But there is yet another quality which civilized standards demand of
our human enterprise. People hate a quitter--and particularly the
quitter whose defection leaves other people under the obligation to
finish what he has started. We demand of a person that he should
refrain from starting what he can’t finish. This is a demand not only
for democratic intentions, but for common sense and ordinary foresight.
He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves other people’s putting their
trust in him, unless he can really carry it through. And if he finds in
the middle of it that he has, as the saying goes, “bit off more than he
can chaw,” he ought to try to stick it out at whatever cost to himself.
If other people have believed he could do it, he must not betray their
faith. This feeling is at the heart of what we ordinarily call telling
the truth, as well as the foundation of the custom of paying one’s
debts. We don’t really care how much a man perjures his own immortal
soul by lying, but we do object to his fooling other people by it. We
are all so entangled with each other, so dependent upon each other,
that none of us can plan and create with any courage or confidence
unless we can depend on others to do what they say they will do. But
our feeling goes deeper than the spoken word--we want people to behave
in accordance with the promise of their actions. We despise the person
who seems, and who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more capable
than he turns out to be. We even resent a story that promises at the
beginning to be more interesting than it is when it gets going. And
in regard to work, the thing which we value above any incidental
brilliancy in its performance, is the certainty that it will be
finished. Hence the pride in finishing any task, however disagreeable,
once started.
This is the hardest thing that children have to learn--not to drop
their work when they get tired of it. But it should be obvious that
there is only one way for children to learn this, and that it is not
by anything which may be said or done in punishment or rebuke from the
authority which imposes the task. It is not to be learned at all so
long as the task is imposed by any one outside the child himself. The
child who is sent on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed. But the
child who has volunteered to go on an errand--not as a pretty trick to
please the Authorities, but because of a sense of the importance of the
errand and of his own importance in doing it--that child has assumed a
trust, which he will not be likely to violate.
But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget. Here we come to the
ethics of punishment--a savage ritual which we generally quite fail to
understand. Let us take a specific case. A group of boys are building
a house in the woods, and they run out of nails. Penrod says he will
go home and get some from the tool-chest in the barn. He goes; and on
the way, he meets a boy who offers to take him to the movies, where
Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects upon his duty; but
he says to himself that he will go in and see one reel of Charlie
Chaplin, and then hurry away. But the inimitable Charles lulls him into
forgetfulness of realities, and when he emerges from the theatre it is
nigh on dinner time. Penrod realizes his predicament, and rehearses
two or three fancy stories to account for his failure to return with
the nails; but he realizes that none of them will hold. He wishes that
a wagon would run over him and break his leg, so that he would have
a valid excuse. But no such lucky accident occurs. How is he going to
face the gang next day? He has set himself apart from them, exiled
himself, by his act. The question is, how is he going to get back? Now
in the psychology of children and savages, there is happily a means for
such reinstatement. This means is the discharge of the emotions--in
the offender and in the group against which he has offended--of shame
on the one hand and anger on the other, which together constitute the
barrier against his return. That is, if they can express their anger
by, let us say, beating him up, that anger no longer exists, they are
no longer offended. While if he can by suffering such punishment pay
the debt of his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence, and at
the same time cleanses himself from the shame of committing it. As the
best conclusion of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself
for such punishment. For children understand the barbaric ritual of
punishment when it really has the barbaric ritual significance.
But the punishment must be inflicted by the victim’s peers. There
are few adults who can with any dignity inflict punishment upon
children--for the dignity with which punishment is given depends upon
the equality of the punisher and the punished, and on the implicit
understanding that if the case had happened to be different the rôles
would have been reversed.
It will be perceived that this leaves discipline entirely a matter
for children to attend to among themselves, with no interference by
adults, and no imposition of codes of justice beyond their years and
understanding. Punishment, in this sense, cannot be meted out unless
the aggrieved parties are angry and the aggressor ashamed; but let no
adult imagine that he can tell whether an offending child is ashamed
or not. Shame is a destructive emotion which a healthy child tries to
repress. He does not say, “I am sorry.” He brazens out his crime until
he provokes the injured parties to an anger which explodes into swift
punishment, after which he is one of them again and all is well.
But the abdication of adults from the office of
judge-jury-and-executioner of naughty children, destroys the last
vestiges of the caste system which separates children from adults. It
puts an end to superimposed authority, and to goodness as a conforming
to the mysterious commands of such authority. It places the child in
exactly such a relationship to a group of equals as he will bear
in adult life, and it builds in him the sense of responsibility for
his actions which is the final demand that civilization makes upon
the individual. And the importance of the school as a milieu for
such a process is in its opportunity to undo at once, early in life,
the psychological mischief brought about, almost inevitably, by the
influences of the home.
There!--I have let the cat out of the bag. I had intended to be very
discreet, and say nothing that could possibly offend anybody. But I
have said what will offend everybody--except parents. They, goodness
knows, are fully aware that a home is no place to bring children up.
They see what it does to the children plainly enough. But we, the
children, are so full of repressed resentments against the tyrannies
inflicted upon us by our parents, and so full of repressed shame at the
slavery to which we subjected them, that we cannot bear to hear a word
said against them. The sentimentality with which we regard the home
is an exact measure of the secret grudge we actually bear against it.
Woe to the person who is so rash as to say what we really feel!--But
the mischief is done, and I may as well go on and say in plain terms
that the function of the school is to liberate the children from the
influences of parental love.
For parental love--as any parent will tell you--is a bond that
constrains too tyrannically on both sides to permit of real friendship,
which is a relationship between equals. The child goes to school in
order to cease to be a son or daughter--and incidentally in order to
permit the two harassed adults at home to cease in some measure to be
father and mother. The child must become a free human being; and he
can do so only if he finds in school, not a new flock of parents, but
adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom and friendship.
But that is something which I can discuss better in dealing with the
subject of Love.