EDUCATION AND EUGENICS
A healthy wave of reaction seems setting in against the old ideal
of "cramming" which once masqueraded as education. Already signs
are apparent that in order to have a healthy mind a healthy body is
necessary. A sentiment in favour of physical education is slowly
arising and may some day be translated into statutes and administrative
rule. At present the sentiment is a vague one and is not wholly free
from the suspicion of ulterior motives connected with national defence.
It cannot be gainsaid that the army and navy will gain in strength
and efficiency by the improvement of the racial physique but the same
forces might be equally increased by some new discovery in aviation,
some new invention in machinery or some new combination in explosives
peculiar to America. Methods of education must justify themselves
first and last by their conformity to the physical, and moral and
intellectual needs of the human basis of society. They must not be
devoted to the development of a healthy manhood only, the interests
of the race demand that healthy womanhood shall be the care of any
truly national system of education. Until we have built up the body
we are little likely to succeed in creating a race of pure-thinking,
pure-living men and women. This is the universal need. Higher
education, the highest intellectual culture is for the few, not for
the wealthy few--but for the proved fit, for those whose antecedents
and character show that their brain is capable of receiving and their
powers are capable of using a fully developed education which would
otherwise be a ridiculously wasted acquisition.
The intellectual education of the future will probably average a
higher standard than at present but we must revise our criterion of
judgment. We must realise that our current ideals tend rather towards
making a nation of priggish inefficients than of happy, healthy home
builders.
If our teachers have aimed in the past at cramming comparatively
useless knowledge into every brain independent of individual capacity,
it is not strange that our educational faults have been to neglect
the physical side and to ignore the vital teaching which might have
led our scholars in the direction of their own physical development.
These two things must inevitably stand or fall together. If you neglect
physical training it will be because you do not realise its importance.
If you realise its importance you will not only devote your principal
educational efforts towards its universal practice in the schools
but you will see that nothing is left undone to induce the young to
adopt in the privacy of their own lives the principles which make for
physical perfection.
Heredity and environment alike teach this lesson. The child is father
to the man, the parents of to-morrow are now being made. The weak
should learn early their limitations, the strong should be taught how
best to economise their strength. No Eugenist believes in over-emphasis
of sexual knowledge, but every Eugenist believes in the absolute
importance of early familiarity with the essential information of
sex-life. To emphasise this knowledge would mean being guilty of the
same _kind_ of error as is at present prevalent. A knowledge of the
laws of sex should never be separated from other physiological and
moral education, its acquisition should be gradual, its full meaning
should be so well prepared for that its physical manifestations in the
youth of both sexes would be understood, without the necessity of a
sudden jump from abysmal ignorance to overwhelming experience.
Co-education, the schooling together of boys and girls until puberty,
is a step in the right direction. It familiarises children with each
other in quite the best and most innocent manner; it is no more likely
to create evil results than the daily life at home of the perfect
family of boys and girls meeting under the protection of their own
parents.
Co-education renders unnecessary that departing into separate schools
which is so mysterious in early life. It aims at giving girls the
benefit of boys' play, encouraging them in the boys' code of honour,
and tending to prepare them for a citizenship they have to share
with the boys whom they may even now regard as "chums." For boys the
familiarity with girls' ways and girls' characteristics will help
them to be courteous without being weak and to lose that shamefaced
sex-consciousness which is the opposite to a healthy knowledge of the
existence of another sex.
In the early years of infancy only the parents can impart information
about sex to their own offspring, and generally speaking only the
mother will be the desirable source of information. This in itself
justifies the necessity of the Eugenist demand for educationally
preparing girls for motherhood. In the nursery the time for teaching
intimate things may be left to date itself. The earliest questions of
a child fix the time when the earliest information must be given. When
a child asks questions you either tell him the truth or a lie. The
truth can be told so delicately that no one need blush to repeat it.
