Education for Simplicity

Since the simple life is above all the product of a certain orientation of mind, it is natural that education should have a great influence in this sphere.

In practice, there are scarcely more than two ways of raising children:

The first consists in raising one's children for oneself;

The second consists in raising them for themselves.

In the first case, the child is regarded as a complement to the parents. He forms part of their property and occupies a place among the objects they possess. Sometimes this place is the noblest one: when the parents value the life of the affections above all else. Sometimes, too, when material interests prevail, the child comes second, third or last. In no case is he a person in his own right. When he is young, he revolves around his parents, not only through obedience, which is legitimate, but through the subordination of all his initiative and of his whole being. As he grows older, this subordination becomes more pronounced and turns into confiscation, extending to his ideas, his feelings, to everything. He remains a minor forever. Instead of slowly evolving toward independence, the man advances further into slavery. He is what he is allowed to be, what his father's trade or industry, or else his father's religious beliefs, political opinions and aesthetic tastes, require him to be. He will think, speak, act, marry or enlarge his family in the direction and within the limits laid down by paternal absolutism. This family absolutism can be practiced by people who have no will at all; it is enough for them to be convinced that good order requires the child to be his parents' thing. Lacking energy, they will take hold of him by other means: by sighs, by entreaties or by base enticements. If they cannot chain him, they will catch him with birdlime and snare him. But he will live in them, through them and for them, which is the only thing admissible.

This kind of education is practiced not only in the family but also in the great social organisms whose chief educational function consists in laying hands on newcomers, in order to shut them up as irresistibly as possible within the existing frameworks. It is the reduction, the grinding down and the absorption of the individual into a social body, whether theocratic, communist or simply bureaucratic and bound by routine. Seen from outside, such a system would seem to be simple education par excellence. Its methods, indeed, are utterly simplistic. And if man were not a person in his own right, if he were merely a specimen of the species, this would be the perfect education. Just as all wild animals, and all fish and insects of the same genus and species, have the same stripe in the same place, so we would all be identical, with the same tastes, the same language, the same beliefs and the same inclinations. But man is not merely a specimen of the species, and that is why this sort of education is far from simple in its effects. People differ so much from one another that countless means must be invented to reduce, lull to sleep and extinguish individual thought. And this succeeds only in part, which keeps everything perpetually in disarray. At every moment, through some crack, the inner force of initiative breaks violently into the open and produces explosions, upheavals and grave disorders. And where nothing happens, where external authority keeps the upper hand, the evil lies deep within. Beneath the apparent order lie hidden smoldering revolts, the defects contracted in an abnormal existence, apathy, death.

A system that bears such fruit is a bad one, and however simple it may appear, at bottom it breeds every complication.

The other system is the opposite extreme. It consists in raising children for themselves. The roles are reversed: the parents are there for the child. Scarcely is he born before he becomes the center. The white heads of the grandparents and the sturdy head of the father bow before this curly head. His babbling is their law; a sign from him is enough. Should he cry a little loudly in his cradle at night, however tired everyone may be, the whole house must be roused. The newcomer is not slow to discover that he is all-powerful, and before he can even walk he is already dizzy with power. As he grows up, all this only goes from strength to strength. Parents, grandparents, servants, teachers: everyone is at his command. He accepts homage and even the sacrifice of his neighbor; anyone who does not step aside as he passes, he treats as a rebellious subject. There is no one but him. He is the one and only, the perfect, the infallible. Too late, people realize that they have given themselves a master, and what a master! Forgetful of sacrifices, without respect, without even pity. He no longer takes any account of those to whom he owes everything, and goes through life without law or restraint.

This education, too, has its social form. It flourishes wherever the past counts for nothing, where history begins with the living, where there is neither tradition, nor discipline, nor respect, where those who know least speak loudest, where all who are charged with representing public order fret over any nobody whose strength lies in shouting loudly and respecting no one. It ensures the reign of passing passions, the triumph of the lowest kind of arbitrary will. I compare these two kinds of education, one the exaltation of the milieu, the other the exaltation of the individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of the newcomers; and I find them equally disastrous. But most disastrous of all is the combination of the two, which produces beings who are half automatons and half despots, forever wavering between the spirit of the flock and the spirit of revolt or domination.

Children must be raised neither for themselves nor for their parents, for man is no more destined to be a grand personage than a mere sample. They must be raised for life. The aim of their education is to help them become active members of humanity, fraternal forces, free servants of the commonwealth. To practice an education inspired by any other principle is to complicate life, to deform it, to sow the seeds of every disorder.

