💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › sebastien-faure-libertarian-education.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:59:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Libertarian Education Author: Sébastien Faure Date: 1910 Language: en Topics: Libertarian Education, education, anarchy Source: https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-documentary-history-libertarian-ideas-volume-1-2
When it comes into the world, when its existence is like a blank sheet
upon which nothing has yet be written, the child is neither good nor
bad. He is both. The heir to all preceding generations, he carries
within himself, in germ, all the qualities and all the shortcomings of
his ancestors; all their virtues and all their vices, all their
strengths and all their weaknesses, all their ignorance and all their
learning, all their savagery and all their indulgence, all their defeats
and all their victories, all their greatness and all their pettiness,
all their courage and all their cowardice, all their rebelliousness and
all their subservience, all their advances and all their set-backs, all
their sublimity and all their wretchedness.
He is as capable of the most sensitive actions as of the most irrational
acts; he is fitted for the noblest acts as well as for the vilest; he
can climb the heights or plumb the depths.
Education and social surroundings will turn this little amorphous,
inconsistent, frail and eminently impressionable creature into what he
will become thereafter.
Strictness makes for deceivers, fa int-hearts and cowards. It is deadly
to openness, confidence and real courage. It erects dangerous barriers
of mutual mistrust between Educator and child: it sours the hearts of
the little ones and alienates them from the affections of their elders;
it introduces a Master-Slave relationship rather than a Friend-Friend
relationship between Educator and child.
The result of a regimen of constraint is regulation of the child's every
move; consequently, it leads to classification of all of the latter
under the headings mandatory and forbidden, the rewarded and the
punished; for there would be no constraint if the child was not required
to conform to prescriptions and prohibitions, and if abiding by the
former and breaching the latter did not bring consequences in the form
of reward or punishment as the case may be.
"If you do such a thing you will be rewarded."
"If you do something else, you will be punished."
That is the whole story .
The constraint system exercises none of the child's nobler facilities;
it makes no appeal to his reasoning, does not speak to his heart, has
nothing to say to his dignity and nothing to his conscience.
It does not prompt any high-minded feelings in him; moves him to no
purposeful effort; arouses no noble aspiration; prompts no unselfish
impulse; and no productive exercise.
It does not focus the considered attention of the child on immediate or
longer-term, direct or indirect consequences for himself and others,
beyond this implication: reward in one instance and punishment in the
other.
It leaves no room for initiative. Seeing two avenues of action open to
him, avenues at the entrance to which two signposts have been carefully
placed, one reading, in curt and trenchant terms "What must be done; the
avenue of reward," while the other displays this inscription "What must
not be done; the avenue of punishment," he struggles to decide whether
the action asked of him is to be classified among the musts or the
must-nots, without bothering to wonder why he should act thus without
the course upon which he embarks bringing him any other satisfaction
than some reward to be collected or punishment to be avoided.
Undetectably, this constraint system produces grey, drab, colourless,
insipid beings bereft of all determination, passion or personality; a
slavish, cowardly, sheepish breed, incapable of manly or sublime deeds,
the execution of which presupposes and requires a dose of liveliness,
fire, independence and enthusiasm, but instead one perfectly capable of
cruelty and abjection, especially in circumstances where personal
accountability is eclipsed by mob activity.
The system of freedom leads to quite different outcomes.
It is characterized by risk throughout the entire learning period. So,
at the outset, when the child is pretty much ignorant of all the
consequences implicit in his actions, the educator bombards him with
warnings, advice, explanations and the thousand ingenious ways in which
his support can be fe d in and his watchful eye exercised, because,
while he is under an obligation to respect the child's freedom, he also
has an obligation to shield him from all of the various dangers that
surround him. Gradually and as the child, better informed with each
passing day, becomes more alive to the precise implications of his
actions, such guardianship should be relaxed so that the child acquires
the habit of clearing away the dangers he meets along the way.
