THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

Contents

Introduction 3 The Unity of Personality 23 The Striving for Superiority and Its Educational — Significance 36 Directing the Superiority Striving 61 The Inferiority Complex ce The Development of the Child: Preventing the Inferiority Complex 95 Social Feeling and the Obstacles to Its Development 115 The Child’s Position in the Family: The Psychology of the Situation and the Remedy 137 The New Situation as a Test of Preparation 149 The Child at School 166 Influences from Outside 190 Adolescence and Sex Education 209 Pedagogical Mistakes 227 Educating the Parent 239 Appendix

I: An Individual Psychological Questionnaire 251

Il: Five Case Histories with Commentaries 259

Chapter One Introduction

ROM a psychological point of view, the problem of education reduces itself, in the case of adults, to the problem of self-knowledge and rational self-direction. In the case of children education may be approached in the same manner, but there is this difference: on account of the immaturity of children, the question of guidance—never wholly absent in the case of adults—takes on supreme importance. We could, if we wished, allow children to develop of their own accord, and if they had twenty thousand years or so to develop and a favorable environment, they would eventually approach the standards of adult civilization. This method is of course out of the question, and the adult must necessarily take an interest in guiding the child in his development.

Here the great difficulty is ignorance. It is difficult enough for the adult to know himself, to know the cause of his emotions, his likes and hates—in short, to understand his own psychology. It is doubly difficult to understand children and to guide them on the basis of proper knowledge.

Individual Psychology has specially concerned itself with the psychology of children, both on its own account and for the light it sheds on adult traits and adult behavior. And unlike other psychological approaches, it allows no gap to exist between theory and practice. It fastens on the unity of personality and studies its dynamic struggle for development and expression. Krom such a point of view scientific knowledge is already practical wisdom, for the knowledge is a knowledge of mistakes, and whoever has this knowledge—whether it be the psychologist, the parent, the friend or the individual himself— immediately sees its practical application in the guidance of the personality concerned.

On account of the method of approach of Individual Psychology, its doctrines hang together as an organic whole. Because it sees the behavior of individuals as motivated and directed by the unity of personality, whatever Individual Psychology has to say about human behavior reflects the same interrelation that is manifested in the activities of the psyche. In this opening chapter the attempt will therefore be made to present the viewpoint of Individual Psychology as a whole, with the later chapters undertaking to treat at fuller length the various interrelated problems that are here broached.

The fundamental fact in human development is the dynamic and purposive striving of the psyche. A child, from its earliest infancy, is engaged in a constant struggle to develop, and this struggle is in accordance with an unconsciously formed but everpresent goal—a vision of greatness, perfection and superiority.. This struggle, this goal-forming activity, reflects, of course, the peculiarly human faculty of thinking and of imagining, and it dominates all our specific acts throughout life. It dominates even our thoughts, for we do not think objectively but in accordance with the goal and style of life we have formed.

The unity of personality is implicit in each human being’s existence. Every individual represents both a unity of personality and the individual fashioning of that unity. The individual is thus both the picture and the artist. He is the artist of his own personality, but as an artist he is neither an infallible worker, nor a person with a complete understanding of soul and body—he is rather a weak, extremely fallible and imperfect human being.

In considering the construction of a personality, the chief defect to be noted is that its unity, its particular style and goal, is not built upon objective reality, but upon the subjective view the individual takes of the facts of life. A conception, a view of a fact, is never the fact itself, and it is for this reason that human beings, all of whom live in the same world of facts, mould themselves differently. Hach one organizes himself according to his personal view of things, and some views are more sound, and some views are less sound. We must always reckon with these individual mistakes and failures in the development of a human being. Especially must we reckon with the misinterpretations made in early childhood, for these dominate the subsequent course of our existence.

A concrete instance of this may be seen in this clinical case. A woman, at the age of fifty-two, was always disparaging women that were older than herself. She related the fact that when she was a tiny child, she always felt humiliated and undervalued because of an older sister, who received all the attention. Looking at this case with what we might call the “vertical” point of view of Individual Psychology, we can see the same mechanism, the same psychological dynamics both at the beginning of her life and at present—that is to say, near the close of her existence. There is always the fear of being undervalued and the anger and irritation at finding others favored or preferred. Even if we knew nothing else of this woman’s life, or of her particular unity of personality, we could almost fill in the gaps in our knowledge on the basis of the two facts given. The psychologist acts here like a novelist, who has to construct a human being with a definite line of action, style of life, or pattern of behavior, and has to construct him in such a way that the impression of a unified personality is not disturbed. A good psychologist would be able to predict the conduct of this woman in certain situations, and to describe clearly the traits which accompany this particular “life line” in her personality.

