The following article is from the May 1914 issue of the L’Umile Pianta. The topic is truthfulness, written by an ex-student of Charlotte Mason’s teacher training course.
I cannot think now why I ever undertook to write this paper. The more I consider the subject, the greater are the difficulties which crop up before me. The instinct of a child is to tell the truth. If he lies it means that something is wrong; there is some distortion somewhere. Find out where, set it right, and there will be no more untruthfulness, because it will be against instinct. But how to find out the defect, how to set it right, that is the difficulty.
There are, of course, different kinds of lies. Roughly, we may divide them into three classes:
Lies of fear (self-defence).
Lies of carelessness (inaccuracy).
Lies of malice.
This classification is quite incomplete, I know, but it seems to me to cover most of the untruthfulness that we are likely to meet with, and I cannot attempt to treat any more subtle kinds in this short paper.
Now, because all lying is symptomatic, our motto throughout our dealings with it must be Remove the cause. Sometimes this is very easily done. Much of our second class, lies of carelessness, hardly deserves the harsh name of lying. When a child comes to anyone with a much exaggerated story, he is careless of the truth, simply because he wishes to impress his listener, to show off, if you will. Such exaggerations from children we need not count as lies, we need not even worry to look for any deeply-hidden cause. A little good-natured patience and common sense is all that is needed, and the child will cure himself. This careless speech must not be treated as a sin, as too severe judgment is always discouraging for children. Deal with it rather as a somewhat babyish failing, joke about it, tell the time-honoured old story of the millions of cats turning out to be our cat and another, and if the children find that their exaggerations and inaccuracies neither amuse nor impress, they will soon get tired of them.
Lies of fear are more difficult to cope with. Everyone must have met the child who, when called upon to give some decisive answer, tell a lie in self-defence. This is the fault of a timid nature, and the timidity must be proved baseless and overcome before we can expect to achieve great things in the way of a cure. And, though I think that this is a kind of untruthfulness that children grow out of, yet we must never underrate its harmfulness. Each lie, though it may in itself be unimportant, does something to undermine the child’s integrity.
Timid children of this kind need very careful treatment. It is hopeless, when you have found them telling a lie, to be scornful, to show that you consider them beneath contempt, to visit your indignation upon them. What a nervous child, one who tells a lie out of fear, needs is encouragement to make him more daring, so that he will dare to tell the truth, even if the consequences are not altogether satisfactory to him. So encourage him, don’t attempt to frighten him by acting the terrible judge. I think there is nothing that so discourages a nervous child from making efforts towards improvements as anger and harsh judgment. And, too, it is well to avoid facing children of this sort with what I call “money or your life” questions.
“But look at that dirty mark on your frock, I told you to put on your overall when you went out, did you or did you not?”
A child on the defensive will probably hesitate whether to answer “yes” or “no” to questions like this, and then say whichever suits him best. Don’t test a weakling so hard as this. As long as we know that there is a tendency to tell lies, make truth-telling easy. Every time that a lie is avoided a step has been taken towards perfect truthfulness.
And now we come to the hardest part of the question – how to deal with malicious lies. If a child is not ashamed of telling lies, often most unnecessary ones, as is too often the case, what can anyone do to make him realize how wrong it is? It is a problem that has troubled many people.
It is in small things that we lay the foundations of truthfulness or untruthfulness. A liar is not made in a day, and I dare say we should often be surprised and sorry if we could only know what a tiny thing has set a child on the path of malicious lying. We might also be surprised if we knew what an equally tiny thing had helped him to conquer this failing. But who dare estimate the importance or non-importance of life’s details?
Always begin by trusting a child. Even when you have discovered him to be untruthful, be slow to believe in his guilt, then show how sorry you are, expect him to be ashamed and sorry too, and perhaps some little shadow of regret will assail him and make the next lie less easy.
Most important of all is the root-treatment of the matter. Every child, consciously or unconsciously, has an ideal which he strives to resemble. Help to make this ideal more clear, help to raise it so that it includes perfect truthfulness, and then all our devices to cure lying will not be in vain. Read interesting books to children, with a living and human, whom they can take as a pattern (honest Tom Brown is splendid for boys, I wish I could cite one as good for girls), discuss the books, praise and blame, appreciate and disapprove. Children often model themselves on the person they know that others admire.
There is one other help towards curing untruthfulness that I have not even mentioned here, the force of public opinion. We all know how it helps to keep the world straight, and no one is more influenced by it than children.
I have said nothing about punishment for untruthfulness, yet this is often an effectual way of stamping out the evil. All the same, what we usually understand as punishment is a very dangerous weapon to use. I think it generally does more harm than good, and hardens many hearts, but I do not feel competent to discuss this point.
A.P.WHITTALL.
As a Christian who believes in original sin, I think it’s interesting what she says about the child’s “instinct,” that it is to tell the truth. She mentions sin so she is a believer as well. What do you think?
And what do you think about her choice of “honest Tom Brown”? Is that the moralizing, the “doctored tale” we are cautioned against? What about George Washington and the Cherry Tree, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf? The Bible also has its stories of truthfulness.
I agree that examples of the heroic are absolutely necessary. Real people in the child’s life will matter greatly. Repentance, reconciliation and restoration matter. It takes wisdom. There’s a lot of insight in this article on the causes of lying and a lot for us to think about!