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The Spirit of Solidarity in Children and International Cooperation (1931)

2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/659425

2153-0327

Jean Piaget,

Educational Philosophies and Pedagogies

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the ArchivesThe Spirit of Solidarity in Children and International Cooperation (1931)*Jean PiagetJean PiagetPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe modern ideal of international cooperation, which it is desired to incorporate in the future education of the young, is based on the two main principles of solidarity and justice. How are we to make children realize these ideas? It is obvious that purely theoretical instruction in the aims of the League and its work—however well it may be given, and however careful the teacher may be to support it with actual instances or visible material such as illustrations and films—cannot in itself suffice. Teaching about the League is, of course, useful, and indeed essential, and it is a good sign that teachers in so many countries are endeavoring to make their pupils understand the meaning and the machinery of international institutions. But such teaching must come at the proper Stage in the development of the child's interests, and, most important of all, the ground must be prepared by the inculcation of a general attitude throughout the whole process of education. A lesson has no value unless it answers to a need, and it cannot answer to a need unless the knowledge it imparts connects with facts that have been actually experienced by the child. Children cannot be made to understand the meaning of international solidarity and justice, and the steps that the nations have taken to bring some order into the chaos of conflicting interests and some unity into the diversity of standpoints, unless in the course of their actual school life they have had the need for solidarity or justice borne in upon them practically, and have thus discovered on their own account the elementary laws of social life. In other words, international education must profit by the methods of the new teaching, and must be based on child psychology; otherwise the international spirit can never become a reality in the minds of the younger generation. It must be remembered that education is one and indivisible; you cannot have one watertight compartment for intellect, another for ethics, and another for international cooperation. The essential point is that in every field as much in mathematics and grammar, as in history and civics—the child should work in an atmosphere of intellectual as well as moral understanding and cooperation. The class must be a real society, accustomed to free discussion and objective research; that is the only way in which the great ideals of solidarity and justice, encountered in practical life before becoming the subjects of study, can teach a profitable lesson. This method, however, raises at the outset a psychological question that we must settle before we can proceed. Have children any spontaneous leanings towards solidarity and justice? What factors influence the development of those leanings, and what are the laws governing their evolution? In our view, a careful study of these problems is essential for any ethical and international teaching, so far as an attempt may be made by the new teaching methods to make use of the child's own psychology.For the time being, we may confine ourselves to the problem of solidarity, which we will consider both in its moral and in its intellectual aspect. In connection with the moral aspect, we shall briefly consider the structure of child societies with special reference to the development of the idea of rules. For the intellectual aspect, we shall examine the question of the exchange of ideas and discussion among children. By these two converging Methods we shall arrive at the conclusion that the "active" methods of self-government and collective work offer the best means of cultivating the spirit of intellectual and moral solidarity in children.I. How does the spirit of solidarity develop in a child? The best way to answer this question is to study spontaneously-developed societies of children, especially societies for play, which establish fixed rules. We may take as an instance the development of the rules in any game, such as the boys' game of marbles.We shall see from the outset that in children's societies there are at least two forms of solidarity, which have very different moral and social effects on the behavior of the individual, and must therefore be clearly distinguished from the educational point of view.The first form we may call external solidarity. There is solidarity among individuals because they all obey an absolute and unalterable rule imposed from without. The unity of the group therefore depends on the obedience of all its members to the same rule, and not on any common decision due to a deliberate effort for understanding and cooperation. On the other hand, in the second form, which we will call internal solidarity, the individuals are not subject to any overriding and unalterable rule, but lay down their own laws, which are therefore internal from the point of view of the group, and are always liable to revision and amendment.To understand all this we must realize what is meant by a rule whether it be a social, moral, grammatical or legal rule, or merely a rule in a game. A rule is not a mere personal habit, for, while habit may dominate in varying degrees, it is never entirely binding so long as it is no more than habit. A rule is a social phenomenon involving a relation between two or more individuals and this social phenomenon depends upon a feeling uniting the individuals in question—namely, the feeling of respect—a rule exists when the will of one individual is respected by others, or when the common will of all is respected by all.Only, there are two kinds of respect. There is what may be called unilateral