RESPONSIBILITY
The ideal of "home" is protection from dangers from _within_--bad
habits, bad food, bad air, dirt and abuse,--shelter, in fact, from all
stunting agencies, just as the gardener protects his tender plants
until they become strong enough to stand by themselves. The child's
home environment is certainly a potent factor in his future
efficiency.
But more than physical protection is that education in all that goes
to make up profitable living, acquired by following the mother or
nurse in her daily round and in having legitimate questions answered.
Imitation is the first step in good habits, as in learning to walk or
to read. That which is set before the child should be worthy its
imitation, and be of value when fixed as a habit. Habits of health,
correct position, deep breathing, clean ways, distaste for dirt in
one's person or in one's vicinity, liking for fresh air, for simple
food, good habits of exercise, of reading, and the thousand and one
trifles that go to make up the efficient worker in adult years, all
belong to the well-ordered home, where, as one author puts it, the
child is the business of the day.
But the State cannot risk its property too far.
When mothers become so careless or ignorant that half their children
fail to reach their first birthday, and of those that live to be three
years old a majority are defrauded of their birthright of health, some
agency must step in.
If the State is to have good citizens it must provide for the teaching
of the essentials to a generation that will become the wiser mothers
and fathers of the next. Therefore, even if we regard this as only a
temporary expedient, we must begin to teach the children in our
schools, and begin at once, that which we see they are no longer
learning in the home. "The achievement at Huddersfield, England, is
especially noteworthy. The average annual number of deaths of infants
for ten years had been 310. By a systematic education of mothers the
number was in 1907 reduced to 212. The cost of saving these
ninety-eight lives was about $2,000."[11]
[11] Dr. Charles H. Chapin.
One university has established a course in the care of children, much
to the amusement of the press. The United States Commissioner of
Education has, however, been a responsible mover in the idea.
But real progress by means of family education means the stable family
and the permanent dwelling. Where is the family in the permanent
dwelling today? Among any class, except the agricultural, where is the
stable family?
Since industry has taken woman's work from her, and she has to follow
it out into the world, the means of education for the child has gone
from the home. Its atmosphere is artificial, if the attempt is made.
To work exclusively on the family, for the sake of the child, is a
very slow process. As in all American life, the quicker method appeals
most strongly. The school is today the quickest means of reaching
both child and home; the present home through the child, and the
future homes through the children when they grow up.
And time presses! A whole generation has been lost because the machine
ran wild without guidance, and all attempt at improvement was met by
futile resistance.
It is very difficult to present the socionomist's view of the child in
the home so that it may appeal to the two extremes of opinion. There
are those who still apply mediæval rules to twentieth century living;
those who believe, honestly, that the ideal life was found in the days
when the mother was the manufacturer in her own home and the children
were her helpers in all the varied processes. "There was never any
artificial teaching devised so good for children as the daily helping
in the household tasks." The inference is made that therefore the same
restriction for the mother and the children leads to an ideal life
today. Such persons fail to realize that the twentieth century is
practically a new world. The old rules which related to material
things hardly hold more closely than they would on the planet Mars.
The fundamental moral principles of reverence, obedience, love, and
unselfish sacrifice must be worked in on a new background.
To keep the eighteenth century habit, so carefully taught the girl, of
courtesying as she stepped aside to allow the rider or the ox cart to
pass, in these days of the swift automobile, which would be out of
sight before the knee could bend, is no more ridiculous than to expect
the average young mother to follow the methods of her grandmother. Her
mother's ways are now pronounced all wrong, not necessarily because
they were wrong then, but because conditions have changed, knowledge
has been gained, and it is clearly a waste of human life, of money, of
physical and mental power for people to be sick and die because the
caretaker does not use the knowledge in circulation.
If the young mother can learn how better to fulfill her duties by
going out of the house to lectures or classes, why not?
