Bertrand Russell: 'education as the power of independent thought', by Chris Shute: Foreword by Ronald Meighan
* Source: Bertrand Russell: 'education as the power of independent thought', by Chris Shute (Nottingham, Eng.; Educational Heretics Press, 2002. [8]+64+[8] pp.)<Foreword by Ronald Meighan
 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
Russell challenges many current dogmas of education. Take, for example, the present obsession with competition in and around education. Russell is not impressed: 'Competition is not only bad as an educational fact, but also as a ideal to be held before the young. What the world now needs is not competition but organisation and co-operation,; all belief in the utility of competition has become an anachronism. ... the emotions connected with it are the emotions of hostilty and ruthlessness. The conception of society as an organic whole is very dlfficult for those whose minds have been steeped in competitive ideas. Ethically, therefore, no less than economically, it is urdesirable to teach the young to be competitive.'
Russell would have been antagonistic to the idea of a National Curriculum: '... much education consists in the instilling of unfounded dogmas in the place of a spirit of inquiry. This results, not necessarily from any fault in the teacher, but from a curriculum which demands too much apparent knowledge, with a consequent need of haste and undue definiteness.'
You are not free without good habits, Russell argued, for you become enslaved to bad habits. Erratic sleep habits, junk food diets, smoking and drug addiction provide obvious examples, but Russell applied this to study as well: 'If curiosity is to be fruitful, it must be associated with a certain technique for the acquistion of knowledge. There must be habits of observation, belief in the possibility, of knowledge, patience and industry.'
Another good habit was happiness. Not only did Russell write a book entitled The Conquest of Happiness, but he saw it as essential basis both for learning and the health of society: 'Happiness in childhood is absolutely necessary to the production of the best type of human being.'
Over-teaching, on the other hand, was another bad habit: 'If personal quality is to be preserved, definite teaching must be reduced to a minimum, and criticism must never be carried to such lengths as to produce timidty in self-expression. But these maxims are not likely to lead to work that will be pleasing to an inspector.'
Russell had a radical vision of officials that is hard to find in our domination-riddled mass schooling system and its endless supply of control-freaks: 'The administrator of the future must be the servant of free citizens, not the benevolent ruler of admiring" subjects.'
It is high time we revisited the educational writings of Bertrand Russell, and when I sought someone to do this service for us, the name of Chris Shute was top of the list. Happily, he accepted the challenge and this splendid short book is the result.