Education and the Good Life

In the following chapters, I propose to deal with various aspects of moral education, especially in the years from the second to the sixth. By the time the child is six years old, moral education ought to be nearly complete; that is to say, the further virtues which will be required in later years ought to be developed by the boy or girl spontaneously, as a result of good habits already existing and ambitions already stimulated. It is only where early moral training has been neglected or badly given that much will be needed at later ages. I suppose that the child has reached the age of twelve months healthy and happy, with the foundations of a disciplined character already well laid by the methods considered in the preceding chapter. There will, of course, be some children whose health is bad, even if parents take all the precautions known to science at present. But we may hope that their number will be enormously diminished as time goes on. They ought, even now, to be so few as to be statistically unimportant, if existing knowledge[102] were adequately applied. I do not propose to consider what ought to be done with children whose early training has been bad. This is a problem for the schoolmaster, not for the parent; and it is especially to the parent that this book is addressed. The second year of life should be one of great happiness. Walking and talking are new accomplishments, bringing a sense of freedom and power. Every day the child improves in both.[5] Independent play becomes possible, and the child has a more vivid sense of “seeing the world” than a man can derive from the most extensive globe-trotting. Birds and flowers, rivers and the sea, motor-cars and trains and steamers all bring delight and passionate interest. Curiosity is boundless: “want to see” is one of the commonest phrases at this age. Running freely in a garden or a field or on the seashore produces an ecstasy of emancipation after the confinement of crib and baby-carriage. Digestion is usually stronger than in the first year, food is more varied, and mastication is a new joy. For all these reasons, if the child is well cared for and healthy, life is a delicious adventure. But with the greater independence of walking[103] and running there is apt to come also a new timidity. The new-born infant can easily be frightened; Dr. J. B. and Mrs. Watson found that the things which alarm it most are loud noises and the sensation of being dropped.[6] It is, however, so completely protected that it has little occasion for the rational exercise of fear; even in real dangers it is helpless, so that fear would not be of any use to it. During the second and third year, new fears develop. It is a moot point how far this is due to suggestion, and how far it is instinctive. The fact that the fears do not exist during the first year is not conclusive against their instinctive character, since an instinct may ripen at any age. Not even the most extreme Freudian would maintain that the sex instinct is mature at birth. Obviously children who can run about by themselves have more need of fear than infants that cannot walk; it would therefore not be surprising if the instinct of fear arose with the need. The question is of considerable educational importance. If all fears arise from suggestion, they can be prevented by the simple expedient of not showing fear or aversion before a child. If, on the other hand, some of them are instinctive, more elaborate methods will be required. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, in his book “The[104] Childhood of Animals”, gives a large number of observations and experiments to show that there is usually no inherited instinct of fear in young animals.[7] Except monkeys and a few birds, they view the age-long enemies of their species, such as snakes, without the slightest alarm, unless their parents have taught them to feel fear of these animals. Children well under a year old seem never to be afraid of animals. Dr. Watson taught one such child to be afraid of rats by repeatedly sounding a gong behind its head at the moment when he showed it a rat. The noise was terrifying, and the rat came to be so by association. But instinctive fear of animals seems quite unknown in the early months. Fear of the dark, also, seems never to occur in children who have not been exposed to the suggestion that the dark is terrifying. There are certainly very strong grounds for the view that most of the fears which we used to regard as instinctive are acquired, and would not arise if grown-up people did not create them. In order to get fresh light on this subject, I have observed my own children carefully; but as I could not always know what nurses and maids might have said to them, the interpretation of the facts was often doubtful. So far[105] as I could judge, they bore out Dr. Watson’s views as to fear in the first year of life. In the second year, they showed no fear of animals, except that one of them, for a time, was afraid of horses. This, however, was apparently due to the fact that a horse had suddenly galloped past her with a very loud noise. She is still in her second year, and therefore for later observation I am dependent on the boy. Near the end of his second year, he had a new nurse who was generally timid and especially afraid of the dark. He quickly acquired her terrors (of which we were ignorant at first); he fled from dogs and cats, cowered in abject fear before a dark cupboard, wanted lights in every part of the room after dark, and was even afraid of his little sister the first time he saw her, thinking, apparently, that she was a strange animal of some unknown species.