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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 57283 ***
+
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+
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+[Illustration: ELLEN KEY From a photograph]
+
+
+
+
+The Century of the Child
+
+By
+
+Ellen Key
+
+G. P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909
+BY
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+Published, February, 1909
+Reprinted, December, 1909
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE
+
+
+The present translation is from the German version of Frances Maro,
+which was revised by the author herself.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                            PAGE
+   I. THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS PARENTS    1
+
+  II. THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK               63
+
+ III. EDUCATION                                     106
+
+  IV. HOMELESSNESS                                  191
+
+   V. SOUL MURDER IN THE SCHOOLS                    203
+
+  VI. THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE                      233
+
+ VII. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION                         284
+
+VIII. CHILD LABOUR AND THE CRIMES OF CHILDREN       316
+
+
+
+
+The Century of the Child
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS PARENTS
+
+
+Filled with sad memories or eager hopes, people waited for the turn of
+the century, and as the clock struck twelve, felt innumerable undefined
+forebodings. They felt that the new century would certainly give them
+only one thing, peace. They felt that those who are labouring to-day
+would witness no new development in that process of change to which they
+had consciously or unconsciously contributed their quota.
+
+The events at the turn of the century caused the new century to be
+represented as a small naked child, descending upon the earth, but
+drawing himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with
+weapons, a world in which for the opening century there was not an inch
+of free ground to set one's foot upon. Many people thought over the
+significance of this picture; they thought how in economic and in actual
+warfare all the lower passions of man were still aroused; how despite
+all the tremendous development of civilisation in the century just
+passed, man had not yet succeeded in giving to the struggle for
+existence nobler forms. Certainly to the question why this still is so,
+very different answers were given. Some contented themselves with
+declaring, after consideration, that things must remain just as they
+are, since human nature remains the same; that hunger, the propagation
+of the race, the desire for gold and power, will always control the
+course of the world. Others again were convinced that if the teaching
+which has tried in vain for nineteen hundred years to transform the
+course of the world could one day become a living reality in the souls
+of men, swords would be turned into pruning hooks.
+
+My conviction is just the opposite. It is that nothing will be different
+in the mass except in so far as human nature itself is transformed, and
+that this transformation will take place, not when the whole of humanity
+becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the
+consciousness of the "holiness of generation." This consciousness will
+make the central work of society the new race, its origin, its
+management, and its education; about these all morals, all laws, all
+social arrangements will be grouped. This will form the point of view
+from which all other questions will be judged, all other regulations
+made. Up to now we have only heard in academic speeches and in
+pedagogical essays that the training of youth is the highest function of
+a nation. In reality, in the family, in the school, and in the state,
+quite other standards are put in the foreground.
+
+The new view of the "holiness of generation" will not be held by mankind
+until it has seriously abandoned the Christian point of view and taken
+the view, born thousands of years ago, whose victory has been first
+foreshadowed in the century just completed.
+
+The thought of development not only throws light on the course of the
+world that lies behind us, continued through millions of years, with its
+final and highest point in man; it throws light, too, on the way we have
+to travel over; it shows us that we physically and psychically are ever
+in the process of becoming. While earlier days regarded man as a fixed
+phenomenon, in his physical and psychical relations, with qualities that
+might be perfected but could not be transformed, it is now known that he
+can re-create himself. Instead of a fallen man, we see an incompleted
+man, out of whom, by infinite modifications in an infinite space of
+time, a new being can come into existence. Almost every day brings new
+information about hitherto unsuspected possibilities; tells us of power
+extended physically or psychically. We hear of a closer reciprocal
+action between the external and internal world; of the mastery over
+disease, of the prolongation of life and youth; of increased insight
+into the laws of physical and psychical origins. People even speak of
+giving incurable blind men a new kind of capacity of sight, of being
+able to call back to life the dead; all this and much else which it must
+be allowed still belongs simply to the region of hypothesis, to what
+psychical and physical investigators reckon among possibilities. But
+there are enough great results analysed already to show that the
+transformations made by man before he became a human being are far from
+being the last word of his genesis. He who declares to-day that human
+nature always remains the same, that is, remains just as it did in
+those petty thousands of years in which our race became conscious of
+itself, shows in making this statement that he stands on the same level
+of reflection as an ichthyosaurus of the Jura period, that apparently
+had not even an intimation of man as a possibility of the future.
+
+But he who knows that man has become what he now is under constant
+transformations, recognises the possibility of so influencing his future
+development that a higher type of man will be produced. The human will
+is found to be a decisive factor in the production of the higher types
+in the world of animal and plant life. With what concerns our own race,
+the improvement of the type of man, the ennobling of the human race, the
+accidental still prevails in both exalted and lower forms. But
+civilisation should make man conscious of an end and responsible in all
+these spheres where up to the present he has acted only by impulse,
+without responsibility. In no respect has culture remained more backward
+than in those things which are decisive for the formation of a new and
+higher race of mankind.
