Give to the child the truth, but that truth which makes life worth
living, that truth which teaches him that life is a task and a duty,
and that his true health and soundness and value will depend upon the
energy with which he makes the world and his own body with its selfish
desires subservient to unselfish ideals. If you mean by the truth that
half-truth of man as a sexual creature of flesh and nerves, the child
to whom you offer it will be led to ever new questions, and if you go
on answering them truthfully as the new fashion suggests, your
reservoir will soon be emptied, even if the six volumes of Havelock
Ellis' “Psychology of Sex” are fully at your disposal. But the more
this species of truth is given out, the more life itself, for which
you educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and meaningless. If
the truth of civilized life is merely that which natural science can
analyze, then life has lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm
and its value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of man
will not necessarily evade the curious question of the child who is
puzzled about the naturalistic processes around him. But instead of
whetting his appetite for unsavoury knowledge, he will seriously
influence the young mind to turn the attention into the opposite
direction. He will speak to him about the fact that there is
something animal-like in the human being, but will add that the true
values of life lie just in overcoming the low instincts in the
interest of high aims. He will point to those hidden naturalistic
realities as something not overimportant, but as something which a
clean boy and girl do not ask about and with which only the
imagination of bad companions is engaged. An instinctive indifference
and aversion to the contact with anything low and impure can easily be
developed in every healthy child amid clean surroundings. Why is the
boy to live and to die for the honour of his country? Why is he to
devote himself to the search for knowledge? Why is he to fight for the
growth of morality? Why does he not confine himself to mere seeking
for comfort and ease and satisfaction of the senses? All which really
creates civilization and human progress depends upon symbols and
belief. As soon as we make all those symbols of the historic
community, all the ideals of honour and devotion, righteousness and
beauty, glory and faithfulness, mere matters of scientific
calculation, they stare us in the face as sheer absurdities; and yet
we might again misname that as truth. Then it is the untruth which
makes us free, it is the non-scientific, humanistic aspect which
liberates us from the slavery of our low desires.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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