When we wish to sum up a child's destiny in one word, it is the word "future" that rises to our lips. The child is the future. That word says everything: past sorrows, present efforts, hopes. Yet at the moment education begins, the child is incapable of measuring the full reach of this word. For at that moment he is at the mercy of the all-powerful impressions of the present. Who, then, will give him his first enlightenment and set him on the path he must follow? His parents, his educators. But if they reflect even a little, they sense that their work concerns more than themselves and the child: they are exercising powers and administering interests that are impersonal. The child must constantly appear to them as a future citizen. Under the influence of this concern they will have two cares that complete each other: care for the initial, individual power that is germinating in their child and must grow, and care for the social destination of that power. At no moment of their action upon him can they forget that this little being entrusted to their care must become himself and fraternal. These two conditions, far from excluding each other, are never found except combined in an indissoluble union. It is impossible to be fraternal, to love, to give oneself, unless one is master of oneself; and conversely, no one can possess himself, grasp himself in what is distinctively his own, without having gone down, through the surface accidents of his existence, to the deep springs of being, where man feels bound to man by what is most intimate in him.

To help a child become himself and fraternal, we must defend him against the violent and pernicious action of the forces of disorder.

These forces are external and internal. From outside, each of us is threatened not only by material dangers but also by the violent interference of other wills; from within, by an exaggerated sense of self and by all the whims that this sense engenders. The external danger that may arise from the undue influence of educators is very great. The right of the strongest slips into education with the utmost ease. To educate, one must have renounced this right, that is, have set aside that lower sense of our own person which turns us into enemies of others, even of our own children. Our authority is good only if it draws its inspiration from another authority, higher than ourselves. In that case it is not only beneficial but indispensable, and in its turn it becomes the best safeguard against the greatest inner peril that threatens a human being: that of exaggerating his own importance. At the beginning of life, personal impressions are so vivid that, to restore the balance, they must be submitted to the pacifying influence of a calm and higher will. The distinctive task of the educator is to represent this will to the child as continuously and as disinterestedly as possible. Educators then represent all that is worthy of respect in the world. They give the being who is entering life the impression of something that precedes him, surpasses him and surrounds him; yet they do not crush him; on the contrary, their will and all the influences they pass on to him become nourishment for his own energy. To exercise influence in this way is to cultivate fruitful obedience, the kind from which free characters are born. The purely personal authority of parents, teachers and institutions is to a child what dense undergrowth is to a young plant, which languishes and dies beneath it. Impersonal authority, the authority that belongs to one who has first submitted himself to the venerable realities before which he wishes to bend a child's individual whims, is like pure and luminous air. It is certainly active and influences us in its own way, but it nourishes and strengthens our own life. Without this authority there is no education. To watch, to guide, to resist: such is the educator's function. He must appear to the child not as a barrier set up on a whim, which one might, if need be, leap over, provided the jump matched the height of the obstacle, but as a transparent wall through which one can see unchanging realities, laws, limits, truths against which nothing can be done. Thus respect is born, which in each of us is the faculty of conceiving what is greater than ourselves, the respect that makes us greater and sets us free by making us modest. This is the law of education for simplicity. It can be summed up in these words: to form free and respectful people, people who are themselves and fraternal.

Let us draw from this principle a few practical applications.

Precisely because the child is the future, we must bind him to the past through piety. We owe it to him to clothe tradition in the most practical forms, those most capable of making a strong impression. Hence the exceptional place that the elders, the honoring of memory and, by extension, the history of the family hearth must hold in an education and in a home. It is above all toward our children that we fulfill a duty when we give the grandparents the place of honor in everything. Nothing speaks so forcefully to a child, and nothing develops feelings of modesty in him so much, as seeing his father and mother maintain, on every occasion, an attitude of respect toward an old grandfather, sometimes an infirm one. Here is a perpetual object lesson that no one can resist. For it to have its full force, a tacit understanding must reign among all the adults in a household. In the child's eyes they all stand together, bound to respect one another and to agree, on pain of compromising the authority that educates him. And among these people the servants must be included. A servant is a grown-up, and it is the same feeling of respect that is wounded when a child fails in consideration toward a servant as when he fails in it toward his father or grandfather. As soon as he speaks a rude or arrogant word to an older person, he leaves the path from which a child must never stray, and if his parents are even slightly negligent in warning him, they will soon see from his conduct toward themselves that the enemy has entered his heart.

We are mistaken if we believe that the child is naturally averse to respect, and if we support this opinion with the many examples of irreverence that the young present to us. At bottom, respect is a need for the child. His moral being feeds on it. The child longs, in a dim way, to respect and admire something. But when no use is made of this longing, it is lost and corrupted. Through our lack of cohesion and of deference toward one another, we grown-ups discredit every day, in the child's eyes, our own cause and that of all things worthy of respect. We inoculate him with the bad spirit whose effects later turn against us.

