There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the part
of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of
this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead
of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular
parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the
whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and childless as well,
whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of
children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today it is easy to find a
widow who has at great cost to herself in pain, danger, and disablement,
borne six or eight children. In the same town you will find rich
bachelors and old maids, and married couples with no children or with
families voluntarily limited to two or three. The eight children do not
belong to the woman in any real or legal sense. When she has reared
them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons,
marrying strangers, working for strangers, spending on the community the
life that has been built up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice
could be imagined than that the burden of rearing the children should
fall on her alone and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.
This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts
to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, with
dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's parents are destitute or
not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is true
that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough to
draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape of
crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping children
barely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there is
no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of the
practice. One is to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants,
on which point, if you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that
you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is
that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory
schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though,
as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must be
conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which
may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child
may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case
prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.
One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure
that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure that
it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned in the
woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty children,
just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom. This morbid
result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon disappear with its
cause.