THE CHILD OF THE FUTURE
=Rights of the coming generations.=--Any school procedure that limits
its interests and activities to the present generation takes a too
restricted view of the real scope of education. The children of the next
generation, and the next, are entitled to consideration if education is
to do its perfect work and have complete and convincing justification.
The child of the future has a right to grandfathers and grandmothers of
sound body and sound mind, and the schools and homes of the present are
charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that this right is
vouchsafed to him. In actual practice our plans seem not to previse
grandfathers and grandmothers, and stop short even of fathers and
mothers. The child of the next generation has a right to a father and a
mother of untainted blood, and neither the home nor the school can
ignore this right.
=Transmitted weaknesses.=--If these rights are not scrupulously
respected by the present generation, the child of the future may come
into the world under a handicap that all the educational agencies
combined can neither remove nor materially mitigate. If he is crippled
in mind or in body because of excesses on the part of his progenitors,
the schools and hospitals may help him through life in a sorry sort of
fashion, but his condition is evermore a reminder to him of how much he
has missed in comparison with the child of sound body and mind. If such
a child does not imprecate even the memory of the ancestors whose
vitiated blood courses through his stricken body, it will be because his
mind is too weak to reason from effect to cause or because his
affliction has taught him large charity. He will feel that he has been
shamefully cheated in the great game of life, with no hope of
restitution. By reason of this, his gaze is turned backward instead of
forward, and this is a reversal of the rightful attitude of child life.
Instead of looking forward with hope and happiness, he droops through a
somber life and constantly broods upon what might have been.
=Attitude of ancestors.=--Whether he realizes it or not, he reduces the
average of humanity and is a burden upon society both in a negative and
in a positive sense. In him society loses a worker and gains a
dependent. Every taxpayer of the community must contribute to the
support which he is unable to provide for himself. He watches other
children romp and play and laugh; but he neither romps, nor plays, nor
laughs. He is inert. Some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the
vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. He asks
for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give
him a living death; he asks for a heaven of delight, and they give him a
hell of despair. He has a right to freedom, but, in place of that, he is
forced into slavery of body and soul to pay the debts of his
grandfather. Nor can he pay these debts in full, but must, perforce,
pass them on to his own children. Sad to relate, the father and
grandfather look upon such a child and charge Providence with unjust
dealing in burdening them with such an imperfect scion to uphold the
family name. They seem blind to the patent truth before them; they seem
unable to interpret the law of cause and effect; they charge the
Almighty and the child with their own defections; they acquit themselves
of any responsibility for what is before their eyes.
=Hospitals cited.=--Our hospitals for abnormal and subnormal children,
and our eleemosynary institutions, in general, are a sad commentary upon
our civilization and something of a reflection upon the school as an
exponent of and a teacher of life. If the wards of these institutions,
barring the victims of accidents, are the best we can do in the way of
coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the
school has any special warrant for exultation. These defectives did not
just happen. The law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. On
the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. With lavish
hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial
consideration to the ounce of prevention. The title of education will be
cloudy until such time as these institutions have become a thing of the
past. Both pulpit and press extol the efforts of society to build,
equip, and maintain these institutions, and that is well; but, with all
that, we are merely trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Education will not fully come into its own until it takes into the scope
of its interests the child of the future as well as the child of the
present; not until it comes to regard the children of the present as
future ancestors as well as future citizens.
=The child as a future ancestor.=--If the children of the future are to
prove a blessing to society and not a burden, then the children of the
present need to become fully conscious of their responsibilities as
agencies in bringing to pass this desirable condition. If the teacher or
parent can, somehow, cause the boy of to-day to visualize his own
grandson, in the years to come, pointing the finger of scorn at him and
calling down maledictions upon him because of a taint in the family
blood, that picture will persist in his consciousness, and will prove a
deterrent factor in his life. The desire for immortality is innate in
every human breast, we are taught, but certainly no boy will wish to
achieve that sort of immortality. He will not consider with complacency
the possibility of his becoming a pariah in the estimation of his
descendants, and will go far in an effort to avert such a misfortune.
There is no man but will shudder when he contemplates the possibility of
having perpetuated upon his gravestone or in the memory of his
grandchild the word "Unclean."