If he is always kept under guard, if he is not allowed to budge without
securing leave to do so, out of fear of stumbling, dangers,
obstacles-which is to say out of fear of the mistakes he may make, the
influences to which he will be exposed and the consequences his conduct
might have for himself and for others-he remains forever trapped in the
bear-hug of constraint, like the infant in his mother's arms, and will
never learn to navigate life's shoals; even as an adult he will still be
the little personality-less and limp creature he was as a child.
And on the day that he comes of age and is left to his own devices due
to the death or departure of those who had taken on the task of thinking
for him and deciding for him, he will have to think, decide and act for
himself and will find that he has no inner reason to guide him, no heart
to drive him, no will to move him, no conscience to reassure him...
The greatest moralizing force is example. Evil is contagious; so is
Good. Example exercises a well-nigh omnipotent influence over the child
by reason of his malleability.
If you do not want your children to lie to you, never deceive them; if
you don't want them to fight with one another, never strike them; if you
don't want them to use coarse language, never curse at them.
If you want them to trust you, prove that you trust them. If you want
them to listen to you, speak to them as if they were capable of
understanding you; if you want them to love you, do not be stingy with
your affection for them; if you want them to cuddle and be open with
you, do not be sparing in your kissing and cuddling of them.
Example is all powerful...
All who are not blinkered by partisanship are gradually coming around to
the idea that there is a lot less danger in having boys and girls live
and grow side by side than in systematically keeping them separated from
each other. Simple observation shows that unwholesome curiosity and
dangerous precociousness grow out of the systematic separation of these
children at an age when they are beginning to sense the earliest
stirrings of sexual life.
Can we so delude ourselves as to believe that, for boys and girls to be
kept apart, we need only forbid the former to speak to the latter and
the latter to play with the former?
Experience shows that the result of such bans is the very opposite of
what was expected.
As long as children are young enough not to be troubled by the approach
of the opposite sex, it cannot be other than dangerous and immoral to
forewarn them of misdemeanours they are not even tempted to commit.
And once boys and girls reach an age where they feel vaguely moved by an
exchanged glance, a fleeting contact, a furtive touch, a held hand, a
word, then even if one throws up the highest barriers between them, one
will only succeed in fuelling the emotion, and fanning the desire to
repeat the encounter. ..
The practice of co-education poses the delicate matter of sex education.
Delicate? Why should it be any more delicate than any other? Why should
apprising the child which has reached the age and degree of awareness
where this matter comes into play, of the conditions in which the
perpetuation of the human race takes place, be any more delicate than
informing it about the reproductive practices of other species?
The unease which a conversation or a course on this matter causes the
educator derives almost entirely from the mystery with which the master
senses the matter is shrouded as far as the child is concerned; and that
mystery itself derives from the circumlocutions, reservations,
oratorical euphemisms and innuendo with which the topic is customarily
treated in the presence of children. If it were dealt with candidly,
tackled head-on and studied just like any other element of the natural
sciences, all of the awkwardness and embarrassment would evaporate.
The hypocritical fathers of the official morality who preach virtue and
who generally practice vice as long as nobody gets to know about it, ask
that children be kept in ignorance of certain subjects.
Ignorance is always an evil, a danger.
How many of the misdemeanours and foolish acts committed by children can
be ascribed entirely to lack of experience, to ignorance! A far-sighted
mother and father should always enlighten their children. The child will
find out eventually: so why hide things from him? Could it be to spare
his blushes? Keeping secrets encourages him to concoct, with regard to
things about which he frets, false notions about which he will consult
with his friends or neighbours. Nor will there be any shortage of people
to misdirect him later, by which time there will be no time left to step
in and brief him in all candour. So why conceal from him something that
he will inevitably discover at some point? This is an unforgivable lack
of foresight.
True morality consists of shedding the requisite light upon such
matters, a light that the child will some day be able to find for
himself. Better that those who love him should provide it than those who
do not know him