THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL
"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education
has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by
reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what
way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way
to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what
way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources
of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our
faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of
others."--HERBERT SPENCER.
"The final value of all institutions is their educational
influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford
and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight,
judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of
regard."--JOHN DEWEY.
"Socialized education has four aims:
First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods
of social intercourse,--language, number, social forms and
conventions.
Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society
through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and
through participation in present social life.
Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.
Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually
appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently
socialized."--GEORGE ALBERT COE.
"The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out
of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.'
But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in
men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing
that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last
culture shall absorb, chaos itself."--EMERSON.
"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is
needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread
among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public
opinion become established in conformity with the existing
conscience and the entire social organization become transformed.
It depends upon us to make the effort."--TOLSTOI.
=New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.=--When the
power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened
both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three
particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence
reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor
and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational
purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and
youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the
journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the
skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built
upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying
trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had
given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The
craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be
called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish
the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there
has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older
and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work,
to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In
the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal
service from each class to each class above to the tax system of
modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash
instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of
handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the
Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right
and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in
political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the
franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station
or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise
is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class
distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which
modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great
divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that
manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.
When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system
were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction
between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there
was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for
that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High
School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in
connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants
signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of
those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr.
Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called
the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some
definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the
grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the
Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a
new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten
itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make
things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of
activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be
called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done
within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in
doing.
The connection between these movements in education and the family
well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and
power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a
competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the
dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for
others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his
influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to
the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating
standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the
industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.
=Education a Social Process.=--These elements are attempts to
socialize education. We say that education is a process in the
development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process
by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.
Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now
theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people,
in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to
perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the
ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them
necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal
one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized
results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose
and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The
family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly
with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin
the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in
activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of
social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part
had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The
limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education,
have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor
Todd in his book, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_.
=The Three Learned Professions.=--When there were but three learned
professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action,
soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his
own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those
of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a
far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the
grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and
university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When
physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually
demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the
line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of
the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for
leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when
colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position
until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of
social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most
part on a par with each other.
=New Calls for Trained Leadership.=--This pressure of the new
subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from
the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the
child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given
confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean
educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new
conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the
educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family
life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual
life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for
skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to
put into the college and university. This means not only that the
family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest
child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in
education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council
and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the
Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence
being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books,
pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs
of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of
other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of
securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded
to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations
must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon
skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence
as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there
is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and
coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other
organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work
against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one
class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to
democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was
strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a
wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to
rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern
times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation
where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate,
the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of
labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The
education that will finally unite in better understood coöperation all
class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the
school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in
the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which,
with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow
understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life
more secure as well as the state more united.
=The Special Education of Girls.=--The application of new educational
ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of
first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the
school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women
than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the
schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious
and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to
childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers
that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious
to require explanation.
There are those who believe that there is no question of
sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all
educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both
precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe
that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of
youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys
and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer
the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the
two sexes?
First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a
long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so
separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys
and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and
sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal
and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were
trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for
personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for
personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land,
and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood,
and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as
were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this:
that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be,
was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular
vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and
technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to
be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family
life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that
family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of
manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general
ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert
knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every
division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of
training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this
specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life
has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the
experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted
as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison
formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which
united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them
all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in
their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and
clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture
manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to
be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation,
women were again left out of control of the processes which man's
organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor
industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any
conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact,
as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated
common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the
middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was
believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and
unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of
exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of
women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not
true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of
the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly
organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have
stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their
fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all
other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be
wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to
make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and
could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern
school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very
demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were
denied formal school training so long after such denial became
actively injurious to the family and group life was because the
popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women
could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to
its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to
fit boys for "a man's part in the world."
=Formal School Training of Women New.=--When the principle of
democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast
of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual
achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's
rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed
doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal
chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought
to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but
class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small
clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards
vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general
training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs.
When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study
disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer
to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a
vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At
first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all _nouveaux
riche_, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the
traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently
entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all
"practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to
the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed
upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost
coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational
opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself
to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the
State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the
more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for
leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.
