Free The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu

beings will in large numbers continue to behave unintelligently and ineffectually.
What, then, is the solution? It lies in a revaluation of our values; in a complete revaluation and reorganization of what today passes for education, but represents nothing more than instruction, a very different thing. Instruction is really just a training in techniques and skills, the three Rs. Such training is, of course, indispensably necessary, but it is only a limited part of what should be understood by education . The very word is derived from the Latin educare, meaning to nourish and to cause to grow. And what is it that one should nourish and cause to grow? It has taken us late into the twentieth century to at last discover the answer to that question. It is: the basic behavioral needs of the child, the needs for growth and development as a physically and mentally healthy person, a whole person, one who is able to love, to work, to play, and to think soundly. These are the four great chords of mental health, and that is what education should be about.
The basic behavioral needs are complementary to our basic physical needs, the latter are the needs for food, oxygen, water, shelter, respiration, activity, rest, sleep, bowel and bladder elimination, and the avoidance of dangerous and noxious stimuli. These physical needs must be satisfied if the organism is to survive. What has not been recognized is that there also exists a set of complementary basic emotional needs, the basic behavioral needs are the need for love, sensitivity, friendship, stimulation, curiosity, wonder, thinking, work, enthusiasm, imagination, creativity, song, dance exploration, experiment, learning, and many others. It is the nourishment and encouragement of these behavioral basic needs that should be the primary

     

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concern of all education, for our very survival depends upon our response to the supreme challenge, civilization: the race between education and catastrophe.
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It is quite evident that because we have failed to understand the true meaning of education, we have become the most self-endangered species on this earth. Education should consist in satisfying the basic behavioral needs of the child. In addition, education should imply the encouragement, cultivation, and development of humane attributes and abilities. This, of course, implies a complete change of the prevailing educational system toward the recognition of the true worth of the child as a loving, brave, cooperative, independent thinker. There are already a number of private schools that have done just this, as well as a few public schools. The results are spectacularly good. In the recognition of the value of such schools, women have an important role to play.
Women have long been conditioned to believe that they are inferior to men, and though reluctant to do so have, like slaves, been forced to act as if they subscribed to what everyone believed to be the natural dispensature of nature. Because Scripture asserts it, and because men proverbially occupy the superior positions in almost all societies, male superiority has long been taken to be the natural dispensator of nature. Women's place is in the home, and man's place is in the counting house and on the board of directors. Women should not meddle in men's affairs, and so on. And yet change is occurring. Women have entered the counting houses and are seated as members of the boards of directors of large corporations. In the United States, women have become members of Congress and have attained cabinet rank; in many other parts of the world, in even greater numbers, women have attained similar positions. They have participated in peace conferences, in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and in international organizations of many different kinds. ''Nevertheless," I wrote in this book's 1953 edition, "it is still inconceivable to many persons that there should ever be a woman president or prime minister. And yet that