+
+It will take the thorough influence of the scientific view of humanity
+to restore the full naïve conviction, belonging to the ancient world,
+of the significance of the body. In the later period of antiquity, in
+Socrates and Plato, the soul began to look down upon the body. The
+Renaissance tried to reconcile the two but the effort was unfortunately
+not serious enough. Boldness it did not lack, but its effort was not
+successful in carrying out a task which Goethe himself said must be
+approached both with boldness and with serious purpose. Only now that we
+know how soul and body together build up or undermine one another,
+people are beginning to demand again a second higher innocence in
+relation to the holiness and the rights of the body.
+
+A Danish writer has shown how the Mosaic Seventh Commandment sinks back
+into nothing, as soon as one sees that marriage is only an accidental
+social form for the living together of two people, while the ethically
+decisive factor is the way they live together. In morality there is
+taking place a general displacement from objective laws of direction and
+compulsion to the subjective basis from which actions proceed. Ethics
+become an ethic of character, a matter dealing with the constitution of
+the temperament. We demand, we forgive, or we judge according to the
+inner constitution of the individual; we do not readily call an action
+immoral which only in an external point of view does not harmonise with
+the law or is opposed to the law. In each particular case we decide
+according to the inner circumstances of the individual. Applying this
+point of view to marriage, we find in the first place that this form
+offers no guarantee that the proper disposition towards the relation of
+the two sexes is present. This can exist as well outside of as within
+marriage. Many noble and earnest human beings prefer for their relation
+the freer form as the more moral one. But as the result of this, the
+significance of the Seventh Commandment is altered, that states
+explicitly that every relationship of sex outside of marriage is
+immoral. People have commenced already to experiment with unions outside
+of marriage. People are looking for new forms for the common life
+between man and woman. The whole problem is being made the subject of
+debate.
+
+In this respect humanity occupies a field of discovery. People are
+seeing more and more what a complicated subject the whole relation of
+sex is, how full it is of dangers to the happiness of man. New
+observations are being constantly made both in regard to the
+significance of this relation for individuals and for posterity. To
+bring light gradually into this chaos is supremely important for
+humanity, and literature should therefore have the greatest possible
+freedom in this sphere,--just the opposite to the tendencies of the
+present day that would limit this freedom. While I fully agree with what
+has been said I should like to state that the greatest obstacle to the
+free discussion of this theme is still the Christian way of looking at
+the origin and nature of man. His only possible escape from the results
+of the fall is made to consist in his belief in Christ; for with this
+point of view, there came into Western Europe, by means of Christianity,
+the opinion that everything concerning the continuation of the race was
+impure; to be suppressed if possible, and if this could not be done,
+that it must at least be veiled in silence and obscurity. For
+Christianity, eternal life, not life in the world, is ever the
+significant factor. The dualism of existence it tries in the first place
+to remove by asceticism, not by attempting to ennoble the life of human
+impulses. This standpoint still continues to be popular in our days, as
+is shown in its victories through legislation directed against the nude
+in art and in literature.
+
+The Christian way of looking at the relation of the sexes as something
+ignoble, alone capable of being made holy by indissoluble marriage, has
+had great direct influence on man's development during a certain period
+of time. It has caused progress in self-mastery, which has elevated the
+life of the soul. Modesty, domesticity, sincerity, have been promoted by
+it; these along with innumerable other influences have developed the
+impulse to love. If these emotions disappeared from love, it would not
+be human, but only animal.
+
+But allowing that the individual love between every new pair of human
+beings always requires seclusion and reserve; allowing too that personal
+modesty always remains an achievement wrought by mankind,
+differentiating man from the animal world, it is still true that this
+kind of spirituality, which passes over in silence and shame all the
+serious questions connected with this subject, or treats them as
+occasions for ambiguities calling forth joking and blushes, must be
+rooted out.
+
+Each one from earliest childhood should on every question asked about
+this subject receive honest answers, suitable for the especial stage of
+his development. One should be in this way completely enlightened about
+one's own nature as man or woman, and so acquire a deep feeling of
+responsibility in relation to one's future duty as man or woman. One
+should be trained in habits of earnest thought and earnest speaking on
+this subject. In this way alone can there come into existence a higher
+type of sex with a higher type of morality.
+
+But at the time when Bjoernsen in _Thomas Rendelen_ brought up the
+question of training youth to purity through intelligence of nature's
+laws, I objected to his book on the ground that like the purity sermons
+of Christianity his efforts were rather directed to the mastery of
+natural impulses than towards their ennoblement. I showed that Bjoernsen
+certainly brought up two new points of view, that of bodily health, and
+that of the ennobling of sex. He did not, as Christianity does, stress
+the spiritual and personal side of the question. These new points of
+view of his were significant, because they united the just egoism of the
+individual with the combining altruism produced by the feeling of
+solidarity. The great purpose of Bjoernsen's book was to transform
+inherited characteristics as they are related to man's attitude towards
+morality. So he proposed to create a sound and happy new generation, in
+which the sufferings of present day sexual discord should be brought to
+an end. For this purpose he wished the collaboration of the schools.
