The Gift of Fire, Richard Mitchell [best e books to read txt] 📗

its work. As to your mind, I do suspect that mine can make some pretty good guesses, even theories, but they are guesses and theories.

Problem-solving is something that we can also do by the gift of Prometheus. Understanding is the thing that we can do by that gift. The light of problem-solving is like the light of the moon, a reflection of some greater light. And when we single out the skills of problem-solving and give them the name of intelligence, we make a choice between the moon and the sun, and run the danger of putting out our own fires.

There is, in all of those dilemmas and mysteries that arise from the unfathomables of our humanity, a hauntingly familiar quality, as though we were all doing everything again and again. Thus it was, for instance, that Freud could conclude that Sophocles was not just right, but still right, perhaps always right. And it is to help us understand not the quaint beliefs of primitive and unscientific people, but, quite simply, ourselves - at any time, and in any place.

As fire is given in the myth, fire is given again and again in each of us, as it must once have been given to creatures who by its power became human. Like the species, we have all lived out of an impenetrable antiquity into the now. Every one of us must awaken out of sleep and come into the light of self-mindedness. And when self-mindedness arises, when the mind first comes to consider itself and knows that it considers itself, it is in language. It seems that the propensity for language and the propensity for self-mindedness are the same thing, which is, really, not sufficiently distinguished by the word “propensity.” “Destiny” seems better. We are the creatures who are destined to think and to know themselves, and that is the gift of Prometheus.

Nobody knows when all that happened, but everybody who knows anything can see that it must have happened. Every single one of us lives again the astonishing and utterly unaccountable history of the coming into this world of the truly human. And we do it, for there is no other way, one by one. It is not humanity that comes into the grasp of the mind. It is a person that comes into the grasp of that person’s mind. Information and examples I can take, in that degree to which I am literate, curious, and attentive, from countless other persons, most of them long dead but still speaking to me, but I must discover thoughtfulness for and in myself and come to understand for the first time what I have never understood before and what no one else can understand for me, any more than he might nourish me by his eating or refresh me by his sleep.

Nevertheless, while no one else can nourish me, I will never be nourished by those who are not themselves nourished, never brought into thoughtfulness unless others have gone there before me. This is, I think, a great mystery, and the most powerful suggestion I know that two seemingly contradictory possibilities are both true: that the individual person is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human, and that society is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human. Unless, of course, there really was a Prometheus, who started the whole business, out of nothing.

But if there was, he has obviously gone away and left us to what we must call, lacking better knowledge, our own devices. And our own devices are pretty good. As persons, we do make society, and as society, we do make persons. The enterprise of education is entangled in that paradox, and it is the proper business of everybody both to nourish and to be nourished, both to take the grasp of his own mind and to provide for others the power to do the same. It is for that reason that we properly connect the idea of education with the rearing of children. As to which of us are truly the children, we really have no clear idea, but we do know that there are children among us, and that something should be done about them. If we knew exactly what that was, and who the children were, there could be education.

Children and Fish

About a century ago, a certain Edward Bellamy wrote a visionary novel about the distant future, about our time, in fact. It was called Looking Backward, and it was the first of all best-sellers in this land. I find it silly and boring, for most of it is made up of little lectures on social betterment delivered by a wise mentor who universally and uncritically approves of everything that his society is doing. But no matter, for in that book there are about four pages of inestimable worth. The mentor, who is called Dr. Leete, explains the principles upon which that society has grounded its understanding of the term education, and proceeds to enumerate certain “rights” that it has granted its citizens in regard to education.

The first of them is the right to enjoy life as fully as possible. That means, among other things, the right to have those powers that provide some access both to the works of the mind that can delight and illuminate, and to the working of the mind, which does the same. Dr. Leete would say of us that leaving people in that condition in which they can neither know nor govern themselves is a violation of their rights, and an outrage.

If that is the right to be educated, the second is the right to live among other educated people, for the former is generally the root of unhappiness in the lack of the latter. If, between the minded and the unminded, there is the equivalent of class struggle, there will be perpetual contempt and animosity on both sides, leaving the members of neither able to enjoy life fully.