respect, when one person respects another but is not respected in return. In such a case, the will of the second is law to the first, and, as one of our best teachers has demonstrated, this may be taken as the scientific explanation of the bond of conscience. But there is also another kind of respect in which two individuals respect each other. This mutual respect, so far from involving any mental compulsion, as the former kind does, is the foundation of cooperation.It is our contention that the two forms of solidarity to which we have referred are explained by the two kinds of respect defined above. There is external solidarity in any group when the individuals forming that group accept a rule imposed on them out of unilateral respect for certain superior individuals by whom that rule is imposed. (The latter may have received and accepted the rule in the same manner.) On the other hand, there is internal solidarity when the individuals forming a group lay down their own rule and accept it in the measure of their mutual respect. Magnis componere parva [to compare small things with great]—using for child psychology terms established in the tradition of adult psychology—we may say that the second case represents the democratic spirit as opposed to compulsion from above whatever may be its nature.To return to child societies. The former type of solidarity is found in small children up to the age of about 10 or 11. When small children learn to play, they are completely ruled by their unilateral respect for the bigger children. The dominant factor is the prestige of their elders, who are the depositories of a "real" rule and impose it on the young ones. The latter endeavor to conform to tradition, to follow the examples set them, and to accept the authoritative rules of the game: A certain communion is thus established between the depositories and the imitators of traditional usage, and among the imitators themselves, on the principle of an external rule based on the mental dominance of the elders and on unilateral respect.This respect for rules is carried so far that children of from 6 to 8 frequently look upon the rules of the game as eternal and unalterable. When examining children I ask them whether, if they could invent new rules, those new rules would be equally valid with the old. This is the best question to ask in order to see in what respect the rules are held. Small children answer flatly that it is easy enough to invent new rules, but that they can never be "real" rules. "Why?" "Because they are not real rules." "Supposing all the children who learn the game agree to these new rules?" "Even then they will not be real rules." "And supposing, later on, the old rules are forgotten and nobody ever plays except under the new rules?" In other words, the traditional rules have an absolute force, a divine right, so to speak, independent of custom, and even if custom entirely neglects the old rules, they will still be more important than custom. When you ask a child why only the traditional rules are "real," the answer is that they have existed from the beginning of the world—"the game has always been played like that." "These rules have been imposed on the children by their parents." Some of the children who were questioned went as far as to say that the rules of marbles had been revealed by God himself, by the first man, by the Government, or the like.We see, therefore, that the psychological feature of this external solidarity observed in small children is respect for rules which are looked upon as imposed from above and having absolute force on account of their origin.The attitude of older children is entirely different. Among them the prestige of the elders yields to the need for mutual agreement. Solidarity no longer takes the form of joint participation in an overruling reality; it becomes the common will to respect the common decisions. Consequently rules no longer represent something concrete imposed from without, but a discipline imposed from within. The children say that it is easy to alter the rules provided they can agree; if everybody accepts an innovation it becomes law. Indeed, that frequently happens; as one boy explained to me, "we squabble a little, and then we agree."Such, in very brief outline, is the development of the child from the age of 5 of the age of 12—a transition from external solidarity to internal or contractual solidarity. Is this development an advance or a retrogression, and can use be made of it for educational purposes? At first sight it looks like a retrogression. In its own proportions, solidarity among small children is the same as compulsory conformity in primitive societies, with their fear of all innovations (their "misoneism"), but also with their sense of collective activity and tradition. The internal solidarity of older children, on the other hand, represents the democratic spirit with all its dangers—a constant threat to the structure of society. There is, however, no cause for alarm. If we turn from the inward feelings of the children, that is to say from their mental attitude towards the rules, to their behavior—the manner in which they actually carry out the rules—we find a different state of affairs.In practice, completely as they respect the rules, small children play very much as they like. They are perfectly satisfied with a very rough imitation of the example set them. They arrange the details just as they think fit; they do not keep a check on one another, but play each for himself. In point of fact, up to the age of 7 or 8, that is the best way for all concerned, because the game is not yet a social activity. The real social link for a child is the inward conviction that he must do the same as his elders; what his next-door neighbor may be doing is of no importance.The elder children, on the other hand, show a remarkable sense of honor in their play. Not only have they a complete code of very complicated rules, which are meticulously observed; they have also a whole system