1. 1942: The Child's Capacity for Doubt

This lecture was given to the Institute of Education, University of London, 7 February 1942.

What sort of a citizen do we want to produce by our education? What are the qualities that we think necessary in a citizen of a real democracy? People usually try to answer this question with a list such as courage, initiative, independence of judgement, and so on. Recent research corroborates common sense by showing that in general such ‘good’ qualities depend on a person's belief in something good inside or outside him which will help him to ‘make good’ in face of difficulties, trouble, pain, and loss instead of ‘going to pieces’. It seems that this belief in something good can come from many sources, from the pride of belonging to a certain race or class or family, from having been to a certain school, from having a certain gift, or believing in a certain creed, or from the love of a certain person, or even partly from having many possessions. But if one tries to summarize people's ideas of what they seem to want in a democratic citizen, he seems distinguished from other types of good citizens by the kinds of good things he depends upon in order to be a good person; he is a person who does not depend for the good things he believes in exclusively on the physical and emotional levels of experience. That is he does not depend entirely on material possessions for his sense of his own value, nor upon physical achievements and prowess, nor upon purely emotional relationships, such as adoration of and subservience to a leader or his own capacity to assert himself and dominate over others. Rather, he believes in