be eliminated in early childhood.
Early development or what is termed “precocity” in children will not only prevent vice, crime, and disease, but will strengthen the individual along all lines, physical, mental, and moral. We should be careful not to cast the child’s mind into ready made moulds, not to subject his mind, his character to the yoke of meaningless mannerisms and rigid formalities. We should have respect for the child’s personality. We should remember that there is genius in every healthy, normal child.
We are blind to the child’s latent genius, because we look to brute force as our standard. Like savages, we are afraid of genius, especially when it is manifested as “precocity in children.” This abject fear of genius and of precocity is one of the most pernicious philistine superstitions, causing the retardation of the progress of humanity. The fear of mental precocity is essentially the phobia of the inveterate philistine.
We should bear in mind that the philistine is an insignificant, though exact part of a huge social machine, of a Frankenstein “kultur” before which the philistine prostrates himself in dust, a social monster of which he is proud to form an irresponsible mite. Whether he be an atom of a political organization, of a nation, or of a military kultur-system, the philistine is trained to be content to play the same ignoble, slavish rôle of submission, obedience, and irresponsibility. Without personal conscience, without personal will, without personal initiative, the impersonal philistine is like the stupid genie of Aladdin’s lamp who slavishly obeys the master of the magic lamp.
The present horrible European war (predicted in this volume several years before the onset of the war. See pp. 30, 31) is the unfortunate, but natural outcome of philistine education and philistine life. The immediate cause of the war may be traced to politics, greed, competition, to commercial, industrial, cultural, national, international, and racial complications. At bottom, however, the present European war is ultimately due to our pernicious system of training, the bane of our industrial, social life. Millions of men are drilled and disciplined to act as automata; men are trained from childhood, at home, school, college, and university to surrender their individual judgment, and follow blindly an alleged “social consciousness,” entrusted, by a set of philistine bureaucrats, to superior leaders, to generals, admirals, and field-marshals. Men are hypnotized by a pernicious and vicious system of training and quasi-education to consider it a high, sacred ideal to obey implicitly the will of a few officials and diplomats, to attack, plunder and slaughter at the command of generals and officers, in the interest of a plutocratic oligarchy, hallowed by the vague shibboleth: “Flag, Country, Patriotism.”[[2]] The youth of nations is debauched with the belief in the supreme grandeur of delivering their personal responsibility in the keeping of a handful of Byzantine bureaucrats, irresponsible junkers, and half-crazed Cæsars.
The principle “Be Childlike” is paramount in the education of mankind. The child represents the future, all the possibilities, all the coming greatness of the human race. We, the adults, are contaminated by the brutal passions and vices incident to the struggle for existence and self-preservation.
Plasticity of mind is characteristic of genius. Plasticity of mind and body is preëminently characteristic of the child. Adaptability and plasticity are found in all young tissue, muscle, gland, and nerve. As the organism ages, becomes differentiated, and adapted to special functions and conditions of life, it loses its original plasticity. The tissues become fixed and the functions set. The adult’s brain and mind begin to work in ruts. The child is superior to the adult.
The child looks at the world with eyes simple, clear, bright, not blinded by the heavy scales of traditions, superstitions, and prejudices of remote ages. The intricate worries, complex fears, selfish motives, brutal passions, greed, revenge, malice, vice, enmity do not as yet mar the soul of the child. Artificial needs, strong animal passions have no firm hold on the child’s mind. The child’s mind is purer, fresher, brighter, far more original than the adult intelligence with its philistine notions and hide-bound habits of thought and belief.