Education and the Good Life

The first year of life was formerly regarded as lying outside the sphere of education. At least until the infant could speak, if not longer, it was left to the entirely unchecked care of mothers and nurses, who were supposed to know by instinct what was good for the child. As a matter of fact, they did not know. An enormous proportion of children died during the first year, and of the remainder many were already ruined in health. By bad handling, the foundations had been laid for disastrous habits of mind. All this has only recently been realized. The invasion of the nursery by science is often resented, because it disturbs the sentimental picture of mother and child. But sentimentality and love cannot coexist; the parent who loves his or her child will wish it to live, even if it should be necessary to employ intelligence for the purpose. Accordingly we find this sentimentality strongest in childless people and in people who, like Rousseau, are willing to leave their children to the Foundling[88] Hospital. Most educated parents are eager to know what science has to say, and uneducated parents, also, learn from maternity centres. The result is shown in the remarkable diminution of infant mortality. There is reason to think that, with adequate care and skill, very few children would die in infancy. Not only would few die, but the survivors would be healthier in mind and body. Questions of physical health, strictly speaking, lie outside the scope of this book, and must be left to medical practitioners. I shall touch on them only where they have psychological importance. But physical and mental are scarcely distinguishable in the first year of life. Moreover the educator in later years may find himself handicapped by purely physiological mistakes in handling the infant. We cannot therefore altogether avoid trespassing upon ground which does not of right belong to us. The new-born infant has reflexes and instincts, but no habits. Whatever habits it may have acquired in the womb are useless in its new situation: even breathing sometimes has to be taught, and some children die because they do not learn the lesson quickly enough. There is one well-developed instinct, the instinct of sucking; when the child is engaged in this occupation, it feels at home with its new environment. But the rest of its waking life is[89] passed in a vague bewilderment, from which relief is found by sleeping most of the twenty-four hours. At the end of a fortnight, all this is changed. The child has acquired expectations from regularly recurring experiences. It is already a conservative—probably a more complete conservative than at any later time. Any novelty is met with resentment. If it could speak, it would say: “Do you suppose I am going to change the habits of a lifetime at my time of life?” The rapidity with which infants acquire habits is amazing. Every bad habit acquired is a barrier to better habits later; that is why the first formation of habits in early infancy is so important. If the first habits are good, endless trouble is saved later. Moreover habits acquired very early feel, in later life, just like instincts; they have the same profound grip. New contrary habits acquired afterwards cannot have the same force; for this reason, also, the first habits should be a matter of grave concern. Two considerations come in when we are considering habit-formation in infancy. The first and paramount consideration is health; the second is character. We want the child to become the sort of person that will be liked and will be able to cope with life successfully. Fortunately, health and character point in the same direction: what is good for one is good also[90] for the other. It is character that specially concerns us in this book; but health requires the same practices. Thus we are not faced with the difficult alternative of a healthy scoundrel or a diseased saint. Every educated mother nowadays knows such simple facts as the importance of feeding the infant at regular intervals, not whenever it cries. This practice has arisen because it is better for the child’s digestion, which is an entirely sufficient reason. But it is also desirable from the point of view of moral education. Infants are far more cunning than grown-up people are apt to suppose; if they find that crying produces agreeable results, they will cry. When, in later life, a habit of complaining causes them to be disliked instead of petted, they feel surprised and resentful, and the world seems to them cold and unsympathetic. If, however, they grow up into charming women, they will still be petted when they are querulous, and the bad training begun in childhood will be intensified. The same thing is true of rich men. Unless the right methods are adopted in infancy, people in later life will be either discontented or grasping, according to the degree of their power. The right moment to begin the requisite moral training is the moment of birth, because then it can be begun without disappointing expectations. At[91] any later time it will have to fight against contrary habits, and will therefore be met by resentful indignation. In dealing with the infant, therefore, there is need of a delicate balance between neglect and indulgence. Everything necessary for health must be done. The child must be picked up when it suffers from wind, it must be kept dry and warm. But if it cries when there is no adequate physical cause, it must be left to cry; if not, it will quickly develop into a tyrant. When it is attended to, there should not be too much fuss: what is necessary must be done, but without excessive expressions of sympathy. At no period of its life must it be regarded as an agreeable pet, somewhat more interesting than a lap-dog. It must from the very first