of law defining the action to be taken in disputes. Conflicting interpretations, and even incompatible rules, are very frequent; but they do not injure the solidarity of the group, such situations being dealt with by friendly agreement or arbitration. There is nothing so instructive, from the point of view of the self-government system of education, as a psychological study of these miniature disputes and no child is better trained to take part in class management, and even to understand the legal principles observed in adult societies, than a child of 11 or 12 who plays his games honestly and so is already—though unconsciously—putting into practice the rules of mutual respect and justice which define internal solidarity.This process of evolution in child societies contains, however, a paradox. It is curious to note that the unilateral respect characteristic of external solidarity goes hand in hand with an egocentric behavior, whereas we should have expected a degree of obedience in practical matters proportionate to this internal respect. It is also curious to observe that those children who are most apt to alter the rules, and look upon them as no more than the result of a mutual agreement, are much more scrupulous in practical action. What is the explanation of this conjunction of a mystical respect for the law with a practical egocentricity, and of mutual respect with obedience and discipline?The explanation is that, in the case of external solidarity, the rules are extraneous to the child's personality, because he was not concerned in making them. Consequently his obedience is external, and there is room for any number of compromises, between observance of the laws and the caprice of the individual. On the other hand, in the case of internal solidarity, the rules are the outcome of cooperation among individuals; in other words, they are made or accepted by the group of its own free will, and every child can regard them to some extent as his own affair, so that they square with the individual personality, and the discipline they represent is accepted by all.The implications of these phenomena in relation to the self-government system of education will be clear enough. Not only is self-government obviously possible from the age of 10 or 11, inasmuch as it develops spontaneously in societies of children playing, but it also seems plain from what has already been said that the form of solidarity to which it leads is a more genuine and deep-rooted form than any that may be imposed or recommended by adults. It is in the nature of things that solidarity imposed from above will always be external, whereas true solidarity can only develop from internal relations gradually, established by the children among themselves. There has been much talk of teaching solidarity; all oral methods of moral education, whether it be education for social life, for national life, or for an understanding of international affairs, give foremost place to this conception. Even the best lessons, however, must be ineffectual unless based on actual experience, just as it is impossible to understand the laws of physics without handling concrete material. In the case of solidarity, the child must himself undergo the experience afresh; for it is even truer on the intellectual than on the material plane that nobody has ever learnt anything from other people's experience, and it is an eternal trait in human nature that each new generation must learn over again what past generations had to discover for themselves. If, therefore, we are trying to develop solidarity among children of different nations through inter-school correspondence and through the Junior Red Cross and many ether admirable agencies of recent growth, and more especially, if we are seeking to give them specific instruction about international institutions, it is essential that the whole spirit of the school should be one of mutual respect and justice, and to that end we hold it necessary that there should be a class social life based on the normal trends of child psychology. Accordingly, humble and insignificant as they may seem, the details we have described cannot be neglected.II. Let us now turn to the intellectual side of the problem of solidarity. This is not the least important aspect of the question from the point of view of international education; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that mutual understanding between individuals of different races or nationalities must be the primary aim of any educationist who seeks to contribute to an international rapprochement. An international spirit will never be brought into being by the teaching of a few vague general principles, or the cultivation of a new form of sentimentality to be superimposed upon national trends of thought and feeling. Even if that were possible, we should relapse into an external solidarity which would in no way moderate individual or collective egocentricities. What we need is a spirit of cooperation whereby each will understand all the others—an "internal solidarity" which will not eliminate individual standpoints, but will bring about mutual comprehension and establish unity in diversity. The duty of a Swiss child is not to evolve a planetary or world mentality to superimpose upon his own as best he can, but to see where his own viewpoint stands among other possible viewpoints, and to understand the German child, the French child, and the rest, as well as he understands himself. It is this correlation of standpoints that we call cooperation, as distinct from the establishment of uniformity or the Utopian search for an absolute viewpoint.This mutual understanding concerns intellectual as well moral education. In other words, there is such a thing as education in intellectual solidarity, which must be pursued and its psychological conditions studied.There are two important truths. The first is that although the contrary is still generally believed—there is a social element in the composition of the human