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EMOTION AND DISCIPLINE

Bertrand Russell
Education has at all times had a twofold
aim, namely instruction and training in
good conduct. The conception of good
conduct varies with the political
institutions and social traditions of the
community. In the middle ages, when
there was a hierarchical organization
proceeding from the serf by gradual
stages up to God, the chief virtue was
obedience. Children were taught to obey
their parents and to reverence their
social superiors, to feel awe in the
presence of the priest and submission in
the presence of the Lord of the Manor.
Only the Emperor and the Pope were
free, and, since the morality of the time
afforded no guidance to free men, they
spent their time in fighting each other.
The moderns differ from the men of the
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thirteenth century both in aim and in

method. Democracy has substituted co-
operation for submission and herd
instinct for reverence; the group in
regard to which herd instinct is to be
most operative has become the nation,
which was formerly rendered
unimportant by the universality of the
Church. Meanwhile propaganda has
become persuasive rather than forceful,
and has learnt to proceed by the
instilling of suitable sentiments in early
youth. Church music, school songs, and
the flag determine, by their influence on
the boy, the subsequent actions of the
man in moments of strong emotion.
Against these influences the assaults of
reason have but little power.
The influence of political conceptions on
early education is not always obvious,
and is often unconscious on the part of
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the educator. For the present, therefore,

I wish to consider education in behaviour
with as little regard as possible to the
social order, to which I shall return at a
later stage.
When it is sought to produce a certain
kind of behaviour in a child or animal,
there are two different techniques which
may be followed. We may, on the one
hand, by means of rewards and
punishments cause the child or animal to
perform or abstain from certain precise
acts; or we may, on the other hand, seek
to produce in the child or animal such
emotions as will lead, on the whole, to
acts of the kind desired.
By a suitable distribution of rewards and
punishments, it is possible to control a
very large part of overt behaviour.
Usually the only form of reward or
punishment required will be praise or
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blame. By this method boys who are

naturally timid can acquire physical
courage, and children who are sensitive
to pain can be taught a stoical
endurance. Good manners, if not
imposed earlier, can be learnt in
adolescence by means of no worse
punishment than the contemptuous
lifting of an eyebrow. What is called
‘good form’ is acquired by almost all who
are exposed to it, merely from fear of the
bad opinion incurred by infringing it.
Those who have been taught from an
early age to fear the displeasure of their
group as the worst of misfortunes will die
on the battlefield, in a war of which they
understand nothing, rather than suffer
the contempt of fools. The English public
schools have carried this system to
perfection, and have largely sterilized
intelligence by making it cringe before
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the herd. This is what is called making a

boy manly.
As a social force, the behaviourist
method of ‘conditioning’ is therefore
very powerful and very successful. It can
and does cause men to act in ways quite
different from those in which they would
otherwise have acted, and it is capable
of producing an impressive uniformity
of overt behaviour. Nevertheless, it
has its limitations.
It was through Freud that these
limitations first became known in a
scientific manner, though men of
psychological insight had long ago
perceived them in an intuitive way. For
our purposes, the essential discovery of
psycho- analysis is this: that an
impulse which is prevented, by
behaviourist methods, from finding
overt expression in action, does not
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necessarily die, but is driven

underground, and finds some new
outlet which has not been inhibited
by training. Often the new outlet will be
more harmful than the one that has been
prevented, and in any case the deflection
involves emotional disturbance and
unprofitable expenditure of energy. It is
therefore necessary to pay more
attention to emotion, as opposed to
overt behaviour, than is done by those
who advocate conditioning as alone
sufficient in the training of character.
There are, moreover, some undesirable
habits in regard to which the method of
rewards and punishments fails
completely, even from its own point of
view. One of these is bed-wetting. When
this persists beyond the age at which it
usually stops, punishment only makes
it more obstinate. Although this fact
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has long been known to psychologists, it

is still unknown to most schoolmasters,
who for years on end punish boys having
this habit, without ever noticing that the
punishment does not produce reform.
The cause of the emotion and discipline
habit, in older boys, is usually some
deep-seated unconscious
psychological disturbance, which
must be brought to the surface before a
cure can be effected.
The same kind of psychological
mechanism applies in many less obvious
instances. In the case of definite nervous
disorders this is now widely recognized.
Kleptomania, for example, is not
uncommon in children, and, unlike
ordinary thieving, it cannot be cured by
punishment, but only by ascertaining
and removing its psychological cause.
What is less recognized is that we all
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suffer, to a greater or less degree, from

nervous disorders having an emotional
origin. A man is called sane when he is
as sane as the average of his
contemporaries; but in the average man
many of the mechanisms which
determine his opinions and actions are
quite fantastic, so much so that in a
world of real sanity they would be called
insane. It is dangerous to produce good
social behaviour by means which leave
the anti-social emotions untouched. So
long as these emotions, while persisting,
are denied all outlet, they will grow
stronger and stronger, leading to
impulses of cruelty which will at last
become irresistible. In the man of weak
will, these impulses may break out in
crime, or in some form of behaviour to
which social penalties are attached. In
the man of strong will, they take even
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more undesirable forms. He may be a

