Remember that it is not my fault that we find ourselves discussing so
inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing what education can
do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of
civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the
realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy,
and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization
upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same
terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love;
who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more
difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are
beginning to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied
in prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of
women of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences
against sexual morality, but a thousand less definable but not less
real offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described
as attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the
implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly
want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon
children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of
education in dissolving those influences.
It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to
be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic
obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our
inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew
in an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves
and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a
long-forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the
parental rôle in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find
themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman likes
to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband; she
likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was to her
in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is at any
moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from using these
infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to have to
mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally a
bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him wise and
obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has something
else--the capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of
these rôles. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship
because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And
they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is
comradeship, is friendship.
Do not imagine that friendship in love implies any absence of that
profound worship and self-surrender which is characteristic of the
types of love that are modelled upon the infantile and parental
patterns. This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality
in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one
ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience
all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional
possibilities of love in a single relationship.
I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme in some detail, were
it not that it might incidentally comprise a catalogue of domestic
difficulties and misunderstandings at once too tragic and too
ridiculous--and some of you might object to my unfolding what you would
consider to be your own unique and private woes in public.
I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized
part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of civilization
in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may seem somewhat of
an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early influences of the
home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic
conditions which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men
and women. But these customs and laws and conditions are in process of
change--and the home influences of which I speak are not. Our problem
is to consider if these influences may not be dissolved by the school.
For, mark you, what happens when they are not! Wedded love, as based
upon those undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace;
serious-minded men and women ask themselves whether such a bondage is
tolerable; a thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities of the
thing; and the more intellectually adventurous in each generation begin
to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not to be
abandoned.
Let me relate only one widely typical--and perhaps only
too-familiar--instance. A boy grows up poisoned with mother-love--er,
I mean, petted and praised and waited upon by his mother, until he
finds the outside world, with its comparative indifference to his
wonderfulness, a very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts
himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love. With whom does he
fall in love? Perhaps with a girl like his mother; or perhaps with
one quite opposite to her in all respects,--for he may have conceived
an unconscious resentment against his mother, for betraying him by
her praise into expecting too much of an unfeeling world. But in any
case, he is going to experience again, in his relationship with his
sweetheart, the ancient delights of being mothered. He is going to
respond to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage the girl in
further demonstrations of motherliness. He is in fact going to reward
her more for motherliness than for any other trait in her possession.
And the girl, who wants a lover and a husband and a man, is going to
find herself with a child on her hands. But that is not the worst. If
the girl does not rebel against the situation, the man is likely to,
when he finds out just what it is. For he, too, despite his unconscious
infantilism, wants a girl and a sweetheart and a wife. And when he
realizes that he is being sealed up again in the over-close, over-sweet
love-nest of his infancy, that he is becoming a baby, he revolts. He
does not realize what has happened--he only knows that he no longer
cherishes a romantic love for her. Naturally. Romantic love is a
love between equals. She has become his mother--and he flees her,
and perhaps goes through life seeking and escaping from his mother
in half a hundred women. When this happens, we call him a Don Juan
or a libertine or a scoundrel or a fool. But that does not alter his
helplessness in the grip of infantile compulsions.
I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education to dissolve,
without the aid of a special psychic technique, any deeply-rooted
infantile dispositions of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant
cases, there are thousands of well-conducted men and women who just
fail to free themselves sufficiently from the emotions of childhood
to be happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible adult
beings that they believe they are, there are within them pathetic and
absurd children whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh tear it
to pieces. It is in regard to these that it seems not improbable that
a civilized education could secure their happiness for them. And it
would do so by supplanting the emotionally over-laden atmosphere of
the home with the invigorating air of equality. I refer in particular
to equality between the sexes. So long as girls and boys are to any
extent educated separately, encouraged to play separately, and treated
as different kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the growth of
real friendship between the sexes, and leaves the mind empty of any
realistic concepts which would serve to resist the transfer to the
other sex, at the romantic age, of repressed infantile feelings about
the beloved parent. What we have to deal with in children might without
much exaggeration be described as the disinclination of one who has
been a lover to become a friend. The emotions of the boy towards his
mother are so rich and deep that he is inclined to scorn the tamer
emotions of friendship with girl-children. (Notoriously, he falls in
love first with older women in whom he finds some idealized image of
his mother.) He is contemptuous of little girls because they are not
the mother-goddess of his infancy. What he must learn, and the sooner
the better, is that girls are interesting human beings, that they are
good comrades and jolly playfellows. He must learn to like them for
what they are. Ordinarily, the love-life of the adolescent boy is a
series of more or less shocked discoveries that the women upon whom he
has set his youthful fancy do not, in fact, correspond to his infantile
dream. Half the difficulties of marriage are involved in the painful
adjustment of the man to the human realities of his beloved; the other
half being, of course, the similarly painful adjustment of the girl to
similar human realities. He could be quite happy with her, were the
other dear charmer, his infantile ideal, away. And it is one of the
functions of education to chase this ideal away, to dissolve the early
emotional bond to the parent, by making the real world in general and
the real other sex in particular so _humanly_ interesting that it will
be preferred to the infantile fantasy.
I may be mistaken, but I think that half of this task will be easy
enough. Girls, I am sure, are only in appearance and by way of saving
their face, scornful of the activities of boys; they will be glad
enough to join with them on terms of complete equality, and ready to
admire and like them for what they humanly are. It will not be so easy
to persuade boys to admire and like girls for what they are; and it
will be the business of the school to dramatize unmistakably for these
young masculine eyes the human interestingness of the other sex--to
give the girls a chance to show their actual ability to compete on
equal and non-romantic terms with boys in all their common undertakings.
To make realities more interesting than dreams--that is the task
of education. And of all the realities whose values we ignore, in
childish preoccupation with our feeble dreams, the human realities
of companionship which each sex has to offer the other are among the
richest. Despite all our romantic serenadings, men and women have only
begun to discover each other. Just as, despite our solemn sermonizings
on the blessedness of work, we have only begun to discover what
creative activity can really mean to us. Work and love!--
A VOICE. “Won’t you please come back to the subject of education?”
What! Is it possible--is it credible--is it conceivable--that you have
been following this discussion thus far, and have not yet realized
that education includes everything on earth, and in the heavens above
and the waters beneath? Come back to the subject of education! Why,
it is impossible to wander away from the subject of education! I defy
you to do so. All the books that have ever been written, all the
pictures that have ever been painted, all the songs ever sung, all the
machines ever invented, all the wars and all the governments, all the
joyous and sorry loves of men and women, are but part of that vast
process, the education of mankind. When you leave this discussion, you
will not have dropped the subject; you will continue it in your next
conversation, whether it be with your employer or your sweetheart or
your milkman. You cannot get away from it. And though you perish, and
an earthquake overwhelms your city in ruins, and the continent on which
you live sinks in the sea, something that you have done or helped to
do, something which has been a part of your life, the twisted fragments
of the office building where you went to work or the old meerschaum
pipe you so patiently coloured, will be dug up and gazed upon by future
generations, and what you can teach them by these poor relics if by
nothing else, will be a part of their education....