William Golding said that his Lord of the Flies was "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." By marooning the youngsters on an uninhabited island, he showed that inside even the most innocent of human beings -- the child -- lurks a beast that is capable of -- indeed, hungers for -- all manner of depravities. By Golding's own account, this grim outlook was shaped by the Second World War, during which supposedly decent people behaved in ways explicable only in terms of "original evil."
As numerous religious officials recognized, Golding's fable was more than a response to fascism. It was a powerful attack on an idea that originated with the ancient Greeks but that found its most ardent supporter in the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. The idea, which permeates Rousseau's writings, is summarized in the opening words of Emile, his meditation on education： "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil." A human being, Rousseau argued, is by nature innocent and noble; if there is an original evil, it arises from the social order, which, based on inequities, invariably turns human beings against one another. Offering a compelling alternative to the bleak picture of mankind painted by medieval Christianity, Rousseau's portrait of the imaginary noble savage Emile helped inspire eighteenth-century romanticism and the French Revolution, as well as nineteenth-and twentieth-century humanism.
The importance of Rousseau's and Golding's perspectives on human nature is that, to this day, they define the debate regarding moral development. At the Rousseauean extreme is the view that the aim of education should be to cultivate a child's innate goodness while insulating him from the perversities of civilization. Rousseau proposed that education be tailored to the child's nature, not that nature be distorted to fit socially prescribed goals. Indeed, he believed that submission to the natural order should be the ultimate moral aim of education.
One would be hard put to find a prominent humanistic educator championing this view in its pure form today. Rousseau seemed blind to what every parent has, with horror, witnessed in his own children: selfishness, anger, cruelty. More important, in the face of the Second World War, not to mention other horrors of the twentieth century, most people have been forced to concede, with Golding, that any human being is capable, under certain circumstances, of committing atrocities against other human beings. When these difficult lessons are taken into account, the revised Rousseauean perspective on human nature is that mankind is not innately innocent but is still predisposed toward goodness and nobility.
Even this watered-down version of humanism is distasteful to those on the opposite end of the spectrum, who believe, like Golding and the medieval Christians, that human beings are inherently evil, or at least indifferent to morality. People of this persuasion hold that a large fraction of the country's children have been abandoned by -- society that, in effect, they have been shipwrecked on largely urban islands, far from the civilizing influences of family, school, church, and neighborhood. If these castaways had been forced to learn a specific moral code, so the argument goes, the beast within never would have escaped to prey upon society.
This is the attitude that prevails today. It is a rare educator, public official, or representative of the criminal-justice system who does not pronounce contemporary American youth depraved as a consequence of adults' inability or unwillingness to give moral instruction. Gary Bauer, former undersecretary of education, said:
the problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, vandalism, promiscuity, and simple lack of common decency which pervade our schools are clearly related to the terrible state of moral education in the American classroom.
Since, according to this ideology, children are by nature unfit to make proper moral judgments, the solution to Bauer's list of social ills is, in the view of the former secretary of education William Bennett, indoctrination. By this he meant the adoption of rules handed down by parents, teachers, and other authorities. Recently appointed by President George Bush to lead the country's war on illicit drug use, Bennett continues to make the same argument; the crack problem, for instance, is caused by the failure, on the part of adults, to inculcate in the young a proper moral code.
Given the growing public concern about the moral development of children, and the importance attached to it by policy makers, it is a shame that Bauer, Bennett, and other so-called traditionalists who dominate the public debate ignore the scientific research on the subject. Although one would never guess from what appears in newspapers and magazines, developmental psychologists have, since the 1960s, reached a measure of agreement on the processes by which children acquire moral and social values. This is demonstrated in The Emergence of Morality in Young Children, edited by Jerome Kagan and Sharon Lamb, which examines the entire range of scientific theories on moral development, and The Moral Child: Nurturing Children's Natural Moral Growth, by William Damon, which aims to span the gap between social scientists and policy makers. The picture of human nature that emerges from these books is less pessimistic than Golding's fable about schoolboys run amok yet more down-to-earth than Rousseau's reverie on the proper care of a holy innocent. Neither devil nor angel, man is above all a social animal -- a creature with a dual identity, whose moral development owes as much to his biological and psychological constitution as it does to his culture.