On Principles 16 & 17: The Will Issue

Principle 16 & 17: The Way of the Will

We may offer to children two guides to moral and intellectual self-management which we may call ‘the Way of the Will’ and ‘the Way of Reason.’

The Way of the Will: Children should be taught (a) to distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’ (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts away from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (This adjust of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort that we may ‘will’ again with added power. The use of suggestion as an aid to the will is to be deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype character. It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development., and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.)

Reference: Volume 6, Chapter 8

“The great things of life, life itself, are not easy of definition,” Charlotte begins and true, we must ponder, ‘what is the will?’ As it concerns us here, her definition of its function is sufficient: “Its function is to choose, to decide, and there seems to be no doubt that the greater becomes the effort of decision the weaker grows the general will.”

Lest we make little robots out of the children, though, we must consider how to train this function of decision and for what purpose? To be automatic and unfeeling cannot be the answer so we see that nurturing of character through ideas is the way to train the will. Charlotte says that “the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character;” and concludes that therefore, “our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character.”

So it’s not what you do but who you are. It comes back to the motivation of the heart. Education is in the business of helping a man to “become,” after all. It’s about the cultivation of character — nurturing the personality and ordering the affections.

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