|
[As reprinted in Left and Right, Spring 1966, edited by Murray N. Rothbard.
Rothbard’s Editorial Note: Education is a
perennially important and controversial subject, especially in a country as
child-centered as the United States.
Within
libertarian ranks, an unlimited diversity of viewpoint prevails, ranging from
rigorous traditionalists to ultra-progressives. Among the numerous
libertarians in the Los Angeles area, a controversy is now raging between the
Cardin and Montessori methods of education. We believe that the views of
Herbert Spencer, the great nineteenth-century English social philosopher, can
provide a much-needed but totally neglected contribution toward a rational
solution to many of these disputes, a solution grounded on education in
cause-and-effect. The following article is condensed from the chapter on
“Moral Education” in Herbert Spencer’s Education: Intellectual, Moral and
Physical (A. L. Burt Company, n.d.).]
While
it is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate
preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of
children, no preparation whatever is needed. In the absence of this
preparation, the management of children, and more especially the moral
management, is lamentably bad. Parents either never think about the matter at
all, or else their conclusions are crude, and inconsistent. In most cases,
and especially on the part of mothers, the treatment adopted on every
occasion is that which the impulse of the moment prompts: it springs not from
any reasoned-out conviction as to what will most conduce to the child’s
welfare, but merely expresses the passing parental feelings, whether good or
ill; and varies from hour to hour as these feelings vary. Or if these blind
dictates of passion are supplemented by any definite doctrines and methods,
they are those that have been handed down from the past, or those suggested
by the remembrances of childhood, or those adopted from nurses and servants —
methods devised not by the enlightenment, but by the ignorance of the
time.
Let
us go on to consider the true aims and methods of moral education. When a
child falls or runs its head against the table, it suffers a pain, the
remembrance of which tends to make it more careful for the future; and by an
occasional repetition of like experiences, it is eventually disciplined into
a proper guidance of its movements. If it lays hold of the fire-bars, thrusts
its finger into the candle-flame, or spills boiling water on any part of its
skin, the resulting burn or scald is a lesson not easily forgotten.
Now
in these and like cases, Nature illustrates to us in the simplest way, the
true theory and practice of moral discipline. Observe, in the first place,
that in bodily injuries and their penalties we have misconduct and its
consequences reduced to their simplest forms.
Though
according to their popular acceptations, right and wrong are words scarcely
applicable to actions that have none but direct bodily effects; yet whoever
considers the matter will see that such actions must be as much classifiable
under these heads as any other actions. Note, in the second place, the
character of the punishments by which these physical transgressions are
prevented. Punishments, we call them, in the absence of a better word; for
they are not punishments in the literal sense. They are not artificial and
unnecessary inflictions of pain; but are simply the beneficent checks to
actions that are essentially at variance with bodily welfare — checks in the
absence of which life would quickly be destroyed by bodily injuries. It is
the peculiarity of these penalties, if we must so call them, that they are
nothing more than the unavoidable consequences of the deeds which they
follow; they are nothing more than the inevitable reactions entailed by the
child’s actions.
Let
it be further borne in mind that these painful reactions are proportionate to
the degree in which the organic laws have been transgressed. A slight
accident brings a slight pain, a more serious one, a greater pain. When a
child tumbles over the doorstep, it is not ordained that it shall suffer in
excess of the amount necessary, with the view of making it still more
cautious than the necessary suffering will make it. But from its daily
experience it is left to learn the greater or less penalties of greater or
less errors, and to behave accordingly. And then mark, lastly, that these
natural reactions which follow the child’s wrong actions, are constant,
direct, unhesitating, and not to be escaped. No threats: but a silent,
rigorous performance.
… finish
reading>>
|
|
