Bertrand Russell
Summary
In order to be happy, childhood needs to be better and this enhances in the adult life. Child basically needs two things; first freedom and the second is security. The better treatment in childhood guarantee better person in future. child should not have taboos and said ‘No’, but said ‘Yes’ to avoid fear, complexities and furies . And scholastic education is tiresome to make children passive, as in classical Greece where the gentlemen would not work, spent time talking, had only snobbery . They had no practical knowledge, tastes are only verbal, not manual and the child cannot do anything except writing articles. The teachers are also wrong because
they do not involve students in the workshops and fail to make the students feel the importance of manual accomplishment.
Cultural education is necessary must be applied to make the students fit to the modern world. History and geography must be taught through cinema that give pleasures and everlasting impression and enjoy with effort that only has educational values. Books (scholastic education) and screenplay have equal benefit to the children. Artistic education has important role in obtaining pleasure and impression, as through literature, music, painting etc. Shakespearean plays give insight (c+t/bli6) and ultimate pleasure and the school should promote it. Music lessons have same role.
European and American students have load of anxiety and frustration due to tough competition for scholarships. It is cruel and forces them for dropped out because the scholarship system is ideally wrong and fund must be raised for them. The happy man is he who will have scholarly education as per his choice without examinations. The youths after 21 will have the pursuit of scholarly education. Every society, even Utopian, every healthy adult really wish to do something useful work, although people think it to be worthless. By work, they achieve economic security and it is the road to happiness. Happy man in personal relations will be fee, generous, expanding and co-operative. The happy man won’t have fear, more trustful attitudes to others, will see foreign nation’s friends, not enemies and see the war folly.
Even Utopian inventors regarded security as important factor which the happy man needs. He needs adventures. Due to machinery, modern life has a little chance of security. But he can save his earning and spend for travel to Antarctic, Africa, to boat on Atlantic and the two books The Kon-Tiki Expedition and Desperate Voyage. Every human being has this opportunity; dictator or gangster. A happy man is due to outward and inward circumstances (aflx/L / leqL kl/l:yltx?), wisdom, kindness, economic security that make his enjoy with friends, work and children. As a result he will have no frustration and failures in the middle years of his life and enjoy in the old age seeing his youth without frustration and regrets.
The art of growing old is necessary. Two dangers occur in old age; first is undue absorption of the past which is better to forget but it is impossible. The second is to be avoided in clinging to youth taking energy but the children leave parents and the parents have problem to cut off emotional attachment. Only philanthropy works here. Successful old age is easier if there are strong impersonal interests in activities, without telling grown-up children they make mistakes, as mistakes are necessary things to learn in education. Their children or grand children cannot be their company just giving them money or goods, but by making impersonal interest on them. Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. Young people feel they might be killed in war or like that but old have wider experience in life and can avoid this feeling with impersonal interest. Life is like a river, small at first within its banks, and passionately rushing (running) past boulders and over falls. Then the river grows wider, and flows quietly and in the end it merges in the sea losing individual identity. Old man sees his life in the same way and will not suffer from death. The wise man should wish to die while still at work. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him.