Tracts are not always successful as an incentive to conduct. It is
obviously impossible to pass a blue law compelling parents to conform
to--what ideal? The school is fast taking the place of the home, not
because it wishes to do so, but because the home does not fulfill its
function, and so far has not been made to, and the lack must be
supplied. The personal point of view, inculcated now by modern
conditions of strife for money, just as surely as it must have been by
barbarian struggle in pre-civilized days, must be supplanted by the
broad view of majority welfare. The extreme of the personal point of
view, expressed in such phrases as "The world owes me a living;" "My
child is mine to treat as I please;" "It is nobody's business how I
spend my money;" "I have a right to all the pleasure I can get out of
life," is well shown in Mr. H. G. Wells's analogy[12]: "A cat's
standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole
universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable, and
interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting
personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables
and pursues delights. Life is to her quite clearly and simply a
succession of pleasures, sensations, and interests, among which
interests there happen to be--kittens."
[12] Mankind in the Making.
This unsuspicious ignorance of the real nature of life is by no means
confined to animals and savages; it would seem to be the common view
of many young people today. At least they take as little care of the
homes to which they bring children, and they follow the cat's example
in boxing the children's ears and turning them out to fend for
themselves.
The last generation seemed to become disciples of Schopenhauer in his
passionate rebellion against the fate that deferred all the pleasure
of the present to the needs of the future generation. Evolution has
revealed the necessity for this subordination of the individual lot to
the destiny of the race, if progress is to be made. The man who
asserts himself as free from race trammels is snuffed out as a
factor--a blighted blossom fallen to earth and trodden under foot. To
the student of biological evolution, the individual is as a mere pin
point on the chart of community advance, for surely society grows
according to evolutionary law. "As certainly as Nature gives the poor
child its chance of a good life, so certainly do the circumstances of
slum environment rob it forthwith of its birthright--it is not
uncommon to find more than half the children of three years of age
hanging on to life with marks of disease and undergrowth firmly
implanted on their tender frames. Yet, practically, none of this is
inherited in the true sense; it is the victory of evil human devices
in their endeavor to cheat Nature of her own. If ever there was a
mission in the world worthy of the most strenuous service, it is to
wrest back this victory, be it out of pity for suffering children or
for the very welfare and existence of the nation.
"The schools have made their beginning; the _homes_ have not yet
started; they wait the impulse from without. It is for voluntary,
intelligent opinion to get to work on the home, and never to relax
until a race of parents has arisen which knows no other duty to the
state than to rear with heart and brain the children which have been
given to them. Then we shall hear no more about physical
degeneracy."[13]
[13] Dr. H. M. Eichholz, Inspector of Schools. Paper before
Conference of Women Workers, London, 1904.
Hope for the future is to be found in the conclusions of the
immigration commission, that in one generation certain marked changes
in stature and in head measurements have taken place in the children
of immigrants of various nationalities, such changes as have hitherto
been considered as the result of centuries. The commissioners credit
the better environment and larger opportunities with these indications
of increasing intellectuality and mental force.
Most human efficiency is the result of habits rather than of innate
ability. These habits of mind, as well as of body, are developed by
the home life at an early age. The home is responsible for the
upbringing of healthy, intelligent children. Here is the place for
fostering the valuable and suppressing the harmful traits. The school
can never take the place of the home in this. With the large classes
of the public schools, the teacher should not be asked to undertake
this individual work. Moreover, correcting a child for personal habits
can hardly be effective before fifty or sixty pairs of critical eyes.
The office of the home must be to teach habits of right living and
daily action, and a joy and pride in life as well as responsibility
for life. It is not fair that the parents should sit back and shift to
the school the whole responsibility for the future citizen.