The third right, and the one that most especially interests me here, is even more shocking and portentous than the first two, for it is one of those rights assigned specifically not to all, but only to a certain group, and thus sounds suspiciously like a privilege rather than a right. It is the right of children to be reared by educated parents. It is not an idea that could ever take hold among us, for it would surely lead to riot and civic discord, but, since we often mean by “education” nothing more than some supposedly acceptable indoctrination, it seems also an idea that should not be allowed to take hold among us.

But it is a truly and usefully provocative idea. Can there be a greater misfortune than to be reared by silly and self-indulgent parents, parents who have no inklings either of self-knowledge or self-government? If children of such parents ever reach those powers, will it not be by sheer, and unlikely, luck? We can look around our world and identify them very easily, the children of children. They are in a condition as desperate as that of the children of the House of Atreus. “Doom, like a black wave out of the West, rises over them.” In Dr. Leete’s scheme of things, they are, while utterly without guilt of their own, a disaster that must inevitably strike us all, depriving us of the first two rights, and making the good life impossible for everyone, and they are themselves incapable of finding that life.

But “incapable” is not the best word. “Incapacitated” would be better. It is not because of what they are that they can not hope for self-knowledge and self-government, but because of what has been done to them. And because of what has not been done in their presence. Education is not something that one person does to another. Like the stone-carriers, we have to do it in ourselves, one by one. Their teacher did not wait to measure their intelligence quotients or cognitive modalities, or devise some test of their listening skills; he simply did what was right. He did not excuse himself from the task of teaching them on the ground of their “learning disabilities.” If we could send Jesus a new and utterly unteachable pack of stone-carriers, it could only be because we had incapacitated in them the native ability to seek the good. To do that - can it really be done? - would be simply to make of a human being something less than human.

We give no noticeable thought as to how we might, deliberately and by underlying principle rather than pragmatic detail, take the greatest possible care to avoid making something less than human of human beings. And if we were to make that consideration into a goal of schooling, we would engender nothing but hosts of people who want to form a committee that will draw up the guidelines for a tentative plan of action to be submitted for approval to a commission that will go to work on the assignment of research grants to institutes that will devise timetables and flowcharts to facilitate the establishment of an agency with an agenda for the drafting of recommended legislation to be presented to an appropriate committee. That may not help.

I, however, can help, provided that I think not of going out to make the world a better place, but only of going in to make the world a better place. Out there, I have little chance, I think. A number of others have failed. Many of them were more skillful and influential than I. Like the stone-carriers, I am a legal grown-up, and a frequent child. That is the child that I am given, before all others, to rear. In those terms it is possible to reach a fairly practical, everyday understanding of what Socrates meant by the examined life; it is nothing but the rearing of the child that I am, and the deliberate doing, in his presence, of the right thing. Perhaps someday I will become able to make the world a better place, but that can hardly be expected in one who can not rear wisely that one who is most utterly and completely his own child.

Consider, therefore, the rearing of children. Consider it even if you imagine that you do not have any children. Do not bother to try to count the various current theories as to how this is best done, and don’t even think of all the old theories that we now, if only for a while, find bunk. In fact, don’t even think of “the rearing of children.” There is no such thing. “Children” can not be reared. To do some rearing, you need a child. Everyone has at least one. Imagine that you are that parent, and that you intend to rear that child.

What do you want her to be like? I suspect that you want her to be good and to be happy. I suspect also that you want her to be successful, too, and not only because she might then be able to support you in your old age, but because success is obviously better than failure, and more likely to provide happiness. Thus, you will want her to be industrious, but not obsessed with work, and effective. You might also want her to be someone who will someday be able to rear her own child as wisely as you reared her.

All of those aims at least sound realistic. They seem to be things that you can do something about. Some other possible aims, however, are not realistic. While you would surely like her to be smart and pretty, she may be neither of those things. She may not even be tall and thin. You can, of course, and almost certainly will, have her teeth straightened and keep her clean, but that is about as