State Education has a dual aim: (1) The production of the desirable citizen; (2) The development of the individual.
You can obtain one kind of perfect citizen by suppressing individuality and cultivating the public virtues: which has been the invariable tendency of reform, and of social idealism in modern days. A real individual has a spark of danger in him, a menace to society. Quench this spark and you quench the individuality, you obtain a social unit, not an integral man. All modern progress has tended, and still tends, to the production of quenched social units: danger- less beings, ideal creatures.
On the other hand, by the over-development of the individualistic qualities, you produce a disintegration of all society. This was the Greek danger, as the quenching of the individual in the social unit was the Roman danger.
You must have a harmony and an inter-relation between the two modes. Because, though man is first and foremost an individual be- lng, yet the very accomplishing of his individuality rests upon his Now it is according to this creed that we proceed, at present, to educate our children. Sentimentally, we like to assume that a child is a little pure spirit arrived out of the infinite and clothed in innocent, manna-like flesh. This pure little spirit only needs to be fed on beauty, truth, and light, and it will grow up into a creature so near the angels that we’d best not mention it. Little stories full of love and sacrifice, little acts full of grace, little productions, little models in plasticine more spiritual than Donatello, little silver-point drawings more ethereal than Botticelli, little water-colour blobs that will suggest the world’s dawn: all these things we quite seriously expect of small children, and in this expectation Whitehall gravely elaborates the educational system.
Ideal and innocent little beings, their minds only need to be led into the Canaan of their promise, and we shall have a world of blameless Shelleys and superior Botticellis. The degree of blameless- ness and ideal superiority we set out to attain, in educating our children, is unimaginable. Pure little spirits, unblemished darlings! So sad that as they grow up some of the grossness of the world creeps inl How it creeps in, heaven knows, unless it is through the Irish stew and rice pudding at dinner. Or perhaps somewhere there are evil communications to corrupt good manners: time itself seems the great corrupter.
Whatever the end may be — and the end is bathos — our children must be regarded as ideal little beings, and their little minds must be led into blossom. Of course their little bodies are important: most important. Because, of course, their little bodies are the instruments of their dear little minds. And therefore you can’t have a good sweet mind without a sweet healthy body. Give every attention to the body, for it is the sacred ark, the holy vessel which contains the holy of holies, the mind of the ideal little creature. Mens sana in corpore sano.
And therefore the child is taught to cherish its own little body, to do its little exercises and its little drill, so that it can become a fine man, or a fine woman. Let it only turn its mind to its own physique, and it will produce a physique that would shame Phidias. Let only the mind take up the body, and it will produce a body as a show gardener produces carrots, something to take your breath away. For the mind, the ideal reality, this is omnipotent and everything. The body is but a lower extension from the mind, diminishing in virtue as it descends. What is noble is near the brain: the ignoble is near the earth. A child is an ideal little creature, a term of ideal consciousness, pure spirit.
Any ideal, once it is really established, becomes ridiculous, so ridiculous that we begin to feel a certain mistrust of mankind’s collective sense of humour. A man is never half such a fool as mankind makes of him. Mankind is a sententious imbecile without misgiving. When an individual reaches this stage, we put him away.
Well, our ideal little darlings, our innocents from the infinite, our sweet and unspoiled little natures, our little spirits straight from the hands of the Maker, our idealized little children, what are we making of them, as we lead their pure little minds into the Canaan of promise, as we educate them up to all that is pure and spiritual and ideal? What are we making of them? Fools, bitter fools. Bitter fools. If you want to know, ask them.
What is a child? A breath of the spirit of God? Well then, the breath of the spirit of God is something that still needs defining. It isn’t like the waft of a handkerchief perfumed with Ess-Bouquet.
But, seriously, before we can dream of pretending to educate a child, we must get a different notion of the nature of children. When we see a seed putting forth its fat cotyledon, do we rhapsodize about the pure beauty of the divine issue? When we see a foal on stalky legs creaking after its mother, are we smitten with dazzled revelation of the hidden God? If we want to be dazzled with revelation, look at a mature tree in full blossom, a mature stallion in the full pride of spring. Look at a man or a woman in the magnificence of their full-grown powers, not at a tubby infant.
What is an infant? What is its holy little mind? An infant is a new clue to an as-yet-unformed human being, and its little mind is a pulp of undistinguished memory and cognition. A little child has one clue to itself, central within itself. For the rest, it is new pulp, busy with differentiation towards the great goal of fulfilled being. Instead of worshipping the child, and seeing in it a divine emission which time will stale, we ought to realize that here is a new little clue to a human being, laid soft and vulnerable on the face of the earth. Here is our responsibility, to see that this unformed thing shall come to its own final form and fullness, both physical and mental.
Which is a long and difficult business. We have to feed the little creature in more ways than one: not only its little stomach and its little mind, but its little passions and will, its senses. Long experience has taught us that a baby should be fed on milk and pap: though we’re not quite sure even now whether carrot-water wouldn’t be better. Our ancient creed makes us insist on awaking the little “mind.” We are all quite agreed that we have serious responsibilities with regard to the infant stomach and the infant mind. But we don’t even know, yet, that there is anything else.
