Education and the good life

IN our cheerful modern symposium, Bertrand Russell is one of the most refreshing speakers. Like Wells, Chesterton, and others, he is impelled, greatly to our profit, to share with us his experiences in religion, politics, science, education, what you will. His very language has and imparts vitality, and the most abstruse subjects become comprehensible and exciting when he treats of them. This book, inspired, he tells us, by contact with his own small children, is one of his simplest. It is not so challenging a book as Why Men Fight or Roads to Freedom: sometimes one might even find it a trifle obvious, did one not remember the atrocities of mechanical discipline still forcing many small folk into a stereotyped mould in the name of education. But it has charm, or it would not be Mr. Russell’s.

The charm results from the audacious and unconventional attitude of a man himself saturated with the best elements in the old educational tradition. Mr. Russell values the classics as little as does Wells, but in some of his most keenly analytical pages he repudiates the ulilitarian trend of education as vigorously as any advocate of the humanities. ‘We cannot say that a useful activity is one that has useful results. The essence of what is useful is that it ministers to some result which is not merely useful. . . . Somewhere we must get beyond the chain of successive utilities, and find a peg from which the chain is to hang. If not there is no real usefulness in any link of the chain.’ Our final peg must he ‘the good life,’ and the good life depends largely on a living imagination.