Free Thought and Official PropagandaRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Free Thought and Official Propaganda
Russell, Bertrand
Free thought; Liberalism; Propaganda
If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in
schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not
giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe
true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught.
The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many
years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read
to the school children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what
was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what
really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either
side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should
make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less
untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching
would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to
idealism by which decent people are induced to further the schemes of
scoundrels.
History should be taught in the same way. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1813
and 1814, for instance, might be studied in the _Moniteur_, leading up
to the surprise which Parisians felt when they saw the Allies arriving
under the walls of Paris after they had (according to the official
bulletins) been beaten by Napoleon in every battle. In the more advanced
classes, students should be encouraged to count the number of times that
Lenin has been assassinated by Trotsky, in order to learn contempt for
death. Finally, they should be given a school history approved by the
Government, and asked to infer what a French school history would say
about our wars with France. All this would be a far better training in
citizenship than the trite moral maxims by which some people believe
that civic duty can be inculcated.
It must, I think, be admitted that the evils of the world are due to
moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human
race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral
defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous
list of vices. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by
methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method
of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought
by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals. One of the chief
obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be
enormously diminished by instruction as to the prevalent forms of
mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever
was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier
than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy,
the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to
the holders of power. Hence the increase in the circulation of
newspapers.
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