Affirmation Is Required

Similar, as to procedure in finding a cure, is this social cancer, he thought. If a person proves only that one form of coercion is antagonistic to the spirit of inquiry—the essence of the educational process—there still remains the endless task of proving that each of the manifold forms and combinations of coercion is antagonistic to any and all creative performances. These techniques are not enough. The problem requires affirmation more than negation. It can have but a positive solution: the rehabilitation of a belief that social performance, whether in medicine, electricity, housing, education, or any other creative activity, can be best attained by men acting in response to free will and volition. As this faith develops, the beliefs in the use of force, as a principle, are rejected, discarded, forgotten—by the individuals of the new-found faith. True, the negative approach (the world is not flat) can and often docs drive away the single fallacy under attack by causing a person to reject it. But this accomplishes little more than to create a vacuum into which the next plausibility (maybe, then, the world is a cube) naturally finds its place. Affirmation and proof of a right principle or a fact, on the other hand (the world is round) leaves no room for any of the numerous errors.