The little modifications can best be made in the home, permanent
foundations can be laid and braced with habits so good and strong that
nothing can shake them. Most powers are the result of habits. Let the
furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic,
then human energies will result in efficiency and the line of least
resistance will be the right line. Everything, therefore, which
influences the child must be the best known to science. The houses of
the land must be regulated by the scientific laws of right living. To
the woman, the home worker, we say: "You must have the will power,
for the sake of your child, to bring to his service all that has been
discovered for the promotion of human efficiency, so that he may have
the habit, the _technique_."
To pay a tax today for the benefit of one's children is a principle of
insurance, of benefit association. This feeling of obligation means
present sacrifice of ease and inclination, and it has been
increasingly shirked, so that it is not surprising that a tax to
insure one against future loss by disease is an unwelcome proposition.
The whole question of the child in the home is one of ethics, as the
writers on social conditions have been trying to convince the world.
If the swarms of dwellers in the busy hives of industry have no sense
of their humanity, if they do not use the human power of looking
ahead, that power which differentiates man from animals, what better
are they than animals?
No one can be sorry that there are no children in thousands of homes
one knows. It is better that children should not have been born than
to come into an inheritance of suffering and mental and moral
dwarfing. Social uplift will not be possible while parents take the
view of cats, or even of a well-to-do mother who said, "I did not have
my baby to discipline her; I had her to play with."
No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of
health, bodily energy, time, and brain power, any more than a nation
may prosper which wastes its natural resources.
America today is wasting its human possibilities even more prodigally
than its material wealth. The latter deficiency is being brought to a
halt. Shall the human side receive less attention? A sharply divided
line between home and school is no longer clearly drawn. Parents'
associations are being formed and are coöperating with the
school-teacher. To what end? To the better moral and intellectual
atmosphere of the home. Physical education has had its vogue, but too
much as an endeavor apart, not as a necessary element in the whole.
The pedagogical world is now becoming convinced that physical defects
are more often than not the basis of mental incompetence, and this
leads logically to the teaching of the laws of right living in a
practical way, not merely as lessons from books, but as daily
practice. This practice must eventually go into the home, where the
most of the child's hours are spent. It is as useless to expect good
health from unsanitary houses as good English from two hours' school
training diluted by twelve hours of slovenly language. Hence the
imperative need of such teaching and example as can be put into
practice; and since immediate house to house renovation and change of
view are impossible, the school must provide for teaching how to live
wisely and sanely, as well as for clear thinking and æsthetic
appreciation. Practical hygiene, food, cleanliness, sanitation, all
must eventually be exemplified by the schoolhouse and taught as a part
of a general education to all pupils, boys and girls.
If this sounds like socialism, let us not be afraid, but educate for
five or ten years all children, so that homes may be better managed,
and then it is to be hoped there will be no need for such school
training. To live economically in the broad sense of wise use of time,
money, and bodily strength is the great need of the twentieth century.
This is practical economics. This is something which cannot today,
except in rare instances, be learned at home, for conditions change so
rapidly that grown people may not keep up with them. Mothers' ways are
superseded before the children are grown.
The school, if it is maintained as a progressive institution and a
defense against predatory ideas, is the people's safeguard from being
crushed by the irresistible car of progress. I repeat, standards may
be set by the school which will reach and influence the community in a
few months. Such standards should be a means of safeguarding the
people, and this leads to the most important service which a teacher
of domestic economy can render to the people in giving them a sense of
control over their environment, than which nothing is so conducive to
stability of ideas.
To feel one's self in command of a situation robs it of its terror. A
great danger in America today is the loss of this feeling of
self-confidence with which the pioneer was abundantly furnished. A
certain helpless dependence is creeping over the land because of the
peculiar development of resources, which must be replaced by a sense
of power over one's environment.
_Home Ideals_
There is no noble life without a noble aim.
The watchword of the future is the welfare and security of
the child.
Love of home and of what the home stands for converts the
drudgery of daily routine into a high order of social
service.
The economy of right uses depends largely upon the
home-maker, and brings the return in health, happiness, and
efficiency.[14]
[14] Motto, Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit,
Jamestown Exposition, 1907.