Practical Education, Volume I

It is certain, that many persons of strict honour and honesty in some points, on others are utterly inconsistent in their principles. Thus it is said, that private integrity and public corruption frequently meet in the same character: thus some gentlemen are jockies, and they have a convenient latitude of conscience as jockies, whilst they would not for the universe cheat a man of a guinea in any way but in the sale of a horse: others in gambling, others in love, others in war, think all stratagems fair. We endeavour to think that these are all honourable men; but we hope, that we are not obliged to lay down rules for the formation of such moral prodigies in a system of practical education.

We are aware, that with children58 who are educated at public schools, truth and integrity cannot be taught precisely in the same manner as in private families; because ushers and schoolmasters cannot pay the same hourly attention to each of their pupils, nor have they the command of all the necessary circumstances. – There are, however, some advantages attending the early commerce which numbers of children at public seminaries have with each other; they find that no society can subsist without truth; they feel the utility of this virtue, and, however they may deal with their masters, they learn to speak truth towards each other. – This partial species of honesty, or rather of honour, is not the very best of its kind, but it may easily be improved into a more rational principle of action. It is illiberal to assert, that any virtue is to be taught only by one process of education: many different methods of education may produce the same effects. Men of integrity and honour have been formed both by private and public education; neither system should be exclusively supported by those who really wish well to the improvement of mankind. All the errours of each system should be impartially pointed out, and such remedies as may most easily be adopted with any hope of success, should be proposed. We think, that if parents paid sufficient attention to the habits of their children, from the age of three to seven years old, they would be properly prepared for public education; they would not then bring with them to public schools all that they have learned of vice and falsehood in the company of servants.59 We have purposely repeated all this, in hopes of impressing it strongly. May we suggest to the masters of these important seminaries, that Greek and Latin, and all the elegance of classical literature, are matters but of secondary consequence, compared with those habits of truth, which are essential to the character and happiness of their pupils? By rewarding the moral virtues more highly than the mere display of talents, a generous emulation to excel in these virtues may with certainty be excited.

Many preceptors and parents will readily agree, that Bacon, in his "general distribution of human knowledge," was perfectly right not to omit that branch of philosophy, which his lordship terms "The doctrine of rising in the world." To this art, integrity at length becomes necessary; for talents, whether for business or for oratory, are now become so cheap, that they cannot alone ensure pre-eminence to their possessors. – The public opinion, which in England bestows celebrity, and necessarily leads to honour, is intimately connected with the public confidence. Public confidence is not the same thing as popularity; the one may be won, the other must be earned. There is amongst all parties, who at present aim at political power, an unsatisfied demand for honest men. Those who speculate in this line for their children, will do wisely to keep this fact in their remembrance during their whole education.

We have delayed, from a full consciousness of the difficulty of the undertaking, to speak of the method of curing either the habits or the propensity to falsehood. Physicians, for mental as well as bodily diseases, can give long histories of maladies; but are surprisingly concise when they come to treat of the method of cure. With patients of different ages, and different temperaments, to speak with due medical solemnity, we should advise different remedies. With young children, we should be most anxious to break the habits; with children at a more advanced period of their education, we should be most careful to rectify the principles. Children, before they reason, act merely from habit, and without having acquired command over themselves, they have no power to break their own habits; but when young people reflect and deliberate, their principles are of much more importance than their habits, because their principles, in fact, in most cases, govern their habits. It is in consequence of their deliberations and reflections that they act; and, before we can change their way of acting, we must change their way of thinking.

To break habits of falsehood in young children, let us begin by removing the temptation, whatever it may be. For instance, if the child has the habit of denying that he has seen, heard, or done things which he has seen, heard, and done, we must not, upon any account, ever question him about any of these particulars, but we should forbear to give him any pleasure which he might hope to obtain by our faith in his assertions. Without entering into any explanations, we should absolutely60 disregard what he says, and with looks of cool contempt, turn away without listening to his falsities. A total change of occupations, new objects, especially such as excite and employ the senses, will be found highly advantageous. Sudden pleasure, from strong expressions of affection, or eloquent praise, whenever the child speaks truth, will operate powerfully in breaking his habits of equivocation. We do not advise parents to try sudden pain with children at this early age, neither do we advise bodily correction, or lasting penitences, meant to excite shame, because these depress and enfeeble the mind, and a propensity to falsehood ultimately arises from weakness and timidity. Strengthen the body and mind by all means; try to give the pupils command over themselves upon occasions where they have no opportunities of deceiving: the same command of mind and courage, proceeding from the consciousness of strength and fortitude, may, when once acquired, be exerted in any manner we direct. A boy who tells a falsehood to avoid some trifling pain, or to procure some trifling gratification, would perhaps dare to speak the truth, if he were certain that he could bear the pain, or do without the gratification. Without talking to him about truth or falsehood, we should begin by exercising him in the art of bearing and forbearing. The slightest trials are best for beginners, such as their fortitude can bear, for success is necessary to increase their courage.