be viewed seriously, as a potential adult. Habits which would be intolerable in an adult may be quite pleasant in a child. Of course the child cannot actually have the habits of an adult, but we should avoid everything that places an obstacle in the way of the acquisition of these habits. Above all, we should not give the child a sense of self-importance which later experience will mortify, and which, in any case, is not in accordance with the facts. The difficulty in the education of young infants is largely the delicate balance required in the parent. Constant watchfulness and[92] much labour are needed to avoid injury to health; these qualities will hardly exist in the necessary degree except where there is strong parental affection. But where this exists, it is very likely not to be wise. To the devoted parent, the child is immensely important. Unless care is taken, the child feels this, and judges himself as important as his parents feel him. In later life, his social environment will not regard him so fondly, and habits which assume that he is the centre of other people’s universe will lead to disappointment. It is therefore necessary, not only in the first year, but afterwards also, that the parents should be breezy and cheerful and rather matter-of-fact where the child’s possible ailments are concerned. In old days, infants were at once restricted and coddled: their limbs were not free, they were too warmly dressed, they were hampered in their spontaneous activities, but they were petted, sung to, rocked and dandled. This was ideally wrong, since it turned them into helpless pampered parasites.[4] The right rule is: encourage spontaneous activities, but discourage demands upon others. Do not let the child see how much you do for it, or how much trouble you take. Let it, wherever possible, taste the joy of a success achieved by its own efforts, not[93] extracted by tyrannizing over the grown-ups. Our aim, in modern education, is to reduce external discipline to a minimum; but this requires an internal self-discipline which is much more easily acquired in the first year of life than at any other time. For example: when you want a child to sleep, do not wheel it up and down, or take it in your arms, or even stay where it can see you. If you do this once, the child will demand that you should do it next time; in an incredibly short space of time it becomes a terrific business to get the child to sleep. Make it warm and dry and comfortable, put it down firmly, and after a few quiet remarks leave it to itself. It may cry for a few minutes, but unless it is ill it will soon stop. If you then go to look, you will find that it is fast asleep. And it will sleep far more with this treatment than with petting and indulgence. The new-born infant, as we observed before, has no habits, but only reflexes and instincts. It follows that his world is not composed of “objects”. Recurrent experiences are necessary for recognition, and recognition is necessary before the conception of an “object” can arise. The feel of the cot, the feel and smell of the mother’s breast (or the bottle), and the mother’s or nurse’s voice will soon come to be familiar. The visual appearance of the mother[94] or the cot comes somewhat later, because the new-born child does not know how to focus so as to see shapes distinctly. It is only gradually, through the formation of habits by association, that touch and sight and smell and hearing come together and coalesce in the common-sense notion of an object, of which one manifestation leads to the expectation of another. Even then, for a time, there is hardly any feeling of the difference between persons and things; a baby which is partly breast-fed and partly bottle-fed will, for a time, have similar feelings towards mother and bottle. During all this time, education must be by purely physical means. Its pleasures are physical—chiefly food and warmth—and its pains also are physical. Habits of behaviour arise through seeking what is associated with pleasure and avoiding what is associated with pain. A child’s crying is partly a reflex connected with pain, partly an act performed in the pursuit of pleasure. At first, of course, it is only the former. But since any real pain that the child may be suffering must, if possible, be removed, it is inevitable that crying should come to be associated with pleasant consequences. The child therefore soon begins to cry because it desires a pleasure, not because it feels a physical pain; this is one of its first triumphs of intelligence. But try as it may, it cannot give quite[95] the same cry as when it is in actual pain. The attentive ear of the mother knows the difference, and if she is wise she will ignore the cry that is not an expression of physical pain. It is easy and agreeable to amuse an infant by dandling it or singing to it. But it learns with amazing rapidity to demand more and more of such amusements, which soon interfere with necessary sleep—and sleep ought to occupy almost all the day except meal-times. Some of these precepts may seem harsh, but experience shows that they make for the child’s health and happiness. But while the amusements which grown-up people provide should be kept within certain limits, those which the infant can enjoy for itself should be encouraged to the utmost. From the first, it should have opportunities to kick and practise its muscles. How our ancestors can have so long persisted in the practice of swaddling-clothes is almost inconceivable, it shows that even parental affection has difficulty in overcoming laziness, since the infant whose limbs are free needs more attention. As soon as the child can focus, it finds pleasure in watching moving objects, especially things that wave in the wind. But the number of possible amusements