Project Gutenberg #70302
Education and the Good Life
Bertrand Russell
1926Russell on raising and educating children, from fear and play in infancy to the school curriculum and the university.
Project Gutenberg #70302 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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would rather remain miserable than do anything unusual.) Most people’s sex-life, at[83] present, is more or less unsatisfactory. This is partly due to bad education, partly to persecution by the authorities and Mrs. Grundy. A generation of women brought up without irrational sex fears would soon make an end of this. Fear has been thought the only way to make women “virtuous”, and they have been deliberately taught to be cowards, both physically and mentally. Women in whom love is cramped encourage brutality and hypocrisy in their husbands, and distort the instincts of their children. One generation of fearless women could transform the world, by bringing into it a generation of fearless children, not contorted into unnatural shapes, but straight and candid, generous, affectionate, and free. Their ardour would sweep away the cruelty and pain which we endure because we are lazy, cowardly, hard-hearted and stupid. It is education that gives us these bad qualities, and education that must give us the opposite virtues. Education is the key to the new world.
But it is time to have done with generalities and come to the concrete detail in which our ideals are to be embodied.
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