Nowhere does this sad truth appear more forcefully than in the relations between masters and servants as we have made them. Our social faults, our lack of simplicity and goodness, fall back on our children's heads. There are certainly few people of the middle class who understand that it is better to lose several thousand francs than to make their children lose respect for the servants, who in our houses represent the class of the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Keep up the conventions and the distances as much as you like, that sort of marking out of social frontiers which allows each person to stay in his place and to observe the hierarchy. It is a good thing, I am convinced of it, but only on condition that we never forget that those who serve us are human beings every bit as much as we are. You impose on your servants set forms of speech and bearing, outward signs of the respect they owe you. Do you also teach your children, and do you yourselves use, ways of behaving that make your servants understand that you respect their individual dignity as you wish them to respect yours? There you have, at home and at every hour, excellent ground for study, where you can train yourselves in the practice of mutual respect, which is one of the essential conditions of social health. I fear that too little advantage is taken of it. You certainly demand respect, but you do not practice it. So most often you obtain nothing but hypocrisy, with an additional and quite unexpected result: you have cultivated pride in your children. These two factors combined pile up serious difficulties for the very future you are bound to safeguard. I am right, then, to say that you suffered a real loss on the day when, by your habits and your ways, you brought about a decline in respect.

Why should I not say it? It seems to me that most of us are working toward this decline. Everywhere, and in almost every social class, I notice that a rather bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of mutual contempt. Here, anyone with calloused hands and working clothes is despised; there, anyone who does not wear the workman's smock is despised. Children brought up in that spirit will one day make sorry fellow citizens. All of this utterly lacks that simplicity which enables men of goodwill at the various levels of a society to work together without being hampered by the secondary distances that separate them.

If the spirit of caste destroys respect, the spirit of party, whatever the party, destroys it just as surely. In certain circles children are brought up to venerate only one country, their own; only one politics, that of their parents and teachers; only one religion, the one drilled into them. Does anyone really imagine that this is how to form people who respect their country, religion and the law? Is a respect that extends only to what touches us or belongs to us really genuine? What strange blindness in the cliques and coteries that claim, with such ingenuous complacency, the title of schools of respect, and that respect nothing apart from themselves! At bottom they are saying: "The country, religion, the law - that is us!" Such teaching breeds fanaticism. And if fanaticism is not the only antisocial ferment, it is certainly one of the worst and most powerful.

If simplicity of heart is an essential condition of respect, simplicity of life is its best school. Whatever your fortune, avoid everything that might lead your children to believe they are more than others. Even if your situation would allow you to dress them richly, think of the harm you may do them by stirring up their vanity. Spare them the misfortune of ever believing that it is enough to be elaborately dressed to possess distinction, and above all do not wantonly widen, by their clothing and their habits, the distances that already separate them from their fellows. Dress them simply. If, on the other hand, you had to make efforts to economize in order to give your children the pleasure of being elegantly dressed, I would urge you to keep your spirit of sacrifice for a better cause. You would risk seeing it poorly rewarded. You are sowing your money when it would be better to save it for serious needs; you are preparing for yourself, later on, a harvest of ingratitude. How dangerous it is to accustom your sons and daughters to a way of life beyond your means and theirs! In the first place, it does great harm to the purse; in the second, it develops the spirit of contempt within the very heart of the family. If you dress your children like little lords and let them believe they are superior to you, is it any wonder that they end up looking down on you? You will have fed at your own table people who belong nowhere. And that kind of product is very costly and worth nothing.

There is also a certain way of schooling children whose clearest result is to lead them to despise their parents, their surroundings, and the customs and labors among which they grew up. Such schooling is a calamity. It is good only for producing a legion of malcontents who in their hearts break away from their stock, from their origins, from their affinities, from everything, in short, that forms the basic fabric of a human being. Once they are detached from the sturdy tree that bore them, the wind of their misguided ambition carries them about the earth like dead leaves, which gather in heaps in certain places to ferment and rot one upon another.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by slow and sure evolution. Let us imitate her in the way we prepare our children's careers. Let us not confuse progress and advancement with those violent exercises known as death-defying leaps. Let us not bring up our children in such a way that they come to despise the work, the aspirations and the spirit of simplicity of the family home; let us not expose them to the evil temptation of being ashamed of our poverty, should they themselves ever become wealthy. A society is very sick on the day when the sons of peasants begin to turn away in disgust from the fields, when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of workmen, hoping to be taken for heiresses, would rather walk alone in the street than on the arm of their good, honest parents. A society is healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members strives to do roughly what his parents did, but better, and, while aiming to rise, is content at first with more modest functions, fulfilling them conscientiously [2].

