The Family and its Members Part 20

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 pa.s.sing 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 s.e.x-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 a.n.a.logue 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 s.e.x 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 elite 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-s.e.x 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 role 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 s.e.x-education.=--The need to have the right sort of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of s.e.x-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 _s.e.x-Education_ written by Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia University, a list of eight reasons for s.e.x-instruction is given which are here quoted by permission:

1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge concerning s.e.xual processes as they affect personal health.

2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases which are distributed chiefly by the s.e.xual promiscuity or immorality of men.

3. The uncontrolled s.e.xual pa.s.sions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prost.i.tution.

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 s.e.x-relationships.

6. There is a prevailing unwholesome att.i.tude of mind concerning all s.e.xual processes.

7. There is very general misunderstanding of s.e.xual life as related to healthy and happy marriage.

8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for s.e.xual actions that concern future generations.

To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of family needs in education will give a.s.sent. This is not the place for specific treatment of prost.i.tution and its effect upon the home, nor is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of s.e.x-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 s.e.x-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 cla.s.sic 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 a.s.s, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sion 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 c.u.mbersome scheme of historic outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial inst.i.tutions, 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 s.e.xes 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 cooperative 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 a.s.sociation 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 coordination 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 cla.s.ses, 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.

CHAPTER XV

THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER STATE

"I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power and under what inst.i.tutions and through what manner of life we became great. We are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many, not the few; but while the law secures equal justice to all, the claim of excellence is always recognized. When a citizen is in any way distinguished he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege but as a reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his position.

"We are unrestrained in private intercourse, while a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts. We are prevented from doing wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard for those ordained for the protection of the injured, as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor the reprobation of general sentiment.

"We are lovers of the beautiful, though simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household, and even those engaged in business have a fair idea of politics.

"The great impediment to right action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which may be gained by discussion.

"We do good to our neighbors not upon a calculation of interest but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit."

From the oration of Pericles, 450 B.C., as reported by Thucydides.

"Statesmen work in the dark until the idea of right towers above expediency or wealth. The Spirit of Society, not any outward inst.i.tution, is the mighty power by which the hard lot of man is to be ameliorated.

"Every line of history inspires a confidence that things mend.

This is the moral of all we learn; it warrants Hope, the prolific mother of all reforms. Our part is plainly not to block improvement or to sit until we are stone but to watch the uprise of progressive mornings and to conspire with the new work of new days."--EMERSON.