The striving or goal-forming activity, which is responsible for the construction of individual personalities, presupposes another important psychological fact. This is the sense or feeling of inferiority. All children have an inherent feeling of inferiority which stimulates the imagination and incites attempts to dissipate the psychological sense of inferiority by bettering the situation. A. bettering of one’s situation results in a lessening of the feeling of

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THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN inferiority. From a psychological point of view it may be regarded as a compensation.

Now the important thing about the sense of inferiority and the mechanism of psychological compensation is that it opens up a vast possibility of making mistakes. The sense of inferiority may stimulate objective accomplishment; it may also result in a purely psychological adjustment which widens the gulf between the individual and objective reality. Or, again, the sense of inferiority may appear so tragic that the only way it can be overcome is by the development of psychological compensatory traits, which in the end may not overcome the situation at all but which are nonetheless psychologically necessary and inevitable.

There are, for example, three classes of children who manifest very clearly the development of compensatory traifs. They are children who come into the world with weak or imperfect organs; children who are treated with severity and with no affection; and, finally, children who receive too much pampering.

We may take these three classes of children as exemplifying three basic situations in terms of which the development of the more normal types of children may be studied and understood. Not every child is born a cripple, but it is surprising how many children manifest, to a greater or lesser degree, psychological traits based on some physical difficulty or weak organ—psychological traits of which the archetype may be studied in the extreme case of the crippled child. And as for the classifications of pampered and hated children, practically all children fall to a greater or lesser degree psychological traits based on some physical difficulty or weak organ— psychological traits of which the archetype may be studied in the extreme case of the crippled child. And as for the classifications of pampered and hated children, practically all children fall to a greater or lesser degree into one, or even both groupings. All these three primary situations produce a feeling of insufficiency and inferiority, and by way of reaction, an ambition beyond the realm of human possibility. The sense of inferiority and the striving for superiority are always two phases of the same fundamental fact in human life, and are thus inseparable. In pathological situations, it is difficult to say whether it is the exaggerated feeling of inferiority, or the exacerbated striving for superiority which is most harmful. They both go together in more or less rhythmical waves. In the case of children we find the inordinate ambition, aroused by an exag- 9 gerated sense of inferiority, acting like a poison in the soul—forever making the child dissatisfied. Such a dissatisfaction is not one which leads to useful activity. It remains fruitless because it is fed by a disproportionate ambition. This ambition may be seen twisting itself into character traits and personal mannerisms. It acts like a perpetual irritant making the individual supersensitive and on guard lest he be hurt or trodden upon.

Types of this nature—and the annals of Individual Psychology are full of them—develop into persons whose abilities remain dormant, persons who become, as we say, “nervous,” or eccentric. Persons of these types, when driven too far, wind up in the world of the irresponsible and the criminal because they think only of themselves and not of others. Their egotism, both moral and psychological, becomes absolute. We find some of them avoiding reality and objective facts and constructing a new world for themselves. By day-dreaming, by hugging imaginative fantasies as if they represented reality, they finally succeed in creating psychological peace. They have reconciled reality and the mind by constructing reality in the image of the mind.

In all such developments the tell-tale criterion which needs to be watched by the psychologist and by the parent is the degree of social feeling which the child or individual manifests. Social feeling is the crucial and deciding factor in normal development. Every disturbance which results in a lessening of the social or communal feeling has a tremendously harmful effect on the mental growth of the child. Social feeling is the barometer of the child’s normality.

It is around the principle of social feeling that Individual Psychology has developed its pedagogical technique. Parents or guardians must not permit a child to attach himself to one person only. If this is permitted the child will find himself badly or insufficiently prepared for later life.

A good way of finding out the degree of social feeling of a child is to observe him at the time when he enters school. On entering school the child meets with one of his earliest and severest tests. The school is a new situation for the child: it will therefore reveal how well the child has been prepared to face new situations, and particularly how well he has been prepared to meet new persons.

