The most significant category in my notes from Bertrand Russell’s Skeptical Essays was about education. Russell’s main concern was that education from a monopoly source – such as the state – endangers freethinking and threatens the creativity required by societies to meet the challenges of the future through invention, development, and growth. He notes that this is a danger a society often gleefully notes in foreign schools yet often finds unable to see in their own curriculums.
His concerns formed a couple of recommendations for how professional educators should approach their craft. First, he thought teachers who cared for their own credit could not be allowed into the classroom. These teachers, he suspected, would favor strong students who could outwardly demonstrate the teacher’s influence via performance or competition. The goal of a school should be to do right by all students, not just a handful of elite performers. A teacher who encouraged students to try new things and learn from inconsequential failures would serve a majority of his or her students. This goal, he reiterated, is not achievable by teachers worried about their own credit because every student’s failure would be counted against the teacher’s performance.
Second, he thought a teacher must harness a child’s natural curiosity to learn about the world. The best teachers awaken the instinct and nurture it by preventing common or traumatic errors in the learning process. A good way to encourage a student’s curiosity is to create conditions that make expending effort fun. A teacher should also bear in mind that, just as a parent does with an infant learning to speak, creating opportunity and providing regular reinforcement are often all that is required for any form of learning.