Madame de Genlis, in her Adele and Theodore, gives Theodore, when he is about seven years old, a box of sugar-plums to take care of, to teach him to command his passions. Theodore produces the untouched treasure to her mother, from time to time, with great self-complacency. We think this a good practical lesson. Some years ago the experiment was tried, with complete success, upon a little boy between five and six years old. This boy kept raisins and almonds in a little box in his pocket, day after day, without ever thinking of touching them. His only difficulty was to remember at the appointed time, at the week's end, to produce them. The raisins were regularly counted from time to time, and were, when found to be right, sometimes given to the child, but not always. When, for several weeks, the boy had faithfully executed his trust, the time was extended for which he was to keep the raisins, and every body in the family expressed that they were now certain, before they counted the raisins, that they should find the number exact. This confidence, which was not pretended confidence, pleased the child, but the rest he considered as a matter of course. We think such little trials as these might be made with children of five or six years old, to give them early habits of exactness. The boy we have just mentioned, has grown up with a more unblemished reputation for truth, than any child with whom we were ever acquainted. This is the same boy who broke the looking-glass.

When a patient, far advanced in his childhood, is yet to be cured of a propensity to deceive, the business becomes formidable. It is dangerous to set our vigilance in direct opposition to his cunning, and it is yet more dangerous to trust and give him opportunities of fresh deceit. If the pupil's temper is timid, fear has probably been his chief inducement to dissimulation. If his temper is sanguine, hope and success, and perhaps the pleasure of inventing schemes, or of outwitting his superiors, have been his motives. In one case we should prove to the patient, that he has nothing to fear from speaking the truth to us; in the other case we should demonstrate to him, that he has nothing to hope from telling us falsehoods. Those who are pleased with the ingenuity of cunning, should have opportunities of showing their ingenuity in honourable employments, and the highest praise should be given to their successful abilities whenever they are thus exerted. They will compare their feelings when they are the objects of esteem, and of contempt, and they will be led permanently to pursue what most tends to their happiness. We should never deprive them of the hope of establishing a character for integrity; on the contrary, we should explain distinctly to them, that this is absolutely in their own power. Examples from real life will strike the mind of a young person just entering into the world, much more than any fictitious characters, or moral stories; and strong indignation, expressed incidentally, will have more effect than any lectures prepared for the purpose. We do not mean, that any artifice should be used to make our lessons impressive; but there is no artifice in seizing opportunities, which must occur in real life, to exemplify the advantages of a good character. The opinions which young people hear expressed of actions in which they have no share, and of characters with whom they are not connected, make a great impression upon them. The horror which is shown to falsehood, the shame which overwhelms the culprit, they have then leisure to contemplate; they see the effects of the storm at a distance; they dread to be exposed to its violence, and they will prepare for their own security. When any such strong impression has been made upon the mind, we should seize that moment to connect new principles with new habits of action: we should try the pupil in some situation in which he has never been tried before, and where he consequently may feel hope of obtaining reputation, if he deserves it, by integrity. All reproaches upon his former conduct should now be forborne, and he should be allowed to feel, in full security, the pleasures and the honours of his new character.

We cannot better conclude a chapter upon Truth, than by honestly referring the reader to a charming piece of eloquence, with which Mr. Godwin concludes his essay upon Deception and Frankness.61 We are sensible how much we shall lose by the comparison: we had written this chapter before we saw his essay.

CHAPTER IX

ON REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS

To avoid, in education, all unnecessary severity, and all dangerous indulgence, we must form just ideas of the nature and use of rewards and punishments. Let us begin with considering the nature of punishment, since it is best to get the most disagreeable part of our business done the first.