[8] All these fears might have been acquired from the timid nurse; in fact they gradually faded away after she was gone. There were other fears, however, which could not be accounted for in the same way, since they began before the nurse came, and were directed to objects which no grown-up person would find alarming. Chief of these was a fear of everything that moved in a surprising way, notably shadows and mechanical[106] toys. After making this observation, I learned that fears of this sort are normal in childhood, and that there are strong reasons for regarding them as instinctive. The matter is discussed by William Stern in his “Psychology of Early Childhood”, p. 494 ff, under the heading “Fear of the Mysterious”. What he says is as follows: The special significance of this form of fear, particularly in early childhood, has escaped the notice of the older school of child psychologists; it has lately been established by Groos and by us. “Fear of the unaccustomed seems to be more a part of primitive nature than fear of a known danger” (Groos, p. 284). If the child meets with anything that does not fit in with the familiar course of his perception, three things are possible. Either the impression is so alien that it is simply rejected as a foreign body, and consciousness takes no notice of it. Or the interruption of the usual course of perception is pronounced enough to attract attention but not so violent as to effect disturbance; it is rather surprise, desire for knowledge, the beginning of all thought, judgment, enquiry. Or, lastly, the new suddenly breaks in upon the old with violent intensity, throws familiar ideas into unexpected confusion without a possibility of an immediate practical adjustment; then follows a shock with a strong affective-tone of displeasure, the fear of the mysterious (uncanny). Groos now has pointed out with keen insight that this fear of the uncanny is also distinctly founded on instinctive fear; it corresponds to a biological necessity which works from one generation to the next. [107]Stern gives many instances, among others fear of a suddenly opened umbrella and “the frequent fear of mechanical toys”. The former, by the way, is very strong in horses and cows: a large herd can be driven into headlong flight by it, as I have verified. My own boy’s terrors, under this head, were just such as Stern describes. The shadows that frightened him were vague quickly-moving shadows thrown into a room by unseen objects (such as omnibuses) passing in the street. I cured him by making shadows on the wall and the floor with my fingers, and getting him to imitate me; before long, he felt that he understood shadows and began to enjoy them. The same principle applied to mechanical toys: when he had seen the mechanism he was no longer frightened. But when the mechanism was invisible the process was slow. Some one gave him a cushion which emitted a long melancholy whine after being sat upon or pressed. This alarmed him for a long time. In no case did we entirely remove the terrifying object: we put it at a distance, where it was only slightly alarming; we produced gradual familiarity; and we persisted till the fear completely ceased. Generally the same mysterious quality which caused fear at first produced delight when the fear had been overcome. I think an irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually[108] overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms. We adopted an exactly opposite process—perhaps wrongly—in the case of two rational fears which were wholly absent. I live half the year on a rocky coast where there are many precipices. The boy had no sense whatever of the danger of heights, and would have run straight over a cliff into the sea if we had let him. One day when we were sitting on a steep slope that ended in a sheer drop of a hundred feet, we explained to him quietly, as a merely scientific fact, that if he went over the edge he would fall and break like a plate. (He had lately seen a plate broken into many pieces by being dropped on the floor.) He sat still for some time, saying to himself “fall”, “break”, and then asked to be taken further from the edge. This was at the age of about two and a half. Since then he has had just enough fear of heights to make him safe while we keep an eye on him. But he would still be very rash if left to himself. He now (three and nine months) jumps from heights of six feet without hesitation, and would jump twenty feet if we would let him. Thus the instruction in apprehension certainly did not produce excessive results. I attribute this to the fact that it was instruction, not suggestion; neither of us was feeling fear when the instruction was given. I[109] regard this as very important in education. Rational apprehension of dangers is necessary; fear is not. A child cannot apprehend dangers without some element of fear, but this element is very much diminished when it is not present in the instructor. A grown-up person in charge of a child should never feel fear. That is one reason why courage should be cultivated in women just as much as in men. The second illustration was less deliberate. One day when I was walking with the boy (at the age of three years and four months) we found an adder on the path. He had seen pictures of snakes, but had never before seen a real snake. He did not know that snakes bite. He was delighted with the adder, and when it glided away he ran after it. As I knew he could not catch it, I did not check him, and did not tell him that snakes are dangerous. His nurse, however, from that time