Education and the Good Life
by . New York: Boni and Liveright. 1926. Large 12mo. xiv+305 pp. $2.50.
IN our cheerful modern symposium, Bertrand Russell is one of the most refreshing speakers. Like Wells, Chesterton, and others, he is impelled, greatly to our profit, to share with us his experiences in religion, politics, science, education, what you will. His very language has and imparts vitality, and the most abstruse subjects become comprehensible and exciting when he treats of them. This book, inspired, he tells us, by contact with his own small children, is one of his simplest. It is not so challenging a book as Why Men Fight or Roads to Freedom: sometimes one might even find it a trifle obvious, did one not remember the atrocities of mechanical discipline still forcing many small folk into a stereotyped mould in the name of education. But it has charm, or it would not be Mr. Russell’s.
The charm results from the audacious and unconventional attitude of a man himself saturated with the best elements in the old educational tradition. Mr. Russell values the classics as little as does Wells, but in some of his most keenly analytical pages he repudiates the ulilitarian trend of education as vigorously as any advocate of the humanities. ‘We cannot say that a useful activity is one that has useful results. The essence of what is useful is that it ministers to some result which is not merely useful. . . . Somewhere we must get beyond the chain of successive utilities, and find a peg from which the chain is to hang. If not there is no real usefulness in any link of the chain.’ Our final peg must he ‘the good life,’ and the good life depends largely on a living imagination.
Presently Mr. Russell settles down to discussing the four basic characteristics of an ideal character: vitality, courage, sensitiveness, and intelligence. From the education of character he passes to intellectual education, leading us up from babyhood to brief comments on the university years. The college teacher, by the way, will relish his insistence that teaching is a subordinate duty, and that universities do not fulfill their function unless they give their staffs rich leisure for research and creative work. Most of the book, however, deals with childhood. Probably the author is right in saying that the increased attention we now pay to infancy is one of our most, important gains; yet how can one forget that amazing passage early in the Confessions, where Saint Augustine talks about himself as a baby? Has modern psychology carried us much further?
Mr. Russell, like most moderns, is all for the removal of disciplinary restrictions; but he is, thanks be, also strong in pointing out the need of the young life to be sustained in the power of internal self-discipline. His discussion is eminently wholesome and sane. The social radicalism we expect from him is undisguised, but while he is clear that any education endorsed must be such as can one day be universal he is equally clear that ‘progress should not be sacrificed to a mechanical equality at the present, moment.’ The two incubi on education most vigorously denounced are the aristocratic theory implicit in the teaching of Locke and Rousseau, and the theory of the Fall of Man, with its disastrous effects on the treatment of children. But it is a relief to find him quite as remote from unmitigated Freud. The (Edipus complex is treated with the polite but disgusted incredulity it deserves. To Mr. Russell, the desire for power seems far stronger than the sex impulse in young children, but he has too much humor to lean on any one formula as an exclusive clue to the miraculous growth of a teal miraculous child.
He will be challenged here and there. Some readers will be shocked at his calm assertion that parents have no right to expect much from children in the way of affection; others will find equally hard-hearted his plea for sending tiny children away to school; it would seem at times as if he agreed with Shaw’s summary of the attitude of the modern mother: ‘ Run away now, Darling.’ But this is all on the surface; really, the book is tender as well as wise.
What a pity that we have to talk all the time about Educationists! No substitute is at hand, but one winces at the frequent recurrence of a word so hideous.
VIDA D. SCUDDER