Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential polymaths of the twentieth century. He is most famous for his work on Analytic Philosophy, Mathematics, Ethics and Logic, however, he was also a prolific educationalist, even briefly setting up a school of his own. His book “On Education: Especially in Early Childhood”, his most celebrated work within Educational Theory, is the focus of this article, in which I will synthesise what I consider to be his most salient arguments from that work, and which although written nearly a century ago, still resonate today.
The Aims of Education
Russell considers education to be in essence the pursuit of an ideal character, within which he identifies four core components:
Vitality
Courage
Sensitiveness
Intelligence
Regarding the first of these, (1) Vitality encompasses the pleasure in feeling alive, in so far as it heightens pleasures and diminishes pains. Vitality makes it easy to take an interest in whatever occurs, and thus promotes objectivity and sanity, curiosity in the outside world, and hard work, safeguarding against envy and becoming absorbed in oneself.
Within (2) Courage, Russell identifies two main components: absence of irrational fear and the power of controlling fear. In order to not rely on repression of fear, which leads to rage (a closely analogous emotion), courage requires health and vitality, practice, self-respect and humility. The ideal form of courage involves self-respect with an impersonal outlook on life, feeling one’s ego to be a small part of the world, through valuing much that is not oneself.
Sensitiveness (3) can be viewed as a corrective of mere courage, and can be summarised as being affected pleasurably or the reverse by many things, and by the right things. Healthy development of sensitiveness commences around five months with the pleasures of sensation such as food and warmth. Following this comes sympathy, which can typically be identified when a child will cry because a brother or sister is crying, and can in some cases extend to abstract sympathy, such as the ability to be moved by statistics.
(4) Intelligence can be divided between actual knowledge and receptivity to knowledge, with the two being closely connected. The aptitude to acquire knowledge can only itself be acquired through practice. Whilst it is possible to impart knowledge in ways that do not train intelligence, it is not possible to train intelligence without imparting knowledge. The instinctive foundation of intellectual life is curiosity, which lessens in adult life but improves in quality. Intelligence demands an alert curiosity but it must be of a certain kind. Interest in gossip for example, whilst widespread, is not a valuable form of curiosity for education to encourage. In order to be successful in the acquisition of valuable knowledge, curiosity must be associated with habits of observation, patience, industry and open-mindedness.