Education and the Good Life

Love of play is the most obvious distinguishing mark of young animals, whether human or otherwise. In human children, this is accompanied by an inexhaustible pleasure in pretence. Play and pretence are a vital need of childhood, for which opportunity must be provided if the child is to be happy and healthy, quite independently of any further utility in these activities. There are two questions which concern education in this connection: first, what should parents and schools do in the way of providing opportunity? and secondly, should they do anything more, with a view to increasing the educational usefulness of games? Let us begin with a few words about the psychology of games. This has been exhaustively treated by Groos; a shorter discussion will be found in William Stern’s book mentioned in the preceding chapter. There are two separate questions in this matter: the first is as to the impulses which produce play, the second is as to its biological utility. The second[124] is the easier question. There seems no reason to doubt the most widely accepted theory, that in play the young of any species rehearse and practise the activities which they will have to perform in earnest later on. The play of puppies is exactly like a dog-fight, except that they do not actually bite each other. The play of kittens resembles the behaviour of cats with mice. Children love to imitate any work they have been watching, such as building or digging; the more important the work seems to them, the more they like to play at it. And they enjoy anything that gives them new muscular facilities, such as jumping, climbing, or walking up a narrow plank—always provided the task is not too difficult. But although this accounts, in a general way, for the usefulness of the play-impulse, it does not by any means cover all its manifestations, and must not for a moment be regarded as giving a psychological analysis. Some psycho-analysts have tried to see a sexual symbolism in children’s play. This, I am convinced, is utter moonshine. The main instinctive urge of childhood is not sex, but the desire to become adult, or, perhaps more correctly, the will to power.[11] The child is impressed by his own weakness in comparison with[125] older people, and he wishes to become their equal. I remember my boy’s profound delight when he realized that he would one day be a man and that I had once been a child; one could see effort being stimulated by the realization that success was possible. From a very early age, the child wishes to do what older people do, as is shown by the practice of imitation. Older brothers and sisters are useful, because their purposes can be understood and their capacities are not so far out of reach as those of grown-up people. The feeling of inferiority is very strong in children; when they are normal and rightly educated, it is a stimulus to effort, but if they are repressed it may become a source of unhappiness. In play, we have two forms of the will to power: the form which consists in learning to do things, and the form which consists in fantasy. Just as the balked adult may indulge in daydreams that have a sexual significance, so the normal child indulges in pretences that have a power-significance. He likes to be a giant, or a lion, or a train; in his make-believe, he inspires terror. When I told my boy the story of Jack the Giant Killer, I tried to make him identify himself with Jack, but he firmly chose the giant. When his mother told him the story of Bluebeard, he insisted on being Bluebeard, and regarded the wife as justly punished for insubordination.[126] In his play, there was a sanguinary outbreak of cutting off ladies’ heads. Sadism, Freudians would say; but he enjoyed just as much being a giant who ate little boys, or an engine that could pull a heavy load. Power, not sex, was the common element in these pretences. One day, when we were returning from a walk, I told him, as an obvious joke, that perhaps we should find a certain Mr. Tiddliewinks in possession of our house, and he might refuse to let us in. After that, for a long time, he would stand on the porch being Mr. Tiddliewinks, and telling me to go to another house. His delight in this game was unbounded, and obviously the pretence of power was what he enjoyed. It would, however, be an undue simplification to suppose that the will to power is the sole source of children’s play. They enjoy the pretence of terror—perhaps because the knowledge that it is a pretence increases their sense of safety. Sometimes I pretend to be a crocodile coming to eat my boy up. He squeals so realistically that I stop, thinking he is really frightened; but the moment I stop he says, “Daddy be a crocodile again”. A good deal of the pleasure of pretence is sheer joy in drama—the same thing that makes adults like novels and the theatre. I think curiosity has a part in all this: by playing bears, the child feels as if he[127] were getting to know about bears. I think every strong impulse in the child’s life is reflected in play: power is only dominant in his play in proportion as it is dominant in his desires. As regards the educational value of play, everybody would agree in praising the sort that consists in acquiring new aptitudes, but many moderns look with suspicion upon the sort that consists in pretence. Daydreams, in adult life, are recognized as more or less pathological, and as a substitute for efforts in the sphere of reality. Some of the discredit which has fallen upon daydreams has