Morals and Education1 (1963)

The title of my lecture gives me scope to develop the theme not so much of society that changes as of human nature that does not change. Human nature does not change. This is an idea that could be challenged. Nevertheless, I shall assume its truth, and build on this foundation. It is true that human nature evolved, just as human bodies and beings evolved, in the course of hundreds of thousands of years. But there is very little evidence that human nature has altered in the short span of recorded history; and comparable with this is the fact that what is true about human nature in London today is also true in Tokyo, in Accra, in Amsterdam and Timbuktoo. It is true for whites and blacks, for giants and pygmies, for the children of the Harwell or Cape Canaveral scientist and for the children of the Australian aboriginal.

Applied to the subject that is under discussion (moral education today) this means that there is an area for study that may be called the capacity of the human child to be morally educated. What I am referring to in this lecture is limited to this area, the human child's development of a capacity for having a moral sense, for experiencing a sense of guilt and for the setting up of an ideal. Analogous would be an attempt to get behind such an idea as ‘belief in God’ to the idea of ‘belief’, or (as I would prefer to say) ‘belief in’. To a child who develops ‘belief in’ can be handed the god of the household or of the society that happens to be his. But to a child with no ‘belief in’, god is at best a pedagogue's gimmick, and at worst a piece of evidence for the child that the parent-figures are lacking in confidence in the processes of human nature and are frightened of the unknown.

Professor Niblett in the opening lecture of this series referred to the headmaster Keate who said to a child: ‘You will believe in the Holy Ghost by 5 o'clock this afternoon or I will beat you till you do,’ and in this way Professor Niblett led on to the idea of the futility of