It is the general lack of knowledge as to how to prepare a child for school that explains why so many adults look back on their school years as a sort of nightmare. Of course the school, when properly administered, will often make up for the deficiencies in the earlier rearing of the children. The ideal school should serve as a mediator between the home and the wide world of reality, and should be a place not merely for book knowledge, but a place in which the knowledge and art of living should be taught. But while we are waiting for the ideal school to develop so that it may overcome the deficiencies in the parental education of children, we can also put our finger on the faults of the parents. |

For analyzing the faults of family upbringing the school may serve as an indicator, precisely because it is not yet an ideal environment. Children who have not been taught how to make contact with others feel themselves alone when they enter school. As a result they are regarded as peculiar, and thus the initial tendency grows stronger and stronger with time. Their proper development is thwarted, and they become behavior problem children. People blame the school in such cases, although the school has here merely brought out the latent defects in the home education.

It has always been an open question to Individual Psychology whether behavior problem children can make any progress in schoo] at all. We have always been able to prove that it is a danger sign when a child begins to fail at school. It is a sign not so much of failure in studies but of psychological failure. It means that the child has begun to lose faith in himself. Discouragement has made its appearance, and the child begins to avoid useful roads and normal tasks, searching all the time for another outlet, a road to freedom and easy success. Instead of the road which society has mapped out, he chooses a private road where he can erect a compensation for his inferiority by attaining a sense of superiority. He chooses the path that is always attractive to discouraged individuals—the path of quickest psychological success. It is easier to distinguish one’s self and to give one’s self the feeling of a conqueror by throwing off social and moral responsibilities and by breaking the law, than by following the established social paths. But this easy road to superiority is always an indication of underlying cowardice and weakness, no matter what apparent daring and brayery are manifested in the outward acts. Such a person always tries to do those things in which he is certain to succeed, thus showing off his superiority. Just as we observe that criminals, despite their apparent recklessness and bravery, are at bottom cowardly, so we have been able to see how children in less dangerous situations betray their sense of weakness by various small signs. Thus we commonly see chil- 13 dren (and for that matter adults, too) who are not able to stand upright but must always lean against something. Under the old methods of training children and the old ways of understanding such signs, the symptom was treated but not the underlying situation. One used to say to such a child, “Don’t Jean on something all the time.” Actually what matters here is not that the child leans, but that he always feels the need of a support. One can readily persuade the child, either by punishment or reward, to give up this sign of weakness, but his great need for support is not thereby relieved. The disease continues. It is a good educator who can read signs and can eradicate the underlying disease with sympathy and understanding.

F’rom a single sign one can often draw conclusions as to the presence of many qualities or traits. In the case of a child obsessed with the need of leaning on something, we can see at once that such traits as anxiety and dependence are sure to be present. By comparing him with similar persons whose cases we know thoroughly, we can reconstruct such a personality, and we can see, in short, that we have to deal with a pampered child.

We turn now to the character traits of another class of children—those who have gone without love.

The traits of this class, in their most developed form, can be observed by studying the biographies of all the great enemies of humanity. In all the life stories of these men the one thing that stands out is the fact that as children they were badly treated. In this way they developed a hardness of character, envy and hatred. They could not bear to see others happy. Now, envious persons of this type are found not merely among straight villains but among supposedly normal persons. Such individuals when they have charge of children think that the children should not be any happier than they themselves were as children. We find such a view applied by parents to their children, as well as by guardians to the children of others who are put in their charge.

Such a view, such thoughts, do not spring from bad intentions. They simply reflect the mentality of those who have been harshly brought up. Such persons can produce any number of good reasons and maxims, as for example, “Spare the rod and spoil the child!’ And they give us endless proofs and examples, which do not quite convince us inasmuch as the futility of a rigid, authoritative education is proved by the simple fact that it estranges the child from his educator.

By exploring various symptoms and interrelating them, the psychologist can, after some practice, organize a system by the aid of which the hidden psychological processes of an individual may be revealed. While every point which we examine by this system reflects something of the complete personality of the individual under investigation, we can feel satisfied only when we get the same indications at every point of our examination. Individual Psychology is thus an art as well as a science, and it cannot be too much emphasized that the speculative scheme, the system of concepts, is not to be applied in a wooden and mechanical fashion to an individual under examination. In all investigations the primary thing is to study the individual; we must never draw far-reaching conclusions from one or two modes of expression, but we must look for all possible supporting phases. Only when we are successful in confirming our tentative hypothesis, only when we have been able, for example, to find the same stubbornness and discouragement in other aspects of his behavior, can we say with certainty that this stubbornness or discouragement permeates the entire personality.