=The heart of the problem.=--Here we arrive at the very heart of the
problem that confronts the home and the school. We may close our eyes,
or look another way, but the problem remains. We may not be able to
solve it, but we cannot evade it. Each day it calls loudly to every
parent and every teacher for a solution. The health and happiness of the
coming generations depend upon the right education of the present one,
and this responsibility the home and the school can neither shirk nor
shift. We take great unction to ourselves for the excellence of the
horses, pigs, and cattle that we have on exhibition at the fairs, but
are silent as to our failures in the form of children, that drag out a
half-life in our hospitals. In one state it costs more to care for the
defectives and unfortunates than to provide schooling facilities for all
the normal children, but this fact is not written into party platforms
nor proclaimed from the stump. In the face of such a fact society seems
to proceed upon the agreeable assumption that the less said the better.
=Misconceptions.=--We temporize with the fundamental situation by the
use of such soporifics as the expressions "necessary evil" and the like,
but that leaves us exactly at the starting point. Many well-meaning
people use these expressions with great frequency and freedom and seem
to think that in so doing they have given a proof of virtue and public
spirit. It were worthy only of an iconoclast to deprecate or disparage
the legislative attempts to foster clean living. All such efforts are
worthy of commendation; but in sadness it must be confessed that,
laudable as these efforts are, they have not produced results that are
wholly satisfactory. Defectives are still granted licenses to perpetuate
their kind; children still enervate their bodies and minds by the use of
narcotics; and society daintily lifts its skirts as it hurries past the
evil, pretending not to see. Legislation is an attempt to express public
sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede
legislation if it is to become effective. Efforts have been made through
the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to
people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught
because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking.
Hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our
problem, until public sentiment has been educated.
=The responsibility of the school.=--This education must come, in large
part, through the schools, but even these will fail until they come into
a full realization of the fact that their field of effort is life in the
large. Time was when the teacher thought she was employed to teach
geography, grammar, and arithmetic. Then she enlarged this to include
boys and girls. And now she needs to make another addition and realize
that her function is to teach boys and girls the subject of Life, using
the branches of study as a means to this end. In a report on the work of
the schools at Gary, Indiana, the statement is made that the first
purpose of these schools seems to be to produce efficient workers for
the mills. This seems to savor of the doctrine of educational
foreordination, and would make millwork and life synonymous. Life is
larger than any mill. We may be justified in educating one horse for the
plow and another for the race track, but this justification rests upon
the fact that horses are assets and not liabilities.
=Clean living.=--Clean living in this generation will, undeniably,
project itself into the next, and we have only to see to it that all the
activities of the school function in clean living in the child of
to-day, and we shall surely be safeguarding the interests of the child
of the future. But clean living means more than mere externals. The
daily bath, pure food, fresh air, and sanitary conditions are essential
but not sufficient in themselves. Clean thinking, right motives, and a
high respect for the rights and interests of the future must enter into
the scheme of life. There must be no devious ways, no back alleys, in
the scheme, but only the broad highway of life, open always to the
sunlight and to the gaze of all mankind. All this must become thoroughly
enmeshed in the social consciousness and in the daily practice of every
individual, before the school can lay claim to success in the art of
teaching efficient living.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. Investigate the following agencies as means for providing future
generations with ancestors of untainted blood: legislation; moral
education; physical education; sex hygiene and eugenics; penal
institutions; medical science.
2. Enumerate some of the physical and mental handicaps of the child who
is not well born.
3. What powerful appeal for clean living may be made to the adolescent
youth?
4. As a concrete example of children being punished for the sins of
their fathers even unto the third and fourth generation, read the
history of the Juke family.
5. To what extent does the school share the responsibility for the
improvement of the physical and moral quality of the children of the
future?
6. What kind of teaching is needed to meet this responsibility?
7. Reliable authorities have estimated that 60 per cent or 12,000,000 of
the school children of America are suffering from removable physical
defects; that 93 per cent of the school children of the country have
defective teeth; and that on the average the health of children who are
not in attendance at school is better than that of those who are in
school. In the light of these facts discuss the failure or success of
our schools in providing fit material for efficient citizenship.