=New Training for Social Service.=--Two movements have resulted from
the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet
recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense
influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon
the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements
are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average
normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements
for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social
treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped
life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose
in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill
mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the
majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease,
poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of
rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it
speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both
higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen
ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture
and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction
led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in
universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary
schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply,
housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social
engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment.
It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the
philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and
standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two
elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that
to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the
majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly
leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers,
doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for
the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have
a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life,
the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the
wayward, and the undeveloped--these, which have been their special
tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their
main business in the more complex situations of modern life.
=Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.=--When the
departments of household economics were added to college courses they
were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher
education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other
side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of
woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in
women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The
college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of
human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new
vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of
race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as
paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are
these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women
than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by
which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with
law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by
politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men;
especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women
voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training
"departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their
work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the
nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially
those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household
economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a
vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general
social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the
modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking,
graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work,
or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and
other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as
trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories,
architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not.
All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are
linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly
related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their
children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in
general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for
wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient
social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have
children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such
girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless
society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and
bear active part in the race-life as parents.
=Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.=--Any study of the
needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation
to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must
take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole
arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based
upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home
partnership. This continues to be the rule even in social strata
where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where
finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible
matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury.
=Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood.=--The second fact which must
have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the
family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of
motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its
evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to
exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its
present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without
paying some adequate price.
=Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ.=--We are now in the
midst of a social order in which the father-office and the
mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast
majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward
specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good
father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant
personal attention to his children as to do something well which the
world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and
improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give
hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper
a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for
money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it
serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average
mother this is not the case. Where there is a family of children more
than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing
stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand
special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or
incompetent members of the family circle call for special
consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the
income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without,
the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength
and the most of time in the service of the private family for many
years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult
independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of
care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of
the family for greater activity in his special line, calls upon the
woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a
primary duty. This puts any vocational specialty she has chosen in a
secondary place while the family obligation is most pressing. The
result of this obvious fact is that the average woman does still have
a double choice to make when marriage offers; a choice for or against
the man, and a choice for or against her vocation. In proportion as
women are highly educated or industrially trained they have been
pressed toward some one calling for which they can be definitely
prepared and in which they may hope to rise in personal achievement
and in financial compensation. On the other hand, marriage and
motherhood appeal to the deepest instincts of human nature; and if the
man seems worth it a woman will generally risk vocational impediment
and awkwardness of economic adjustment for the sake of a congenial
mate and children of her own.
=Should the Education of Girls Include Special Attention to Family
Claims?=--These facts indicate that social prudence must at least ask
the question, Should not the education of girls include some distinct
recognition of special problems to be met, often in acute experience
of contrary currents of personal desire and social pressure, in the
lives of young women? As has been shown in other connection what we
are witnessing now in domestic life is the passing of the servant
caste, of the ordinary "hired girl" and of the unpaid family drudge;
not the eclipse of the housemother or the waning of the homemaker's
power or charm. In this household change and in the demand that goes
with it upon any woman who would have or make a home, and with clear
understanding of the new responsibilities which the new freedom of
women place upon them, certain fundamental principles should be held
firmly in mind as we deal with special problems of adjustment created
by new social situations. First of all, let us admit, and never cease
to emphasize the fact, that the social education of women demands from
now on the most scrupulous regard for the training of every normal
girl for self-support. This cannot be too much emphasized. This is the
only sure foundation for socially helpful sex-relationship and for
that democratization of the family without which social progress is
now impossible. The social education of women in general demands,
also, the cultivation of domestic tastes and of some measure of
household technic, not as a concession to the past, but as a safeguard
of the future, in such fashion that the call to personal service of
the family life may recall familiar and pleasant educational
activities. These educational activities should precede those which
tend directly toward vocational preparation for self-support. This
point, too, is vital. The age when almost all little girls like to do
things which concern the family comfort is from the eighth to the
fourteenth year, a period too young for proper vocational drill. Then,
when they are most likely to be ordered out of the kitchen if there is
a paid cook to give the order, and most likely to be thought "in the
way" if trying to help in domestic process of any sort, is the period
of all others when to "learn by doing" what they are interested in
will give them a background capable of easy adjustment to the later
demands of family life. The training of boys of the same ages has an
analogue in farming and handy use of common tools; and in the "work,
play, and study school" boys and girls learn much together which fit
both for mutual aid in the private family. The new education of the
grade schools, therefore, is coming to the rescue of the housemother's
task, as the high school and college have come to the aid of those who
would provide vocational careers for women. They may meet in helpful
alliance just as soon as a few social principles, which can make a
bridge between them, are outlined and accepted.