A lie may be directly more indelicate and in its future results may
be a source of deadly demoralisation. Children ask about the "secret"
of birth when a baby brother or sister is born. Their questions and
our answers are a frequent subject for jest, when the only reasonable
excuse for our failure to impart accurate knowledge is either our own
unfitness to teach, or our child's incapacity to understand. If the
first is not incurable it should be the object of immediate study with
a view to reform. The incapacity of youthful intelligence to grasp
elementary facts is greatly exaggerated, but anyhow it is no excuse for
deliberate deception. The immature mind can wait for knowledge, its
development need not be prejudiced before it begins to know anything.
If we cannot feed it on facts at least do not fill it with falsehood.
On entering school the children are introduced to a person whose
profession is to teach. How easy now it would be to obtain a child's
confidence, how easy to lead a child to believe that there is no
hidden knowledge, no subject which is taboo, no function of a healthy
body which is unhealthy, and no process of Nature which cannot be
made an interesting and helpful study. To impart an unnecessary sense
of shame to a child is a shocking outrage from which a sensitive
soul never recovers. Exceptional children will require exceptional
care but the average child need never know from experience the
meaning of sexual shame. Healthy boys and girls will learn that as
their parents made them they will one day themselves qualify for all
those joys, pains, excitements and interests which are so intimately
wrapt round the functions of parenthood. To prepare boys and girls
to become parents may seem a big proposition. I am convinced it is
practicable, desirable and in the best interests of the race. The human
relationship, the human parentage, the human processes should be the
foundation of natural history lessons. Botany and biology should be
interesting because of their relation to humanity. Information about
the human processes of life and sex should not be made contingent on
the possibility of divulging it in scattered fragments incidental to
remarks on the habits of polar bears or the functions of the stamen
and pollen of the flower.
On this subject at least there is no possibility of permanent secrecy.
The plan for Eugenic school-teaching is only a plea for the wise,
discreet well-timed truth from a capable and trusted source, against
indiscreet and often indecently ill-timed half-truth from the worst
sources. Children need to be informed, warned and helped.
Why should it be regarded as indecent to give kindly warning against
disease? Children are often over sensitive about fancied or discovered
differences between themselves and other children, and about natural
developments or even small defects which the uninformed mind magnifies
into first-class abnormalities. They would often be reassured by
learning of the enormous varieties which can exist within the average
and the normal. Children should neither be frightened by the well-meant
exaggerations which sometimes are used to warn children and growing
youth from the very real evil results of self-abuse, nor should such
evils be encouraged by a prudish ignoring of the possible danger.
Masturbation can be shown to stand in the way of all that youth rightly
values in its present happy school life and play, it can be proved
to prevent the accomplishment of what every healthy school ideal
demands as the future functions of maturity. Restraint is impossible
because onanism is essentially a secret vice, and therefore when
these appeals to reason, idealism, self-respect, and self-interest
fail everything fails. Fear is opposed to the very basis of school
honour. If the nobler motives are inadequate the physician is required
rather than the teacher, for there is a pathological reason for such
abnormal minds. The danger of contracting sexual diseases must be very
carefully taught. The body must be saved but the soul must not be
simultaneously lost. Sexual disease problems must not be mixed up with
sexual morality, or we shall pervert the noblest part of youth. Sexual
disease should be referred to, like all other sexual questions, as
incidental to the whole subject of the body and its functions, abuses
and diseases. The idea that any disease may justly be regarded as a
fitting "punishment" for any particular crime, is as evil in its effect
as it is vicious in its principle. To encourage the notification of
every disease, especially the worst, is a public duty we can only evade
at enormous cost in innocent lives. Grappling with the sexual scourge
called syphilis is horribly hindered by the reticence, concealment and
shame, directly or indirectly to be traced to a mistaken ethic about
Nemesis.