tyrant in the home, ruthless in business,
bellicose in politics, persecuting in his
social morality; for all these qualities
other men with similar defects of
character will admire him; he will die
universally respected, after having
spread hatred and misery over a city, a
nation, or an epoch according to his
ability and his opportunities. Correct
behaviour combined with bad emotions
is not enough, therefore, to make a man
a contributor to the happiness of
mankind. If this is our criterion of
desirable conduct, something more must
be sought in the education of
character.
Such considerations, as well as the
sympathetic observation of children,
suggest that the behaviourist method of
training character is inadequate, and
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needs to be supplemented by a quite

different method.
Experience of children shows that it is
possible to operate upon feeling, and not
only upon outward behaviour, by giving
children an environment in which
desirable emotions shall become
common and undesirable emotions rare.
Some children (and some adults) are of a
cheerful disposition, others are morose;
some are easily contented with any
pleasure that offers, while others are
inconsolable unless they can have the
particular pleasure on which their hearts
are set; some, in the absence of
evidence, regard the bulk of human
beings with friendly confidence, while
others regard most people with terrified
suspicion. The prevalent emotional
attitude of the child generally remains
that of the adult, though in later life men
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learn to conceal their timidities and

grudges by disguises of greater or lesser
effectiveness. It is therefore very
important that children should have
predominantly those emotional attitudes
which, both in childhood and
subsequently, will make them happy,
successful, and useful, rather than those
that lead to unhappiness, failure, and
malevolence. There is no doubt that it is
within the power of psychology to
determine the kind of environment that
promotes desirable emotions, and that
often intelligent affection without science
can arrive at the right result. When this
method is rightly used, its effect on
character is more radical and far more
satisfactory than the effect to be
obtained by rewards and punishments.
The right emotional environment for a
child is a delicate matter, and of course
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varies with the child’s age. Throughout

childhood, though to a continually
diminishing extent, there is need of the
feeling of safety. For this purpose,
kindness and a pleasant routine are the
essentials. The relation with adults
should be one of play and physical ease,
but not of emotional caresses. There
should be close intimacy with other
children. Above all, there should be
opportunity for initiative in
construction, in exploration, and in
intellectual and artistic directions.
The child has two opposite needs, safety
and freedom, of which the latter
gradually grows at the expense of the
former. The affection given by adults
should be such as to cause a feeling of
safety, but not such as to limit freedom
or to arouse a deep emotional response
in the child. Play, which is a vital need of
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childhood, should be contributed not only

by other children, but also by parents,
and is essential to the best relation
between parents and children.
Freedom is the most difficult element to
secure under existing conditions. I am
not an advocate of absolute freedom, for
reasons which we considered in an
earlier chapter; but I am an advocate of
certain forms of freedom which most
adults find unendurable. There should
be no enforced respect for grown-
ups, who should allow themselves to be
called fools whenever children wish to
call them so. We cannot prevent our
children from thinking us fools by merely
forbidding them to utter their thoughts;
in fact, they are more likely to think ill of
us if they dare not say so. Children
should not be forbidden to swear—not
because it is desirable that they should
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swear, but because it is desirable that

they should think that it does not matter
whether they do or not, since this is a
true proposition. They should be free
entirely from the sex taboo, and not
checked when their conversation seems
to inhibit adults to be indecent. If they
express opinions on religion or politics or
morals, they may be met with argument,
provided it is genuine argument, but not
if it is really dogma: the adult may, and
should, suggest considerations to them,
but should not impose conclusions.
Given such conditions, children may
grow up fearless and fundamentally
happy, without the resentment that
comes of thwarting or the excessive
demands that are produced by an
atmosphere of hothouse affection. Their
intelligence will be untrammeled, and
their views on human affairs will have
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emotion and discipline the kindliness

that comes of contentment. A world of
human beings with this emotional
equipment would make short work of our
social system, with its wars, its
oppressions, its economic injustice, its
horror of free speech and free inquiry,
and its superstitious moral code. The
toleration of these evils depends upon
timidity in thought and malevolent
feeling due to lack of freedom. Dr
Watson, who minimizes the congenital
aspects of character, nevertheless
allows, as one of the unlearnt reactions
of infants, rage at any constriction of the
limbs. This instinctive emotion is the
basis of the love of freedom. The man
whose tongue is constricted by laws or taboos
against free speech, whose pen is constricted
by the censorship, whose loves are
constricted by an ethic which considers
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jealousy a better thing than affection, whose

childhood has been imprisoned in a code of
manners and whose youth has been drilled in
a cruel orthodoxy, will feel against the world
that hampers him the same rage that is felt
by the infant whose arms and legs are held
motionless. In his rage he will turn to
destruction, becoming a revolutionary, a
militarist, or a persecuting moralist
according to temperament and
opportunity. To make human beings who
will create a better world is a problem in
emotional psychology: it is the problem
of making human beings who have a free
intelligence combined with a happy
disposition. This problem is not beyond
the powers of science; it is the will, not
the power, that is lacking.
(Education and the Social Order, London:
Allen & Unwin; Education and the Modern
World, New York: W. W. Norton, 1932.)
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