Reflections on Education

Congratulations to you — congratulations, congratulations...

Words sent forth by scores of mouths, with the tenderest of smiles, whenever a new child is born — since the most ancient of ages, since man learned the meaning of fatherhood and woman the meaning of motherhood; that is, since the family was born of human life. This mother poured her whole soul into her daughter, and so the daughter — the family — came forth a faithful mirror of her mother — life.

Our story today, then, is not about this man or that woman; it is the story of every individual of the human generations that have passed, that pass, and that will pass. It is the story of each one of us — the story of the newborn child until he becomes a man. How many faces beam at his birth, how many delegations come to congratulate, how many trays are offered! Yet amid this flood of rejoicing, do the eyes look upon this child of ours as upon a living being — a human being? Or... does the child need nothing more than a bath, sleep, clothes, and food? I do not believe so. The child needs education. And his education begins from the very first moment in which he is born. He is, before all else, a living creature who feels pain and pleasure; the mother who accustoms her child to sleeping in the light has sown fear in his soul without knowing it. Just so, he learns the meaning of love and the meaning of joy from his mother's glances, his father's laughter, and his brother's kisses.

The child's soul is not an empty cupboard that we must fill with sermons, instructions, and sciences. No — he is a living being, possessed of mind, sense, feeling, and instincts; and it is for us to walk with the stages of his growth step by step, offering him at each stage his bodily, psychological, and mental needs. And I do not know by what right the educator exploits his educational authority to mold the child as he himself wishes, or as the head of the state wishes. No: this child is a trust laid upon our necks, with which life has girded us. Our duty is to acquaint him with life, and our first aim in educating him is to prepare him for a complete life: by providing him with the conditions that help him grow naturally in body and in thought, and by leaving him to use his senses in discovering what surrounds him, encouraging him toward independent thinking and inference. How then, in God's name, can we ask of a child who has known nothing from his parents but orders and the duty of obedience, and heard nothing from his teacher but lectures and sciences swallowed under compulsion just as they are — how can we ask him to become a man who is master of himself and captain of his own life? If we want the child to become a complete human being, we must treat him as a human being, with a mind, a heart, and instincts, from the moment of his birth — for a very simple reason: that life brought him into existence a human being. By what right, then, do we enslave him to ends of our own??!!

In the light of this, we can conclude that education is a matter that touches the very heart of human life; it is the nourishment of society's soul. "Just as food and reproduction preserve the life of the body down the generations, so social life cannot stay alive without education and instruction."

And it is a great error to throw the responsibility for education upon mothers, fathers, and teachers alone. This means that education's place is not only the home and the school; rather, the child draws it from life itself — from home and school, and from every person he sees and every event that surrounds him. Indeed, I very much doubt that the child is the only one among us in need of education; every one of us needs education and instruction to the very last moment of his life. As individuals in a society, we cannot live without the social bonds that tie us together — and how can these bonds remain firm and strong without education? No wonder, then, that a servant should educate his master, or a child his grandfather.

One example of this is a vendor, or a ticket-taker on a bus or a tram. If he is well-mannered, gentle in his questions, glad to help, cheerful despite his streaming sweat — does his personality not stir the noblest feelings in the soul of every passenger? He is no schoolmaster and no university professor; he is a ticket-taker — yet he is the greatest of educators in the performance of duty, in patience, and in optimism; that is, in the meaning of life itself.

Thank God, the age of feudalism and the nobility is over, and the twentieth century has dropped the curtain on the farce of the master and his slave. This means that we live — or rather, are supposed to live — with no difference between Zayd the emir's son and Amr the hireling's son. The ideal system of education must be democratic — democratic in the full sense of the word. We all know that Montessori's great works in education began, grew, and lived in the poorest of quarters, and today most modern kindergartens proceed along Montessori's educational principles. Nor do I think I need mention the scores of great men who were children of hovels and black bread. The system of education must embrace every individual, and must provide the conditions that help every individual to advance.

Here we must distinguish between the art of education and education itself. The art of education is the theories and rules of education; education in itself is the application of these theories and rules.

A quick glance, then, at all we have said confirms that education is not a profession like other professions. The merchant can succeed if he masters the secret of his trade, and the workman can excel if he merely grasps the craft of his calling. But of one who memorizes all the theories of education — even of one who composes for us an unending river of writing in the field of education — we cannot affirm that he is a good educator. Such a one is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the undisputed leader of modern education, who cried out in the eighteenth century for the tormented childhood that the lessons of educators had enslaved and their whips had bloodied. Such a one is the author of "Émile," the gospel of modern education, which has given, gives, and will give to the millions of children in the world — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — freedom and a happy childhood. That

man sent his five children to the foundling homes and proved unable to rear a single one of them; Rousseau's children were lost among hundreds of wretched orphan children, while the children of the world walked in the educational ways laid down by the father of the waifs.

I acknowledge Rousseau's leadership in the foundations of modern education, and I hold most of his educational theories sacred; but I do not consider him a good educator — indeed, I hold that our friend the ticket-taker far surpasses him in the goodness of his educating. And I do not know whether this makes clear the meaning of the good educator.

The good educator is he who sheds light wherever he goes, and who can lead the little child not by talk and preaching, but by humane treatment and by a guidance that is nothing more than a practical lesson, a small gesture, or even a glance.

This educator — this human being upon whose hands the progress of human life depends — must himself first grasp human loftiness and the meaning of life: the life whose members cooperate and understand one another, in which a Chinese lives beside a Frenchman beside a Senegalese — and in which, with envy and self-love, brother cannot live with brother.

This is education as I understand it, and I do not know to what extent I have been able to make it plain. I say, finally, that every one of us has surely seen a child in his mother's arms. Is there any place for that child better than his mother's arms? Has that mother anything dearer than that child? Life is that tender mother, and education is that child. And that which makes the bond between the mother and her child the strongest bond in existence — namely, motherhood — makes life and education forever embracing, forever smiling, on a single road, pressing ever forward, through all the ages.