To prepare children for parenthood involves finding a reasonable regard
for fatherhood as well as for motherhood. No system of economics that
relegates fatherhood to unimportance is good for the State. The boy
must learn that the father has responsibilities, different from the
mother's but worthy of his own very best. Fortunately the pages of
history teem with illustrations of this theme for those who desire
examples and warnings from the past, it may even be necessary to point
out that the father's function has been over valued in our annals as
compared with that of the still more important but less praised mother.
Inasmuch, however, as the mother's function is so much more continuous
than the father's, the perpetuation of such degree of perfection as a
boy is endowed with must be secured by constant vigilance, lest he fail
in the one great act which earns the right of giving his name to his
offspring.
The Eugenic education of girls is generally easier than that of boys
for many reasons. Girls see more than boys of the management of a home,
they are used to children younger than themselves, they are fond of
babies and will nurse dolls for an amusement, deriving much pleasure
from a pastime fraught with Eugenic suggestiveness. Later on certain
signs of adolescence precipitate explanations and stimulate inquiry.
There is no need for any restrictions of the facilities women enjoy
educationally. As with boys the best education should be given to those
girls who show capacity for using it. It has never been claimed that
culture should be withheld from a man, as inconsistent with fatherhood;
motherhood must not be made an excuse for denying education. The safest
policy is to make preparations for Life independent of preparations
for a Career. The don and the bluestocking have to live, so have the
cowboy and the cook. All must have the universal knowledge whereby
they may serve their race as healthy parents of healthy children, even
though the college, the study, the ranch and the kitchen have their own
particular technicalities to be mastered by the interested individuals.
Of study in general Eugenics will find much to say. It is impossible
to neglect any branch of knowledge. The human will no less than human
necessity presses forward in every direction. We may be like King
Solomon surrounded by material wealth and possessions, but, like him,
if we are forced to choose between them and knowledge, the noblest
thing within us will cry for knowledge. We must learn to discriminate
between knowledge-values, and endeavour to frame our study-time so
that even the least of us may be encouraged to learn all that we
can. For those who can rapidly digest huge continents of study the
prizes of scholarship are assured. It is not in the interests of
Eugenics that knowledge should be acquired with this rapidity by those
constitutionally unfitted for the strain. An educational system devised
for men may not necessarily be suited to women equally anxious to
know and willing to give as long a period to study. It may be found
practicable on Eugenic grounds to give more facilities than we do for
broken studies, for studies which go slower and last longer, and for
studies where the honours are not given to those who can cram most in
the least time.
It is impossible for any view of Eugenics in relation to education to
ignore the terrible danger of child-labour. Economic consideration of
this subject is common enough; it is time that Eugenics made its voice
heard in denunciation of a system which cannot fail to demoralise the
race if persisted in. The energy of a growing youth is required for
building up his own constitution, and if his early labours are spent
in occupations inconsistent with physical development he becomes a
stunted weakling from whose loins we cannot expect the issue of a noble
race. In the case of girl-labour the trouble is intensified, partly
because the occupations of young girls are mostly of a description
requiring a bodily posture which works untold evil in their future
health and fitness. Needlework, laundry-work and typewriting are cases
in point. Housework, with which every young girl should be familiar at
a reasonably early age, becomes an intolerable check to womanly growth
when overdone. Factory life and "home" labour are equally objectionable
where children are forced by parental pressure, or the exigences of
economic circumstance to earn bread for themselves or to contribute to
the family sustenance.
I close this chapter abruptly, fully realising that Eugenic zeal has
carried me beyond any narrow view of elementary education, and will
inevitably lead the nation into economic controversy. The history
of all reform encourages us to persevere. Neither fears of expense,
nor metaphysical considerations of parental duty, nor sentimental
objections to State intrusion have prevented a nation (when faced with
a foreign foe) pledging all its resources, taking sons from mothers and
husbands from wives, and using land, railways and stores to prosecute
a war deemed necessary for national defence. I am convinced that we
have only to realise the national danger and we shall heartily follow
the Eugenic lead, even if it costs us the price of a fifth-rate war.