Education; Educational psychology; Moral education
When I say that pupils should be regarded as ends, not as means, I
may be met by the retort that, after all, everybody is more important
as a means than as an end. What a man is as an end perishes when he
dies; what he produces as a means continues to the end of time. We
cannot deny this, but we can deny the consequences deduced from it. A
man’s importance as a means may be for good or for evil; the remote
effects of human actions are so uncertain that a wise man will tend to
dismiss them from his calculations. Broadly speaking, good men have
good effects, and bad men bad effects. This, of course, is not an
invariable law of nature. A bad man may murder a tyrant because he has
committed crimes which the tyrant intends to punish; the effects of
his act may be good, though he and his act are bad. Nevertheless, as a
broad general rule, a community of men and women who are intrinsically
excellent will have better effects than one composed of people who are
ignorant and malevolent. Apart from such considerations, children
and young people feel instinctively the difference between those who
genuinely wish them well and those who regard them merely as raw
material for some scheme. Neither character nor intelligence will
develop as well or as freely where the teacher is deficient in love;
and love of this kind consists essentially in _feeling_ the child as an
end. We all have this feeling about ourselves: we desire good things
for ourselves without first demanding a proof that some great purpose
will be furthered by our obtaining them. Every ordinarily affectionate
parent feels the same sort of thing about his or her children. Parents
want their children to grow, to be strong and healthy, to do well at
school, and so on, in just the same way in which they want things for
themselves; no effort of self-denial and no abstract principle of
justice is involved in taking trouble about such matters. This parental
instinct is not always strictly confined to one’s own children. In
its diffused form, it must exist in any one who is to be a good
teacher of little boys and girls. As the pupils grow older, it grows
less important. But only those who possess it can be trusted to draw
up schemes of education. Those who regard it as one of the purposes
of male education to produce men willing to kill and be killed for
frivolous reasons are clearly deficient in diffused parental feeling;
yet they control education in all civilized countries except Denmark
and China.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account