When a child does lie, parents should take themselves to task rather than him ; they should deal with it by removing its causes, and by explaining gently and reasonably why it is better not to lie. They should not deal with it by punishment, which only increases fear and therefore the motive for lying. 出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 8: Truthfulness 詳細情報：https://russell-j.com/beginner/OE08-030.HTM
The child brought up without fear will be truthful, not in virtue of a moral effort, but because it will never occur to him to be otherwise. The child who has been treated wisely and kindly has a frank look in the eyes, and a fearless demeanour even with strangers; whereas the child that has been subject to nagging or severity is in perpetual terror of incurring reproof, and terrified of having transgressed some rule whenever he has behaved in a natural manner. It does not at first occur to a young child that it is possible to lie. The possibility of lying is a discovery, due to observation of grown-ups quickened by terror. The child discovers that grown-ups lie to him, and that it is dangerous to tell them the truth ; under these circumstances he takes to lying. Avoid these incentives, and he will not think of lying.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 8: Truthfulness
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To produce the habit of truthfulnessshould be one of the major aims of moral education. I do not mean truthfulness in speech only, but also in thought; indeed, of the two, the latter seems to me the more important. I prefer a person who lies with full consciousness of what he is doing to a person who first sub-consciously deceives himself and then imagines that he is being virtuous and truthful.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 8: Truthfulness
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In a happy child, it should not be difficult to stimulate a generous disposition ; but if the child is starved of pleasures, he will, of course, cling tenaciously to those that are attainable. It is not through suffering that children learn virtue, but through happiness and health.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood,1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 7: Selfishness and property.
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Closely connected with justice is the sense of property. This is a difficult matter, which must be dealt with by adaptable tact, not by any rigid set of rules. There are, in fact, conflicting considerations, which make it difficult to take a clear line. On the one hand, the love of property produces many terrible evils in later years ; the fear of losing valued material possessions is one of the main sources of political and economic cruelty. It is desirable that men and women should, as far as possible, find their happiness in ways which are not subject to private ownership, i.e. in creative rather than defensive activities. For this reason, it is unwise to cultivate the sense of property in children if it can be helped. But before proceeding to act upon this view, there are some very strong arguments on the other side, which it would be dangerous to neglect. In the first place, the sense of property is very strong in children ; it develops as soon as they can grasp objects which they see (the hand-eye co-ordination). What they grasp, they feel is theirs, and they are indignant if it is taken away. We still speak of a property as a “holding”, and “maintenance” means “holding in the hand”. These words show the primitive connection between property and grasp ; so does the word “grasping”. A child which has no toys of its own will pick up sticks or broken bricks or any odds and ends it may find, and will treasure them as its very own. The desire for property is so deep-seated that it cannot be thwarted without danger. Moreover, property cultivates carefulness and curbs the impulse of destruction. Especially useful is property in anything that the child has made himself ; if this is not permitted, his constructive impulses are checked.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 7: Selfishness and property.
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It is difficult, if not impossible, to teach justice to a solitary child. The rights and desires of grown-up people are so different from those of children that they make no imaginative appeal ; there is hardly ever direct competition for exactly the same pleasure. Moreover, as the grown-up people are in a position to exact obedience to their own demands, they have to be judges in their own case, and do not produce upon the child the effect of an impartial tribunal. They can, of course, give definite precepts inculcating this or that form of convenient behaviour : not to interrupt when their mother is counting the wash, not to shout when their father is busy, not to obtrude their concerns when there are visitors. But these are inexplicable requirements, to which, it is true, the child submits willingly enough if otherwise kindly treated, but which make no appeal to his own sense of what is reasonable. It is right that the child should be made to obey such rules, because he must not be allowed to be a tyrant, and because he must understand that other people attach importance to their own pursuits, however odd those pursuits may be. But not much more than external good behaviour is to be got by such methods； the real education in justice can only come where there are other children.This is one of many reasons why no child should long be solitary. Parents who have the misfortune to have an only child should do all that they can to secure companionship for it, even at the cost of a good deal of separation from home, if no other way is possible. A solitary child must be either suppressed or selfish–perhaps both by turns. A well-behaved only child is pathetic, and an ill-behaved one is a nuisance.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 7: Selfishness and property.
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When self-sacrifice is taught, the idea seems to be that it will not be fully practised, and that the practical result will be about right. But in fact people either fail to learn the lesson, or feel sinful when they demand mere justice, or carry self-sacrifice to ridiculous extremes. In the last case, they feel an obscure resentment against the people to whom they make renunciations, and probably allow selfishness to return by the backdoor of a demand for gratitude. In any case, self-sacrifice cannot be true doctrine, because it cannot be universal ; and it is most undesirable to teach falsehood as a means to virtue, because when the falsehood is perceived the virtue evaporates. Justice, on the contrary, can be universal. Therefore justice is the conception that we ought to try to instil into the child’s thoughts and habits.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 7: Selfishness and property.
詳細情報：https://russell-j.com/beginner/OE07-010.HTM
The man who imagines a social system as a tree will have a different political outlook. A bad machine can be scrapped, and another put in its place. But if a tree is cut down, it is a long time before a new tree achieves the same strength and size. A machine or a mould is what its maker chooses ; a tree has its specific nature, and can only be made into a better or worse example of the species. Constructiveness applied to living things is quite different from constructiveness applied to machines ; it has humbler functions, and requires a sort of sympathy. For that reason, in teaching constructiveness to the young, they should have opportunities of exercising it upon plants and animals, not only upon bricks and machines.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 6: Constructiveness.
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In the later years of education, there should be a stimulation of social constructiveness. I mean, that those whose intelligence is adequate should be encouraged in using their imaginations to think out more productive ways of utilizing existing social forces or creating new ones. Men read Plato’s Republic, but they do not attach it to current politics at any point. When I stated that the Russian State in 1920 had ideals which were almost exactly those of the Republic, it was hard to say whether the Platonists or the Bolsheviks were the more shocked. People read a literary classic without any attempt to see what it means in terms of the lives of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. This is particularly easy with a Utopia, because we are not told of any road which leads to it from our present social system. The valuable faculty, in these matters, is that of judging rightly as to the next step.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 6: Constructiveness.
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Even in purely intellectual matters it is possible to have a constructive or a destructive bias. A classical education is almost entirely critical : a boy learns to avoid mistakes, and to despise those who commit them. This tends to produce a kind of cold correctness, in which originality is replaced by respect for authority. Correct Latin is fixed once for all.. it is that of Vergil and Cicero. Correct Science is continually changing, and an able youth may look forward to helping in this process. Consequently the attitude produced by a scientific education is likely to be more constructive than that produced by the study of dead languages. Wherever avoidance of error is the chief thing aimed at, education tends to produce an intellectually bloodless type. The prospect of doing something venturesome with one’s knowledge ought to be held before all the abler young men and young women.
出典： On Education, especially in early childhood, 1926, Pt. 2：Education of character, chap. 6: Constructiveness.
詳細情報：https://russell-j.com/beginner/OE06-060.HTM
子供が実際に嘘をついたときには,親は子供をしかるよりも,むしろ自分を責めるべきである。この問題に対処するためには,親は嘘を言う原因を取り除き,なぜ嘘を言わないほうがよいのかを,優しく,合理的に説明してやらなければならない。そのために罰を与えたりしてはならない。そんなことをすれば,恐怖感をつのらせ,ために嘘を言う動機を強めるのが落ちである。
When a child does lie, parents should take themselves to task rather than him ; they should deal with it by removing its causes, and by explaining gently and reasonably why it is better not to lie. They should not deal with it by punishment, which only increases fear and therefore the motive for lying.
