Childhood and Early Youth 41of religious discipline, but a warm, understanding, and supportive environ¬
ment that built confidence in his own abilities and a sense of self-worth. Like
his sisters and his brother, "Manelchen," as his mother called him, was loved
by his parents. Indeed, they not only loved their children, but also treated
them with respect. They taught by example, and they not only provided a
harmonious and decent, if simple and frugal, home for all of their children,
but also gave their oldest son every opportunity for advancement.
Kant gave us several clues about what he learned from his parents. He
asserted late in his life that the education he received from them "could
not have been better when considered from the moral point of view," and
throughout his life he remarked about the ideal early moral education.
Therefore, it is perhaps best to listen to Kant on what the best moral ed¬
ucation of young children involves, and to take this as a clue to what he
learned from his own parents. In his so-called Lectures on Pedagogy he
differentiates between a physical education that is based on discipline and
a moral education that is based on maxims. The former does not allow
children to think, it simply trains them. Moral education is based on max¬
ims. In it, he thinks, "everything is lost when it is founded on examples,
threats, punishment, etc." It is necessary to lead the child to act well from
maxims, not from mere habit, so that the child does not just do what is good
but does it because it is the good thing to do. "For the entire worth of moral
actions consists in their maxims."^57 More particularly, in order to provide
the foundation of a moral character in children, "we must teach them the
duties that they must fulfill as much as possible by means of examples and
instructions. A child's duties are only the common duties towards oneself
and others." At this point, they consist mainly in cleanliness and frugality,
and they are based on
a certain dignity that a human being possesses in his inner nature, which gives him dig¬
nity compared with all the other creatures. His duty is not to deny this dignity of
humanity in his own person.
Drunkenness, unnatural sins, and all kinds of excess (Unmaessigkeit) are
for Kant examples of such a loss of dignity whereby we, lower ourselves
below animals. Most importantly, Kant thinks that "crawling" — the making
of compliments and the currying of favors - is also beneath the dignity of
man. For children it is mainly lying that is to be avoided, for "lying makes
human beings the object of general contempt and it tends to rob the child
of his self-respect," something everyone should have.