=Adjustment of Family Service and Vocational Work.=--First, most women
should allow for marriage and maternity first place for the years
socially required. Second, women cannot afford to lose entirely out of
their married lives vocational discipline, by the use of leisure time
left them by new easing of household service, even in odd jobs of
unpaid "social work," as is now so much the custom. The very
multiplicity and variety of ancient crafts practised in the home make
some one activity, held to rules of specialization, essential to the
housemother's development. The chosen vocation retained as an
avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however,
be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest
the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold
upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the
children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty
hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as
many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously
demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women
past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than
any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated,
married women with young children must learn to combine in "team
work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's
or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is
especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's
organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged
against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due
not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate
condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing
personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would
operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of
"continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor
schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social
principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is
one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the
limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor
itself.
=Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.=--We are beginning to
see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap
person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of
manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to
achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social
principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of
social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to
individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly
outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and
guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the
social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of
intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which
the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest
social consciousness is the question, How may the individual
conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual élite be harmonized
with, not destroyed by, the levelling process of democracy? Saints
and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can
they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity
of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have
paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and
who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as
supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward
the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not,
however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social
order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also
must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as
truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society
upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in
the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the
"Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who
willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a
good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good
husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something
of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great
moment throughout the ages of the past.
Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have
long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in
what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at
the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the
most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.
=The New Training in Sex-education.=--The need to have the right sort
of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of
sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems
is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most
effective way. In the admirable volume on _Sex-Education_ written by
Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia
University, a list of eight reasons for sex-instruction is given which
are here quoted by permission:
1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge
concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health.
2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases
which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or
immorality of men.
3. The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous
development of organized and commercialized prostitution.
4. There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers
and illegitimate children, the result of the common
irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women.
5. There is need of more general following of a definite moral
standard regarding sex-relationships.
6. There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning
all sexual processes.
7. There is very general misunderstanding of sexual life as
related to healthy and happy marriage.
8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that
concern future generations.
To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of
family needs in education will give assent. This is not the place for
specific treatment of prostitution and its effect upon the home, nor
is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of sex-education
and of social hygiene now advocated and beginning to show encouraging
results in use. The simple statement must be made that if, as Spencer
has said, one test of education is its ability to make men good
husbands and fathers, the element of sex-education must not be omitted
from the educative process. How or where the necessary information and
stimulus to truly social conduct may or should be given is matter for
another statement.
=Heroes Held Up for Admiration.=--One point, usually wholly ignored,
must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of
children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted
as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines
commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past.
That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear
in outline the lives of the great and good. It may be that some
prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is
almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by
the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This
makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes
as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social
surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to
secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in
social judgment required for full understanding of the character
without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is
particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday
School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and
good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read
in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy
or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and
their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson!
One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the
"servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a
man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that
education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of
every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences
in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have
come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before
our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon
our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so
great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its
difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively
than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has
used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the
lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of
human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion
in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method
leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling
his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and
place.
However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize
what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to
inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes
and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and
onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family
relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections
of poems worthy to live and to be read, but at least we should insert
some companion pieces which show wifely fidelity in a more modern
form. We may well ask the child's admiration of the craftsman's
passion for achievement in "Palissey the Potter," but there might be
ethical significance in pointing out that nowadays we sometimes
question the right of a man to sacrifice to his art not only himself
but his wife, his children, and all related to him. The fact is that
although we cannot make use of any cumbersome scheme of historic
outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial
institutions, we must somehow learn to permeate our teaching of
history and of literature and our exaltation of examples of human
greatness of character with the spirit of those who believe that
humanity is learning, and can know how to manage social affairs better
and better as the years of life-experience go on.[19]
=Moral Training at the Heart of Education.=--The right and helpful
relation of the school to the family, then, is one that must first of
all place moral character, the power to live a good and useful life in
all social relations, at the centre. And it is one also that takes
account particularly of the development of the family order and of
what we must save and of what we may throw away in that order, if we
would have a stable inner circle of human rights and duties as a
pattern for all relationship in the industrial order and in the state.
=Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies.=--In view also of the danger of
economic tragedies that affect the family,--dangers of unemployment of
the father by reason of bad times beyond his control, of his
disablement by industrial accident, of his too-early impairment of
strength by reason of industrial misuse of his powers in ways he can
not prevent,--it may be that education for every boy should include,
while he is still under the legal wage-earning age, efficient drill in
the simpler arts of agriculture. He who can get from the land the raw
material for family comfort is alone, it would seem, able to meet all
industrial catastrophes without alarm. In this country, at least, such
a man, whatever his failure or misfortune in professional, in
clerical, or in manual labor, may make good his father-office in basic
essentials of family support. All that has been said about the need of
mixing vocational training with preparation for home-making in the
case of girls may be said with almost as much, force about the need of
giving the average man an economic refuge in case of vocational
disaster in the ability to work the land to meet essential family
need. This is beginning to be understood as never before. The newest
education of all, as has been said, is intent upon providing for girls
and boys alike this training for economic safety in some expert use of
land for self-support as well as for retranslation of older work
interests. In these "schools of tomorrow" the boys as well as the
girls, while still very young, are being trained to cook and to do
necessary things for household comfort. This is not subversive of
inherited divisions of labor in the home. This teaching only adds to
the economic security of both sexes and may make the men of the future
able to exist comfortably without so much personal service from their
womenfolk, and, above all, may make the home a more perfectly
coöperative centre of our social order.
=A Graduated Scale of Virtues.=--In the French _Categories_ of "Moral
and Civil Instructions," first outlined in 1882 and perfected and
applied in 1900, the children of the Public Schools of that country
have their attention called first to the duties related to "Home and
Family," going on from that topic to "Companionship, The School,
Social Life, Animal Life, Self-respect, Work, Leisure and Pleasure,
Nature, Art, Citizenship and Nationality," and ending with a study of
the "Past and Future." The latter topic indicates an intent to give in
some fashion the idea of human progress and something of its
outstanding points of interest and value. Other moral codes aim at
some sublimation of history and literature as a finish to courses in
ethical instruction. It is for the student of social progress to
insist that such study of the past, linked to the study of the present
and to some hopeful outline of the future, be not used merely as a
capstone but shall be woven in, as warp and woof of all education, as
it touches every side of life.
=Types of Education.=--Dr. Lester Ward, in his _Dynamic Sociology_,
lists the various types of education we must cherish and realize in
the common life as follows:
"The Education of Experience;
The Education of Discipline;
The Education of Culture;
The Education of Research;
The Education of Information."
To this list, with which most educators would be in agreement, the
believers in the "New Education" might add the Education of
Development of Personality.
Experience, discipline, culture, research, and information are,
however, the great means by which the personality absorbs the social
inheritance and thus finds its own place in the social whole. The
early initiation by the family to all these means of personal
development is not yet exhausted either in function or in social
usefulness. The family still begins the socializing process.
QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL
1. In child-training, should the general aim be to give as much
as possible of that training in the home or as much as
possible in the school? or what is a wise and efficient
balance between family and society influence in education?
2. Given a necessity in character-development for drill in
obedience, stimulus toward self-development, capacity for
self-control and for helpful association with others in the
interest of the commonweal, what part, if any, can the home
play which the school cannot?
3. What is the duty of citizens in respect to tax-supported and
compulsory education and how can that duty be effectively done
in city and country life?
4. How can educational systems be made to work for the better
coördination of family life among the newly arrived immigrants?
5. Outline, in general suggestion, an educational program for boys
and for girls which would be likely to directly aid the family
in attaining stability and success among all classes, having
regard to aim, subject-matter, methods of character-development
and form of social provision and control in the school.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] See _Democracy and Education_, by John Dewey: "Because of death of
individuals, life has to perpetuate itself by transmission, by
communication; must be social in character."
[18] See _The Children's Book of Moral Lessons_, published by Watts and
Co., London.
[19] See _Principles of Sociology with Educational Applications_, by
Frederick R. Clow, a valuable and suggestive book for the general
reader.