In this connection it must be remembered that the subject under examination has no understanding of his own forms of expression and is thus unable to conceal his true self. We see his personality in action, and his personality is revealed not by what he says or thinks about himself but by his acts interpreted in their context. It is not that the patient deliberately wants to lie to us, but we have learned to recognize a vast gulf between a man’s conscious thoughts and his unconscious motivations—a gulf which can best be bridged by a disinterested but sympathetic outsider. The outsider—whether he be the psychologist, or the parent or the teacher—should learn to interpret a personality on the basis of objective facts seen as the expression of the purposive, but more or less unconscious, strivings of the individual.

Thus the attitude of the individual with regard to the three fundamental questions of individual and social life reveals his true self as nothing else can. The first of these questions is the social relation, which we have already discussed in the context of the contrast between the private and objective views of reality. But the social relation manifests itself also as a specific task—it is the task of making friends and getting along with people. How does the individual meet that problem? What is his answer? When a human being believes he can evade the question by saying that the matter of friends, the matter of social relationships is of complete indifference to him, then indifference is his answer. From this indifference we can, of course, draw conclusions as to the direction and organization of his personality. It is to be noted, moreover, that the social relation is not confined merely to the physical making of friends and meeting of people: all the abstract qualities like friendship, comradeship, truthfulness and loyalty cluster about this relation, and the answer to the social relation indicates the individual’s answer on all these points,

The second great question concerns how the individual wants to make use of his life—what part he wants to take in the general division of labor. If the social question may be said to be determined by the existence of more than one ego, by the relationship I-you, then we may say that this question is determined by the fundamental relationship Man-Earth. If one could reduce all mankind into one person, this person would have mutuality with the earth. What does he want from the earth? Just as in the case of the first question, the solution of the problem of occupation is not a one-sided or private matter, but a matter between man and earth. It is a two-sided relationship in which man hasn’t got it all his own way.

Success is determined not by our private will but in relation to objective realities. For this reason the answer that an individual makes, and the manner in which he makes it, to the question of occupation throws a very revealing light on his personality and on his attitude towards life.

The third fundamental question arises from the fact that mankind is divided into two sexes. The solution of this problem is again not a private, subjective matter, but must be solved according to the inherent objective logic of the relationship. What is my position towards the other sex? The typical private conception is again a mistaken conception. A correct solution can be arrived at only through a careful consideration of all the questions which cluster around the sex relationship. And it stands to reason that every departure from a correct solution of the problem of love and marriage indicates a mistake, an error in the personality. Also many of the harmful consequences that follow a wrong solution of this problem are to be interpreted in the light of the underlying error of personality.

We can see, therefore, that we are in a position to discover the general style of life and particular goal of an individual from the way in which he answers these three questions. The goal is omnipotent. It decides a person’s style of life and it will be reflected in every one of his acts. Thus if the goal is a striving towards being a fellow man, a goal directed to the useful side of life, the stamp of that goal will be apparent in the individual’s solutions of all his problems. All the solutions will reflect constructive usefulness, and the individual will have the sense of happiness and the feeling of worth and power that go with constructive and useful activity. If the goal is directed otherwise, if it is directed to the private and useless side of life, the individual will find himself unable to solve fundamental problems, and he will also lack the joy that comes from their proper solution.

There is a strong interconnection between ail these fundamental problems, and it is made all the stronger by the fact that in the course of social life specific tasks spring out of these fundamental prob- Jems which can be carried out properly only in a social or communal setting, or, in other words, on the basis of social feeling. These tasks begin in the earliest years of childhood, when our sense-organs are developing in accordance with the stimulus of social life, in looking, speaking, hearing—in our relations to our brothers, sisters, parents, relatives, acquaintances, comrades, friends and teachers. They continue through life in the same manner, so that he who gets out of social touch with his fellows is lost.