reason. The combined researches of sociologists and psychologists ha[ve] shown that if individuals did not live a life in common, the line of thought would be entirely different from what it is in our civilized adult societies. The effect of a collective life is not merely to make science possible, that is, to allow an accumulation of knowledge which no single individual could amass, but primarily—and this is the beginning of science—to alter the whole structure of individual thought and make it objective and logical. Apart from varying degrees of adaptation of the sensorimotor nerves, purely individual thought consists in musings and whims—it is the kingdom of egocentric fancy and caprice. It is the thought of a small child when he thinks all by himself, before he is capable of discussing, listening or testing—in short, before he knows how to think socially. There is a certain analogy between individual thought and individual behavior as it would be if it were not canalized by ethical laws. On the other hand, so far as individuals think in common—that is to say, try to understand one another and learn to discuss—they are bound by certain rules or objectivity and coherence which form what we call logic. Thus it is cooperation, in this new intellectual and not purely moral aspect, which fashions the human reason and makes it an instrument of truth, as distinct from individual thought which is primarily a seeking for satisfaction.This being so, there is an intellectual solidarity among individuals, and, judging from contemporary life, we may presume that this solidarity is still only in its infancy and call for correction and further education in certain respects. Who are the people with whom we do actually co-operate, either in thought or in fact? They are the people with whom we have become acquainted in the course of our individual development, the people of our own generation, a few selected authors—in short, a very small society which has formed our feeble reason and our frail instruments of objective verification. As soon, however, as we step outside our own intellectual circle and come into contact with other mentalities, other habits of thought than our own, we encounter immense difficulties, and experience a secret tendency to exalt the egocentric standpoint above all others. Intellectual solidarity, though it is the breeding-ground of reason and has produced the astounding achievements of science, is yet but at the beginning of its conquests, and one of the central problems of international education is to inculcate it into the minds of individuals. We cannot repeat too often, therefore, that oral teaching is not enough; the schools must be filled with a new spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation, both intellectual and moral.The second observation, before we return to the child, is that, from the point of view of psychology, logic and ethics are parallel phenomena. Logic is the ethics of thought, just as ethics is the logic of action. There is an intellectual egocentricity, just as there is a moral egotism. There are collective compulsions upon the reason and the critical sense, just as there is an ethic formed by external rules; opinion, like custom, very often prevails over truth and right. Again, there is an intellectual cooperation parallel to moral cooperation, and, for that reason, education in solidarity is a matter as much of intellect as of conduct.To return to the child: we will now consider how intellectual solidarity develops among children, and how it can be used for educational purposes. From what has been said, it will at once be seen why we shall find in the intellectual field results exactly parallel to those already described in the field of behavior. Intellectual solidarity develops in the child from an initial stage of external solidarity to a terminal stage of internal solidarity. In the early stages, the fundamental principle of intellectual solidarity is the unilateral respect of children for the pronouncements of adults or older children. They have a ready-made truth in the shape of what their elders say; and all they need for communion in the truth is to repeat it. But just as, in the case of the rules of a game, the external solidarity of small children does not in any way modify the egocentricity of their behavior, so the child's respect for the pronouncements of the adult in no way prevents him from having egocentric habits of thought; so that we find that children are incapable of discussing a matter among themselves, and are ignorant of the most elementary processes of intellectual cooperation, such as the logic of relations. Among older children, on the other hand, the habits of discussion and verification gradually undermine the respect for authority, and this mutual respect among equal individuals exchanging their ideas in an atmosphere of unrestricted criticism leads the child intellect to new processes of research and understanding, which make up reason in the proper sense of the term. It is this gradually-developed internal solidarity that, in our view, is the essential instrument for the teaching of co-operation and comprehension among differing mentalities.Let us look at the facts. The first or "external solidarity" period is, in practice, a period in which there is no solidarity among children; the real solidarity at this stage is that of the child with the adult, with the Law on the ethical side and the Word on the intellectual side. This external solidarity amounts in practice to a comparative absence of intellectual solidarity among children—that is to say it is far from strong enough to overcome spontaneous intellectual egocentricity.This is visible at first glance in the child's logic. In this connection, and from the point of view of education in intellectual solidarity, nothing is more instructive than the manner in which a child argues when his own view conflicts with other views. As a general rule, he regards his own view as absolute, because he does