Education by Herbert Spencer

Author:Herbert Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: D. Appleton

Bear constantly in mind the truth that the aim PROGRESSIVE NEED OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. 221

of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by-and-by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. This it is which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences, so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached. Under early, tyrannical forms of society, when one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should be a predominant means of government. But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one—now that the good or evil which he experiences throughout life is mainly that which in the nature of things results from his own conduct, it is desirable that from his first years he should begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct. Aim, therefore, to diminish the amount of parental government as fast as you can substitute for it in your child's mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results. In infancy a considerable amount of absolutism is necessary. A three-year old urchin playing with an open razor, cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of consequences; for the consequences may, in such a case, be too serious. But as intelligence increases, the number of instances calling for peremptory interference may be, and should be, diminished; with the view of gradually ending them as maturity is approached. All periods of transition are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate; which, alike by cultivating a child's faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which it is left to its self-constraint, and by so bringing it, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity. Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule: at the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful; by-and-by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in parental abdication.

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