“But, you may ask, what has all this to do with truth? Simply this. We have been forcing children to memorize alleged facts. A fact so memorized cannot be distinguished from a falsehood similarly memorized. And so we may very well say that we have failed to bring truth into education. For truth is reality brought into vital contact with the mind. It makes no difference whether we teach children that the earth is round or flat, if it means nothing to them either way. For truth does not reside in something outside the child’s mind; reality becomes truth only when it is made a part of his living.
“But, you will protest—and you will protest the more loudly the more you know of children—that their processes of thought are illogical, fantastic and wayward. And you will ask, Do I mean that we must respect the child’s error in order to cultivate in him a love of truth? Yes, I do mean just that! Do I mean that we must respect the child’s belief that the earth is flat, you ask? More than that, we must respect a thousand obscure and pervasive childish notions, such as the notion that a hair from a horse’s tail will turn into a pollywog if left in the rainbarrel, or the notion that the way to find a lost ball is to spit on the back of the hand, repeat an incantation couched in such words as ‘Spit, Spit, tell me where the ball is!’ and then strike it with the palm of the other hand. You can doubtless supply a thousand instances of the kind of childhood thinking to which I refer. But for simplicity’s sake, let us use the childish notion that the earth is flat as a convenient symbol for them all. And I say that if we do not respect the error, we shall not have any real success in convincing the child of the truth. We shall easily persuade him that the globe in the schoolroom is round—that the picture of the earth in the geography-book is round—but not that the familiar earth upon which he walks is anything but flat! At best, we shall teach him a secondary, literary, schoolroom conception to put beside his workaday one. And, in the long run, we shall place a scientific conception of things in general beside his primitive childish superstitions—but we shall scarcely displace them; and when it comes to a show-down in his adult life, we shall find him acting in accordance with childish superstitions rather than with scientific knowledge. Most of us, as adults, are full of such superstitions, and we act accordingly, and live feebly and fearfully; for we have never yielded to the childish magical conception of the world the respect that is due to it as a worthy opponent of scientific truth—we have assumed that we were persuaded of truth, while in reality truth has never yet met error in fair fight in our minds.
“If you wish to convince a friend of something, do you not first seek to find out what he really thinks about it, and make him weigh your truth and his error in the same balance? But in dealing with children, we fail to take account of their opinions at all. We say, ‘You must believe this because it is so.’ If they do believe it, they have only added one more superstition to their collection. Truths are not true because somebody says so; nor even because everybody says so; they are true only because they fit in better with all the rest of life than what we call errors—because they bear the test of living—because they work out. And this way of discovering truth is within the capacity of the youngest school-child. If you can get him to state candidly and without shame his doubtless erroneous ideas about the world, and give him leave to prove their correctness to you, you will have set in motion a process which is worthy to be called education; for it will constitute a genuine matching of theory with theory in his mind, a real training in inductive logic, and what conclusions he reaches will be truly his. When he sees in a familiar sunset, as he will see with a newly fascinated eye, the edge of the earth swinging up past the sun—then astronomy will be real to him, and full of meaning—and not a collection of dull facts that must be remembered against examination-day.
“This means that we must treat children as our equals. Education must embody a democratic relationship between adults and children. Children must be granted freedom of opinion—and freedom of opinion means nothing except the freedom to believe a wrong opinion until you are persuaded of a right one. They, moreover, must be the judges of what constitutes persuasion. You have asked me for practical and concrete suggestions in regard to education. I will make this one before I go: when I find an astronomy class in the first grade engaged in earnest debate as to whether the earth is round or flat, I will know that our school system has begun to be concerned for the first time with the inculcation of a love of truth. For, like Milton, I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.—I thank you for your attention!”
XXII. Enterprise
AND so we come to Goodness—and at the same time to a change in our program. After calling on the Artist as an expert to testify in regard to Beauty, and the Philosopher to tell us about Truth, it would seem that we should hear about Goodness from a moralist. So, no doubt, you expected—and so I had originally intended. But it cannot have failed to secure your notice that our experts pursued a somewhat unconventional line of argument. The Artist told us that the way to teach children to love Beauty was to leave them free to hate it if they chose. The Philosopher said that the way to inculcate in children a love of Truth was to leave them free to hold wrong opinions. Now it is all very well to talk that way about Beauty and Truth. We might perhaps be persuaded to take such risks, so long as only Beauty and Truth were involved. But Goodness is a different matter. It simply would not do for us to hear any one who proposed a similar course[Pg 158] in regard to conduct. Imagine any one suggesting that the way to teach children to be good is to leave them free to be bad! But that is just what I am afraid would happen if we called an expert on Morals to the stand. I have observed twenty or thirty of them shuffling their notes and their feet and waiting to be called on. But I do not trust them. No! Goodness is not going to be treated in so irreverent a fashion while I am running this discussion. I am going to see that this subject is treated with becoming reverence. And as the only way of making absolutely sure of this, I am going to address you myself.
We want children to grow up to be good men and women; and we want to know how the school can assist in this process. First, we must define goodness; and I shall suggest the rough outline of such a definition, which we must presently fill up in detail, by saying that goodness is living a really civilized life. And as one’s conduct is not to be measured or judged except as it affects others, we may say that goodness is a matter of civilized relationships between persons. And furthermore, as the two most important things in life are its preservation and perpetuation, the two fields of conduct in which it is most necessary to be civilized are Work and Love. Let us first deal with Work and find out what constitutes civilized conduct in that field.
We all exist, as we are accustomed to remind ourselves, in a world where one must work in order to live. That, in a broad sense, is true; but there are certain classes of persons exempt from any such actual compulsion; and with respect to almost any specific individual outside of those classes, it is generally possible for him to escape from that compulsion if he chooses. Take any one of us here; you, for instance. If you really and truly did not want to work, you could find a way to avoid it; you could get your wife or your mother to support you by taking in washing or doing stenography—or, if they refused, you could manage to become the victim of some accident which would disable you from useful labor and enable you to spend your days peacefully in an institution. But you prefer to work; and the fact is that you like work. You are unhappy because you don’t get a chance to do the work you could do best, or because you have not yet found the work you can do well; but you have energies which demand expression in work. And if you turn to the classes which are exempt from any compulsion to work, you find the rich expending their energies either in the same channels as everybody else, or organizing their play until its standards of effort are as exacting as those of work; you find women who are supported by their husbands rebelling against the imprisonment of the idle home, and seeking in all directions for employment of their energies; and as for the third class of those who do not have to work in order to live, we find that even idiots are happier when set at basket-weaving.