Several benevolent and enlightened authors62 have endeavoured to explain the use of penal laws, and to correct the ideas which formerly prevailed concerning public justice. Punishment is no longer considered, except by the ignorant and sanguinary, as vengeance from the injured, or expiation from the guilty. We now distinctly understand, that the greatest possible happiness of the whole society must be the ultimate object of all just legislation; that the partial evil of punishment is consequently to be tolerated by the wise and humane legislator, only so far as it is proved to be necessary for the general good. When a crime has been committed, it cannot be undone by all the art, or all the power of man; by vengeance the most sanguinary, or remorse the most painful. The past is irrevocable; all that remains, is to provide for the future. It would be absurd, after an offence has already been committed, to increase the sum of misery in the world, by inflicting pain upon the offender, unless that pain were afterwards to be productive of happiness to society, either by preventing the criminal from repeating his offence, or by deterring others from similar enormities. With this double view of restraining individuals, by the recollection of past sufferings, from future crimes, and of teaching others, by public examples, to expect, and to fear, certain evils as the necessary consequences of certain actions hurtful to society, all wise laws are framed, and all just punishments are inflicted. It is only by the conviction that certain punishments are essential to the general security and happiness, that a person of humanity can, or ought, to fortify his mind against the natural feelings of compassion. These feelings are the most painful, and the most difficult to resist, when, as it sometimes unavoidably happens, public justice requires the total sacrifice of the happiness, liberty, or perhaps the life, of a fellow-creature, whose ignorance precluded him from virtue, and whose neglected or depraved education prepared him, by inevitable degrees, for vice and all its miseries. How exquisitely painful must be the feelings of a humane judge, in pronouncing sentence upon such a devoted being! But the law permits of no refined metaphysical disquisitions. It would be vain to plead the necessitarian's doctrine of an unavoidable connection between the past and the future, in all human actions; the same necessity compels the punishment that compels the crime; nor could, nor ought, the most eloquent advocate, in a court of justice, to obtain a criminal's acquittal by entering into a minute history of the errours of his education.

It is the business of education to prevent crimes, and to prevent all those habitual propensities which necessarily lead to their commission. The legislator can consider only the large interests of society; the preceptor's view is fixed upon the individual interests of his pupil. Fortunately both must ultimately agree. To secure for his pupil the greatest possible quantity of happiness, taking in the whole of life, must be the wish of the preceptor: this includes every thing. We immediately perceive the connection between that happiness, and obedience to all the laws on which the prosperity of society depends. – We yet further perceive, that the probability of our pupil's yielding not only an implicit, but an habitual, rational, voluntary, happy obedience, to such laws, must arise from the connection which he believes, and feels, that there exists between his social duties and his social happiness. How to induce this important belief, is the question.

It is obvious, that we cannot explain to the comprehension of a child of three or four years old, all the truths of morality; nor can we demonstrate to him the justice of punishments, by showing him that we give present pain to ensure future advantage. But, though we cannot demonstrate to the child that we are just, we may satisfy ourselves upon this subject, and we may conduct ourselves, during his non-age of understanding, with the scrupulous integrity of a guardian. Before we can govern by reason, we can, by associating pain or pleasure with certain actions, give habits, and these habits will be either beneficial or hurtful to the pupil: we must, if they be hurtful habits, conquer them by fresh punishments, and thus we make the helpless child suffer for our negligence and mistakes. Formerly in Scotland there existed a law, which obliged every farrier who, through ignorance or drunkenness, pricked a horse's foot in shoeing him, to deposit the price of the horse until he was sound, to furnish the owner with another, and in case the horse could not be cured, the farrier was doomed to indemnify the injured owner. At the same rate of punishment, what indemnification should be demanded from a careless or ignorant preceptor?

When a young child puts his finger too near the fire, he burns himself; the pain immediately follows the action; they are associated together in the child's memory; if he repeat the experiment often, and constantly with the same result, the association will be so strongly formed, that the child will ever afterwards expect these two things to happen together: whenever he puts his finger into fire, he will expect to feel pain; he will learn yet further, as these things regularly follow one another, to think one the cause, and the other the effect. He may not have words to express these ideas; nor can we explain how the belief that events, which have happened together, will again happen together, is by experience induced in the mind. This is a fact, which no metaphysicians pretend to dispute; but it has not yet, that we know of, been accounted for by any. It would be rash to assert, that it will not in future be explained, but at present we are totally in the dark upon the subject. It is sufficient for our purpose to observe, that this association of facts, or of ideas, affects the actions of all rational beings, and of many animals who are called irrational. Would you teach a dog or a horse to obey you; do you not associate pleasure, or pain, with the things you wish that they should practise, or avoid? The impatient and ignorant give infinitely more pain than is necessary to the animals they educate. If the pain, which we would associate with any action, do not immediately follow it, the child does not understand us; if several events happen nearly at the same time, it is impossible that a child can at first distinguish which are causes, and which are effects. Suppose, that a mother would teach her little son, that he must not put his dirty shoes upon her clean sofa: if she frowns upon him, or speaks to him in an angry tone, at the instant that he sets his foot and shoe upon the sofa, he desists; but he has only learned, that putting a foot upon the sofa, and his mother's frown, follow each other; his mother's frown, from former associations, gives him perhaps, some pain, or the expectation of some pain, and consequently he avoids repeating the action which immediately preceded the frown. If, a short time afterwards, the little boy, forgetting the frown, accidentally gets upon the sofa without his shoes, no evil follows; but it is not probable, that he can, by this single experiment, discover that his shoes have made all the difference in the two cases. Children are frequently so much puzzled by their confused experience of impunity and punishment, that they are quite at a loss how to conduct themselves. Whenever our punishments are not made intelligible, they are cruel; they give pain, without producing any future advantage. To make punishment intelligible to children, it must be not only immediately, but repeatedly and uniformly, associated with the actions which we wish them to avoid.