[2] This would be the place to speak of work in general and of its bracing influence on education. But I have spoken of this subject in my books Justice, Youth and Courage; I simply refer the reader to them.

Education must form free people. If you want to raise your children for freedom, raise them simply, and above all do not fear that in doing so you will harm their happiness. Quite the contrary. The more luxurious toys, parties and refined pleasures a child has, the less he enjoys himself. That is a sure sign. Let us be sparing in the means we use to delight and entertain the young, and above all let us not lightly create artificial needs. Food, clothing, lodging, amusements: let all of it be as natural and as uncomplicated as possible. To make life pleasant for their children, some parents give them habits of gluttony and idleness, expose them to excitements unsuited to their age, and multiply invitations and shows. Sad gifts, all of these. Instead of a free man, you are raising a slave. Overaccustomed to luxury, he will grow tired of it, and yet when, for one reason or another, his comforts fail him, he will be unhappy, and you with him; and, what is worse, you may all be inclined together, at the great moments of life, to sacrifice human dignity, truth and duty out of sheer cowardice.

Let us, then, raise our children simply, I would almost say the hard way; let us train them in strengthening exercises, and even in privations. Let them be among those who are better prepared to sleep on hard ground and to endure fatigue than to savor the pleasures of the table and the comfort of a bed. In this way we will make them independent and sturdy people on whom others can count, who will not sell themselves for a little comfort, and who nevertheless, more than anyone, will have the capacity to be happy.

Too easy a life brings on a kind of weariness of the vital energy. One becomes jaded, disillusioned, a young old man whom nothing can amuse. How many children and young people are in this state today! On them, like a dismal mold, have settled the marks of our decrepitude, our skepticism, our vices, and the bad habits they have picked up in our company. How much these faded young lives make us reflect upon ourselves! How many warnings are engraved on those brows!

By their very contrast, these shadows tell us that happiness consists in being truly alive, active, spontaneous, untouched by the yoke of passions, artificial needs and morbid excitements, having kept in one's body the capacity to enjoy the light of day and the air one breathes, and in one's heart the capacity to love and to feel powerfully all that is generous, simple and beautiful.

An artificial life breeds artificial thought and faltering speech. Healthy habits, strong impressions and everyday contact with reality naturally lead to frank speech. Lying is a slave's vice, the refuge of cowards and weaklings. Whoever is free and firm is also forthright. Let us encourage in our children the happy boldness to say everything without mincing words! What is usually done? Characters are repressed and leveled for the sake of the uniformity that, for the great herd, is synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, to feel with one's own heart, to express one's true self: how improper, how boorish! Oh, what an atrocious education it is that consists in perpetually stifling in each of us the one thing that gives us our reason for being! How many murders of souls we are guilty of! Some are clubbed with rifle butts, others gently smothered between two eiderdowns! Everything conspires against independent characters. When we are small, people want us to be like pictures or dolls; when we are grown, they love us on condition that we are like everyone else, automatons: once you have seen one, you know them all. That is why the lack of originality and initiative has overtaken us, and why flatness and monotony are the distinctive marks of our life. Truth will set us free: let us teach our children to be themselves, to sound their own note, without a crack or a mute. Let us make honesty a need for them; even in their gravest faults, provided they admit them, let us give them credit for having done wrong with their faces uncovered.

Together with frankness, let us make naïveté part of our care as educators. Let us show every possible consideration to this companion of childhood, a little wild, but so graceful and so beneficent. Let us not frighten her away. Once she has fled from a place, she very rarely returns. Naïveté is not only the sister of truth and the guardian of each person's own qualities; she is also a great power that educates and reveals. All around us I see too many self-styled realists, armed with terrifying spectacles and great scissors, who hunt naive things out of their nests and clip their wings. They root naïveté out of life, out of thought, out of education, and pursue her even into the realm of dreams. On the pretext of making men of their children, they prevent them from being children, as if, before the ripe fruits of autumn, there did not have to be the flowers, the fragrances, the songs and the enchantment of spring.

I beg mercy for all that is naive and simple, not only for those innocent little charms that flutter about curly heads, but also for legend, the artless song, the tales of the world of marvels and mystery. A child's sense of wonder is the first form of that sense of the infinite without which a human being is like a bird deprived of wings. Let us not wean childhood away from wonder, so that it may keep the power to rise above the earthbound and later appreciate those devout and moving symbols of vanished ages in which human truth found expressions our dry logic will never replace.