not yet know how to handle the instrument of intellectual reciprocity which is known as the "logic of relations." "Have you a brother?" we ask a child of seven. Answer: "Yes, he is called Paul." "And has Paul a brother?" In three cases out of four the child will answer, "No," and if we press the point, he will go so far as to say: "I am the only one who has a brother. He has no brother." Or, again, a child of five may be able to point to his right and left hands, but it is not until about the age of eight that he can point correctly to the right hand of a person sitting opposite him; up to that age he interchanges the attitudes, looking at the matter exclusively from his own standpoint. We have to wait until the age of eleven before a child can understand that an object between two other objects may be on the left of one and at the same time on the right of the other—so accustomed is he to look at right and left as absolutes, or as depending exclusively on his own consciousness. Or, again—and this brings us to what we may call national and not merely personal egocentricity—we ask a Genevese child what a foreigner is. "He is a man from some country outside Geneva, a Savoyard or a Frenchman." "Are you a foreigner?" "No, I am a Swiss. But are you a foreigner to a Savoyard?" "Of course not, I am a Swiss." And so on. Or, again, "What is an enemy?" "A bad man," and so on.The significance of these childish statements is greater than might be thought at first sight. They teach us primarily that the individual spontaneously regards himself as the center of the world and needs to acquire a number of special processes of thought, similar in the field of reasoning to the laws of perspective in geometry or the ideas of relativity in physics, before he can bring different points of view on to the same footing and define what are called in logic their "relations." But these statements also show that the individual requires a complete and systematic technique of objectivity, self-forgetfulness, solidarity, in fact, to master this logic of relations and become capable of intellectual reciprocity. That is the great lesson for the educationist who has international problems at heart: if a social education is needed to enable individuals to understand one another in the simplest relations, such as those we have just described, a far greater effort must be made by the teacher to inculcate into individuals a spirit in which they can understand others, when their processes of thought are subjected to pressure from emotional factors and collective traditions, so that they are incapable of objective reasoning.From this point of view, there is only one remedy—namely, cooperation among children both in work and in play. What is the source of these peculiar features of a small child's logic? They come from his egocentricity—that is, his difficulty in cooperating in the field of thought. It is a striking fact that egocentric habits of thought are closely correlated, as to the psychological laws of their development, with social attitudes. We have already alluded to the mixture of egocentricity and external solidarity which is a feature of small children's games. The case is exactly the same with their social relations on the intellectual side—conversations, discussions, and the like.The best illustration of the difficulty children experience in understanding one another is to be found when one child tells a story to others. This is a very instructive experiment both educationally and psychologically, and can be used in class to show the children how much a story is distorted when passed on orally, and what misunderstandings may arise between perfectly honest people. For example, we told a boy of eight the story of how Niobe was changed into a rock by Leto for boasting of the number of her children (but we made Leto a fairy, so as not to put too much strain on the child's memory).1 After hearing the story, the boy retold it to a schoolfellow of the same age, who in turn passed it on to us.This is how the first child told the story to the second: "There was once a lady called Niobe who had twelve boys and twelve girls, and there was a fairy, a boy and a girl. And Niobe wanted to have more sons (i.e., than the fairy; meaning that there was a rivalry between her and the fairy). Then she (the fairy) got angry. She (the fairy) tied her (Niobe) to a stone. He (Niobe) became a rock and then the tears made a stream which is still flowing to-day." Now see how the second child repeated the story immediately afterwards: "There was once a lady called Vaika. She had twelve sons. There was a fairy who had only one. Once, one day, her son (whose?) made a mark2 on a pebble. His mother wept for five years. It (the mark) made a rock and her tears made a stream which is still flowing to-day."This is, of course, only a single instance, and the experiment can be varied indefinitely by telling true stories or anything one likes instead of fictitious tales. As it stands, however, the example is a representative one. It will be observed that the first child could not make himself understood by the second because he was talking from his own point of view, and as if the other child knew the story beforehand and could understand it from mere allusions. Hence the elliptical style, the absence of explanations, and so forth. As for the second child, he thought he understood the whole story straight off, and substituted his own interpretations for the actual facts of the story. In short, the two individuals were incapable of understanding each other, inasmuch as each was in the habit of thinking and talking entirely from his own point of view.This little illustration can teach us much. Mutual understanding between human beings requires a certain technique, to which attention should be paid in school. When a child, or even an adult, has realized by practical experience how immensely difficult it is to secure a real exchange of thoughts—how hard it is for him to make himself understood—