推荐阅读约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒（John Stuart Mill）的《我的知识之路》（Autobiography of John Stuart Mill）双语版，郑加丽和于春晓译，外语教育与研究出版社，第1版 (2009年12月1日)

 

19世纪英国著名的经济学家和哲学家约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒（John Stuart Mill）写有一本《我的知识之路》（Autobiography of John Stuart Mill），该书详细介绍了他自幼所受的教育。穆勒未接受正规的学校教育，全赖其父一人教导。给我的感触有几点：

 

1、中国人有“易子而教”的传统。《孟子·离娄》：公孙丑曰：“君子之不教子，何也？”孟子曰：“势不行也。教者必以正，以正不行，继之以怒。继之以怒，则反夷矣。‘夫子教我以正，夫子未出于正也。’则是父子相夷也。父子相夷，则恶矣。古者易子而教之，父子之间不责善。责善则离，离则不祥莫大焉。”然而穆勒的教育经历则说明父教子是可行的。

 

2、教育得法，非学校教育和天才儿童单独教育是可行的。穆勒在其父教导下，“3岁开始学希腊文,8岁开始学拉丁文,并开始接触几何与代数,9岁开始阅读古希腊文学与历史作品,10岁读完古希腊哲学家柏拉图和德摩斯提尼的原著,12岁开始学习逻辑,熟读亚里斯多德的逻辑学，13岁开始阅读李嘉图的《政治经济学及赋税原理》，接着又阅读了亚当•斯密。（见郑加丽和于春晓《译者序》）”——这种大量阅读哲学经典人称“穆勒式阅读法”是十分成功的。虽然这种家庭受教育方式也有其一定的弊端，例如身体技能、体能锻炼和玩耍的缺乏，“不具备男孩子们在接受自谋生路训练过程中学到的技能和他们在群体活动中所学到的东西（ The deficiencies in my education were principally in the things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves, and from being brought together in large numbers.）”。

 

3、对儿童进行严格教育是必需的，完全注重教育的趣味性是不足取的。如在第二章中他这样评述：“As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or gainer by his severity it was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to apply themselves with vigour, and what is so much more difficult, perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then, believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with; but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.”

 

4、填鸭式教育是不可取的，会使儿童缺乏形成自己观点的能力。这一点实在让我国大中小学教育工作者汗颜。如在第一章中这样描述“There was one cardinal point in this training, of which I have already given some indication, and which, more than anything else, was the cause of whatever good it effected. Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.”

 

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