spilled over on to children’s pretences, quite mistakenly, as I think. Montessori teachers do not like children to turn their apparatus into trains or steamers or what not: this is called “disordered imagination”. They are quite right, because what the children are doing is not really play, even if to themselves it may seem to be nothing more. The apparatus amuses the child, but its purpose is instruction; the amusement is merely a means to instruction. In real play, amusement is the governing purpose. When the objection to “disordered imagination” is carried over into genuine play, it seems to me to go too far. The same thing applies to the objection to telling children about fairies and giants and witches and magic carpets and so on. I cannot sympathize[128] with the ascetics of truth, any more than with ascetics of other kinds. It is commonly said that children do not distinguish between pretence and reality, but I see very little reason to believe this. We do not believe that Hamlet ever existed, but we should be annoyed by a man who kept reminding us of this while we were enjoying the play. So children are annoyed by a tactless reminder of reality, but are not in the least taken in by their own make-believe. Truth is important, and imagination is important; but imagination develops earlier in the history of the individual, as in that of the race. So long as the child’s physical needs are attended to, he finds games far more interesting than reality. In games he is a king: indeed he rules his territory with a power surpassing that of any mere earthly monarch. In reality he has to go to bed at a certain time, and to obey a host of tiresome precepts. He is exasperated when unimaginative adults interfere thoughtlessly with his mise-en-scène. When he has built a wall that not even the biggest giants can scale, and you carelessly step over it, he is as angry as Romulus was with Remus. Seeing that his inferiority to other people is normal, not pathological, its compensation in fantasy is also normal and not pathological. His games do not take up time which might be more profitably spent in other ways: if all his hours were[129] given over to serious pursuits, he would soon become a nervous wreck. An adult who indulges in dreams may be told to exert himself in order to realize them; but a child cannot yet realize dreams which it is right that he should have. He does not regard his fancies as a permanent substitute for reality; on the contrary, he ardently hopes to translate them into fact when the time comes. It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit. Dreams are only to be condemned when they are a lazy substitute for an effort to change reality; when they are an incentive, they are fulfilling a vital purpose in the incarnation of human ideals. To kill fancy in childhood is to make a slave to what exists, a creature tethered to earth and therefore unable to create heaven. This is all very well, you may say, but what has it to do with giants eating children, or Bluebeard cutting off his wives’ heads? Are these things to exist in your heaven? Must not imagination be purified and ennobled before it can serve any good purpose? How can you, a pacifist, allow your innocent boy to revel in the thought of destroying human life? How can you justify a pleasure derived from instincts of[130] savagery which the human race must outgrow? All this I imagine the reader has been feeling. The matter is important, and I will try to state why I hold to a different point of view. Education consists in the cultivation of instincts, not in their suppression. Human instincts are very vague, and can be satisfied in a great variety of ways. Most of them require, for their gratification, some kind of skill. Cricket and baseball satisfy the same instinct, but a boy will play whichever he has learnt. Thus the secret of instruction, in so far as it bears upon character, is to give a man such kinds of skill as shall lead to his employing his instincts usefully. The instinct of power, which in the child is crudely satisfied by identification with Bluebeard, can find in later life a refined satisfaction by scientific discovery, or artistic creation, or the creation and education of splendid children, or any one of a thousand useful activities. If the only thing a man knows is how to fight, his will to power will make him delight in battle. But if he has other kinds of skill, he will find his satisfaction in other ways. If, however, his will to power has been nipped in the bud when he was a child, he will be listless and lazy, doing little good and little harm; he will be “a Dio spiacente ed a’ nemici sui.” This kind of milksop goodness is not what the world needs, or what we should try to produce[131] in our children. While they are small and cannot do much harm, it is biologically natural that they should, in imagination, live through the life of remote savage ancestors. Do not be afraid that they will remain at that level, if you put in their way the knowledge and skill required for more refined satisfactions. When I was a child, I loved to turn head over heels. I never do so now, though I should not think it wicked to do so. Similarly the child who enjoys being Bluebeard will outgrow this taste, and learn to seek power in other ways. And if his imagination has been kept alive in childhood by the stimuli appropriate to that stage, it is much more likely to remain alive in later years, when it can exercise itself in the ways suitable to a man. It is useless to obtrude