And so Individual Psychology stands on firm ground when it regards as “right”’ that which is useful for the community. It realizes that every departure from the social standard is an offense against right and brings with it a conflict with the objective laws and objective necessities of reality. This clash with objectivity makes itself felt first of all in the feeling of worthlessness on the part of the offending individual, and it also comes out—with even stronger force—in the retaliations of the others who feel themselves aggrieved. Finally, it may be said, that the departure from the social standard violates an immanent social ideal which every one of us, consciously or unconsciously, carries in himself.

With its rigorous emphasis on social-mindedness as a test of development, Individual Psychology finds it easy to understand and evaluate the style of life of any child. For as soon as the child is confronted with a life problem, he will reveal, as if he were under examination, whether or not he has been “rightly” prepared. He will show, in other words, whether he has social feeling, whether he has courage, under-

JAPADIGE-PLATN standing, and in general a useful goal. What we then try to find out is the form and rhythm of his upward striving, the degree of his feeling of inferiority, the intensity of his social consciousness. All these things are closely interconnected and interpenetrate one another so as to form an organic and unbreakable unity—a unity that is unbreakable until the fault of construction is discovered and a reconstruction is accomplished.

Chapter Two The Unity Of Personality

HE psychic life of a child is a wonderful thing, T and it fascinates at every point where one touches it. Perhaps the most remarkable fact of all is the way in which one must unroll the whole scroll of the child’s life in order to understand a single event. Every act seems to express the whole of a child’s life and personality, and is thus unintelligible without a knowledge of this invisible background. To this phenomenon we give the name unity of personality.

The development of this unity—the co-ordination of actions and expressions into a single pattern— begins at a very early age. The demands of life compel the child to make his responses in a unified manner, and this unified manner of answering situations is not only what constitutes the child’s character but individualizes each of his acts and makes them distinct from the similar acts of other children.

This fact of the unity of personality is generally overlooked by most schools of psychology; or, if it is not entirely overlooked, it does not receive in their hands the attention that it deserves. As a result we often find both in psychological theory and in psychiatrical technique a particular gesture or a particular expression singled out for consideration as if it were an independent entity. Sometimes such a manifestation is called a complex, and the assumption is that it is possible to separate it from the rest of an individual’s activity. But such a procedure is comparable to singling out one note from an entire melody and attempting to understand the significance of this one note apart from the string of notes which make up the melody. The procedure is an improper one, but unfortunately it is widespread. Individual Psychology is compelled to take a stand against this widespread error, which is especially harmful when it is applied to the education of children. In that connection it expresses itself in the theory of punishment. What happens generally when a child does something that invites punishment? It is true that in a certain sense the total impression made by the child’s personality is usually taken into account, but this is more often a disadvantage than otherwise, since in the case of an oftrepeated mistake the teacher or parent is apt to be 24 prejudiced in approaching the child and regards him as incorrigible. It is also true that on the basis of a total impression one is apt to deal less harshly with the mistakes of a child whose behavior is otherwise quite good. Nonetheless in neither instance do we reach the real root of the problem as we should on the basis of the total comprehension of the child’s unity of personality. We are in the position of trying to understand the significance of a few individual notes torn from the context of the whole melody.

When we ask a child why he is lazy, we cannot expect him to know the basic connection which it is essential for us to know. Neither can we expect him to tell us why he lies. For thousands of years the saying of Socrates, who had so great an understanding of human nature, has been sounding in our ears: “How difficult it is to know one’s self!’ By what right, then, can we demand that a child answer such complex questions, the solution of which is difficult even for a psychologist? To be able to understand the significance of individual expression presupposes having a method for understanding the whole personality. This does not mean a description of what he does and how he acts, but involves understanding the child’s attitude towards the tasks which lie before him.

The following example shows how essential it is that we understand the whole context of a child’s life. A boy of thirteen was the older of two children. He was for five years the only child of parents who had seen better days. Then a sister was born. Previously every person in his environment was only too glad to fulfill every desire the boy had. The mother undoubtedly pampered him. The father was a good-natured, tranquil sort of person, who enjoyed his son’s dependence on him. The son, naturally, was closer to his mother, since the father was an army officer and frequently away from home. Now the mother was a clever and well-meaning woman, who tried to satisfy every whim of her dependent but insistent son. Nonetheless she was often annoyed at a display of ill-breeding or threatening gestures. A state of tension was created, and this tension expressed itself chiefly in the boy’s constantly trying to tyrannize his mother—ordering her about, teasing her, and in short making himself disagreeably prominent wherever and whenever he could.