The Education of Children

Adler argues that the child's mental life is a purposive whole, oriented from infancy toward an unconsciously formed goal of superiority, and that education must guide this striving toward socially useful expression. What the book rejects is the idea that the child's development is determined by objective facts or external causes. A sibling's birth, a teacher's severity, or a family's poverty matters only through the child's subjective interpretation. This is Adler's explicit refutation of psychological causality: the child behaves 'in the circle of his personal mistakes,' not in a chain of cause and effect, so pedagogy must address the child's private scheme rather than the circumstances alone.

Freud traced child development through psychosexual stages and the Oedipal conflict, locating the child's difficulties in instinctual drives and their repression. Adler rejected this framework: the child's psyche is not a battleground of drives but a unified striving toward a future goal. Where Freud asked what was repressed, Adler asked what purpose the child's behavior serves. The book's clinical material comes from Adler's Vienna child-guidance clinics, which worked with teachers and parents rather than in psychoanalytic consultation rooms. This practical, educational orientation is itself a departure from the Freudian model of treatment through analysis of unconscious conflict.

The book applies Adler's core concepts to education: the striving for superiority and its educational significance, the inferiority complex and how to prevent it, social feeling and the obstacles to its development, and the child's position in the family as a determinant of style of life. It also presents the child's psyche as having a goal-setting activity that makes a unique interpretation of every situation. The appendix includes the Individual Psychological Questionnaire used in Vienna clinics and five case histories with commentaries. These materials show how Adlerian theory was translated into concrete diagnostic and pedagogical practice.

Reception was mixed. The Spectator's 1930 review was scathing, calling Adler 'a muddled and ill-informed writer' whose psychology rests on 'one idea' — the striving for superiority — and who is 'incapable of analysing even that thread itself any further' . A reviewer in The American Journal of Sociology was more measured, noting that even readers who differ with Adler's theoretical assumptions would find 'very helpful and practical insights into at least some of the behavior problems of children,' praising the book's simple, non-technical style for parents and teachers . The split response reflects Adler's position: popular with educators, suspect among academic psychologists.

The book was originally published in 1930 by George Allen & Unwin in London and Greenberg in New York, translated by Eleanore and Friedrich Jensen . A later edition was published by Gateway Editions in 1978 with an introduction by Rudolph Dreikurs and a facsimile reproduction of the 1930 Allen & Unwin text . Routledge reissued it in 2015 . The Jensen translation is the standard English version; no major textual controversies are documented, though like all Adler translations it renders German terms such as Gemeinschaftsgefühl into English with some semantic shift.

The most common misreading is that Adler's pedagogy is permissive — that if children are simply left to follow their natural striving, all will be well. In fact, Adler insists that guidance is 'supreme' precisely because children are immature and will misinterpret their situations . The teacher's task is not to remove all obstacles but to prevent the child from becoming discouraged and retreating into a useless side of life. Another misreading treats 'striving for superiority' as encouragement of competition; Adler explicitly warns against running a classroom as a contest for first place, since only one student can win and the rest disengage.