We think that all the reaction goes on within the stomach and the little brain. All that is wonderful, under the soft little skull; all that is tiresome, under the tubby wall of the abdomen. A set of organs which ought to work beautifully and automatically, considering the care we take: and a marvellous little mind which, we are sure, is full of invisible celestial blossoms of consciousness.
Poor baby: no wonder it is queer. That self-same little stomach isn’t half so automatic as we and our precious doctors would like to have it. The “instrument” of the human body isn’t half so instrumental as it might be. Imagine a kettle, for instance, suddenly refusing to sit on the fire, and not to be persuaded. Think of a sewing-machine that insisted on sewing cushions, nothing but cushions, and would not be pacified. What a world! And yet we go on expecting the baby’s stomach to cook the food and boil the water automatically, as if it were a kettle. And when it refuses, we still talk to it as if it were a kettle. Anything rather than depart from our foregone conclusion that the human body is a complicated instrument, a sort of system of retorts and generators which will finally produce the electric messages of ideas.
The body is not an instrument, but a living organism. And the goal of life is not the idea, the mental consciousness is not the sum and essence of a human being. Human consciousness is not only ideal; cognition, or knowing, is not only a mental act. Acts of emotion and volition are acts of primary cognition and may be almost entirely non-mental.
Even apart from this, it is obvious to anyone who handles a baby that the vital activity is neither mental nor stomachic. Wherein lies the mystery of a baby, for us adults? From what has grown the legend of the adoration of the infant? From the fact that in the infant the great affective centres, volitional and emotional, act direct and spontaneous, without mental cognition or interference. When mental cognition starts, it only puts a spoke in the wheel of the great affective centres. This for ever baffles us. We can see that it is not mental reaction which constitutes the true consciousness of a baby. Neither perception nor apperception, nor conception, nor any form of cognition, such as is recognized by our psychology, is to be ascribed to the infant mind. And yet there is consciousness, and even cognition: here, as in the mindless animals.
What kind of consciousness is it? We must look to the great affective centres, emotional and volitional. And we shall find that in the tiny infant there are two emotional centres primal and intensely active, with two corresponding volitional centres. We need go through no tortures of scientific psychology to get at the truth. We need only take direct heed of the infant.
And then we shall realize that the busy business of consciousness is not taking place beneath the soft little skull, but beneath the little navel, and in the midst of the little breast. Here are the two great affective centres of the so-called emotional consciousness. Which emotional consciousness, according to our idealistic psychology, is only some sort of force, like imagination, heat, or electric current. This force which arises and acts from the primal emotional-affective centres is supposed to be impersonal, general, truly a mechanical universal force, like electricity or heat or any kinetic force.
Impersonal, and having nothing to do with the individual. The personal and the individual element does not enter until we reach mental consciousness. Personality, individuality, depends on mentality. So our psychology assumes. In the mind, a child is personal and individual, it is itself. Outside the mind, it is an instrument, a dynamo, if you like, a unit of difficult kinetic force betraying a sort of automatic consciousness, the same in every child, undifferentiated. In the same way, according to our psychology, animals have no personality and no individuality, because they have no mental cognition. They have a certain psyche which they hold in common. What is true of one rabbit is true of another. All we can speak of is “the psychology of the rabbit,” one rabbit having just the same psyche as another. Why? Because it has no recognizable cognition: it has only instinct.
We know this is all wrong, because, having met a rabbit or two, we have seen quite clearly that each separate rabbit was a separate, distinct rabbit — individual, with a specific nature of his own. We should be sorry to attribute a mind to him. But he has consciousness, and quite an individual consciousness too. It is notorious that human beings see foreigners all alike. To an English sailor the faces of a crowd of Chinese are all alike. But that is because the English sailor doesn’t see the difference, not because the difference doesn’t exist. Why, each fat domestic sheep, mere clod as it seems, has a distinct individual nature of its own, known to a shepherd after a very brief acquaintance.
So here we are with the great affective centres, volitional and emotional. The two chief emotional centres in the baby are the solar plexus of the abdomen and the cardiac plexus of the breast. The corresponding ganglia of the volitional system are the lumbar ganglion and the thoracic ganglion.
And we may as well leave off at once regarding these great affective centres as merely instrumental, like little dynamos and accumulators and so on. Nonsense. They are primary, integral mind- centres, each of a specific nature. There is a specific form of knowing takes place at each of these centres, without any mental reference at all. And the specific form of knowing at each of the great affective centres in the infant is of an individual and personal nature, peculiar to the very soul and being of that infant.
That is, at the great solar plexus an infant knows, in primary, mindless knowledge; and from this centre he acts and reacts directly, individually, and self-responsibly. The same from the cardiac plexus, and the two corresponding ganglia, lumbar and thoracic. The brain at first acts only as a switchboard which keeps these great active centres in circuit of communication. The process of idealization, mental consciousness, is a subsidiary process. It is a second form of conscious activity. Mental activity, final cognition, ideation, is only set up secondarily from the perfect interaction and inter-communication of the primary affective centres, which remain all the time our dynamic first-minds.