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“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.“
— Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Totems of Bertrand Russell, p. 30
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Image: Bertrand Russell with pupils and a white rabbit at his Beacon Hill School, 1931.
Beacon Hill School was founded by Bertrand and Dora Russell in 1927, West Sussex Downs, UK. In establishing a school, the Russells hoped to offer an alternative to traditional educational values, which at this time still relied on a Christian hierarchy of authority maintained by teachers through strict regimes and corporal punishment. The school soon attracted a series of “problem children” which made everyday life challenging. It also acquired a certain notoriety mostly on account of its secular values.
“Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.“
— Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order (1932), Ch. VIII: Religion in Education, p. 110
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