When children begin to reason, punishment affects them in a different manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. They distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation; they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause, frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that the will is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by circumstances, by passions, by persuasion, by caprice. It must be, however, by slow degrees, that they acquire any ideas of justice. They cannot know our views relative to their future happiness; their first ideas of the justice of the punishments we inflict, cannot, therefore, be accurate. They regulate these first judgments by the simple idea, that our punishments ought to be exactly the same always in the same circumstances; when they understand words, they learn to expect that our words and actions should precisely agree, that we should keep our promises, and fulfil our threats. They next learn, that as they are punished for voluntary faults, they cannot justly be punished until it has been distinctly explained to them what is wrong or forbidden, and what is right or permitted. The words right or wrong, and permitted or forbidden, are synonymous at first in the apprehensions of children; and obedience and disobedience are their only ideas of virtue and vice. Whatever we command to be done, or rather whatever we associate with pleasure, they imagine to be right; whatever we prohibit, provided we have uniformly associated it with pain, they believe to be wrong. This implicit submission to our authority, and these confined ideas of right and wrong, are convenient, or apparently convenient, to indolent or tyrannical governours; and they sometimes endeavour to prolong the reign of ignorance, with the hope of establishing in the mind an opinion of their own infallibility. But this is a dangerous, as well as an unjust, system. By comparison with the conduct and opinions of others, children learn to judge of their parents and preceptors; by reading and by conversation, they acquire more enlarged notions of right and wrong; and their obedience, unless it then arise from the conviction of their understandings, depends but on a very precarious foundation. The mere association of pleasure and pain, in the form of reward and punishment, with any given action, will not govern them; they will now examine whether there is any moral or physical necessary connection between the action and punishment; nor will they believe the punishment they suffer to be a consequence of the action they have committed, but rather a consequence of their being obliged to submit to the will of those who are stronger or more powerful than they are themselves. Unjust punishments do not effect their intended purpose, because the pain is not associated with the action which we would prohibit; but, on the contrary, it is associated with the idea of our tyranny; it consequently excites the sentiment of hatred towards us, instead of aversion to the forbidden action. When once, by reasoning, children acquire even a vague idea that those who educate them are unjust, it is in vain either to punish or reward them; if they submit, or if they rebel, their education is equally spoiled; in the one case they become cowardly, in the other, headstrong. To avoid these evils, there is but one method; we must early secure reason for our friend, else she will become our unconquerable enemy. As soon as children are able, in any instance, to understand the meaning and nature of punishment, it should, in that instance, be explained to them. Just punishment is pain, inflicted with the reasonable hope of preventing greater pain in future. In a family, where there are several children educated together, or in public schools, punishments may be inflicted with justice for the sake of example, but still the reformation and future good of the sufferer is always a principal object; and of this he should be made sensible. If our practice upon all occasions correspond with our theory, and if children really perceive, that we do not punish them to gratify our own spleen or passion, we shall not become, even when we give them pain, objects of their hatred. The pain will not be associated with us, but, as it ought to be, with the fault which was the real cause of it. As much as possible we should let children feel the natural consequences of their own conduct. The natural consequence of speaking truth, is the being believed; the natural consequence of falsehood, is the loss of trust and confidence; the natural consequence of all the useful virtues, is esteem; of all the amiable virtues, love; of each of the prudential virtues, some peculiar advantage to their possessor. But plum-pudding is not the appropriate reward of truth, nor is the loss of it the natural or necessary consequence of falsehood. Prudence is not to be rewarded with the affection due to humanity, nor is humanity to be recompensed with the esteem claimed by prudence. Let each good and bad quality have its proper share of praise and blame, and let the consequences of each follow as constantly as possible. That young people may form a steady judgment of the danger of any vice, they must uniformly perceive, that certain painful consequences result from its practice. It is in vain that we inflict punishments, unless all the precepts and all the examples which they see, confirm them in the same belief.