+They were to communicate the knowledge of human beings as members of
+sex, and to instruct their scholars how, as human beings, they should
+protect themselves and their posterity.
+
+I objected at that time to this plan, showing that the school was not
+the place to lay the foundation for such knowledge. It should be slowly
+and carefully communicated by the mother herself; the school should only
+give a theoretical basis. More defective still, I found the question of
+chastity handled essentially and solely as a question of bodily purity,
+as a negative not a positive ideal. I maintain that only erotic idealism
+could awaken enthusiasm for chastity. The basis for such idealism must
+be found in stories, history, and belles-lettres. Information derived
+from physiology is, in this respect, very inadequate, unless the
+imagination and the feeling are moved in the same direction. Neither
+imagination nor feeling can be helped by natural science and bodily
+exercises alone, and just as little by Christian religious instruction.
+
+No, we must on the basis of natural science attain, in a newer and
+nobler form, the whole antique love for bodily strength and beauty, the
+whole antique reverence for the divine character of the continuation of
+the race, combined with the whole modern consciousness of the soulful
+happiness of ideal love. Only so can the demand for real chastity save
+mankind from the torments which sexual divisions and degradations now
+bring with them. It is profoundly significant that in the world of the
+past, divinity was associated with woman on the ground of observations
+concerning the continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman
+became divine as the Virgin Mother. Through heathen and Christian
+thought, reunited and ennobled, the woman will receive a new reference
+for herself as a sexual being. Antique and modern love, the love of the
+senses and the love of soul, will, united and ennobled, induce human
+beings, men and women alike, to adore again Eros the All-powerful.
+
+To diminish the significance of love, to oppose it as a lowering
+sensualism, does not mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on the
+other hand, working for its debasement. For as lowering as sexual life
+would be if it were continued in man accompanied by a feeling of shame
+as a characteristic of animal life, it would be just the same if it were
+regarded as a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out for the
+preservation of the species.
+
+Antiquity stood higher than the present day, for example when Lycurgus'
+laws asserted that a people's strength lies in the breast of blooming
+womanhood. Accordingly in Sparta, the physical development of the woman
+was watched over as well as of the man, and the age of marriage was
+determined with reference to a healthy offspring. Higher, too, stood
+Judaism in relation to the conception of the seriousness of bearing
+children. This conviction expressed itself in the strictest hygienic
+legislation known to history. Jewish, like other Oriental legislation,
+depended, in relation to sexual morality as in relation to diet, on
+sharp-sighted observations of natural law and disease. The foundation to
+a new ethic in these questions cannot be laid, until men begin with Old
+Testament shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to handle the life
+questions which the idealism of Christianity has indeed spiritualised
+but at the same time debased.
+
+This new ethic will call no other common living of man and woman
+immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring, and
+produces bad conditions for the development of their offspring. The Ten
+Commandments on this subject will not be prescribed by the founders of
+religion, but by scientists.
+
+Up to the present day, partly as a result of a perverted modesty in such
+things, science has only been able to offer incomplete observations on
+the physical and psychical conditions for the improvement of the human
+type in its actual genesis.
+
+Ontogeny is really a new science in our century, introduced by Von
+Leeuwenhock, de Graaf, and others. It was founded in 1827, by von Baer.
+The differences of opinion and the discovery of different theories are
+very far from being ended. Purely scientific points of view are being
+combined with social, physiological, or ethical ones. It is maintained
+that by changing the diet of the mother the sex of the child can be
+determined. Attempts have been made to show that about three fifths of
+all men of genius were first-born children.
+
+People are studying what influence the age of parents has on the child;
+extreme youth of parents seems unfavourable for the offspring as well
+as extreme age. The first child of a too youthful mother is often weak,
+and besides ordinarily the joys of motherhood are not desired, because
+she feels that physically and psychically a child is too great a burden
+to her, who herself is only a child. The conditions of a strong,
+well-nourished offspring require the postponement of the marriage age
+for women. In northern countries it should be established, if not by law
+at least by custom, at about twenty years. This is all the more
+necessary because then the young woman can have behind her some years of
+careless youthful joy, an undisturbed self-development, and will also
+have reached the physical development necessary for motherhood. While
+twenty years should be regarded as the earliest period of marriage it
+should actually be often postponed some years still for the well-being
+of the woman, the man, and the children, and married life as a whole, in
+which most conflicts arise because women have decided about their fate
+before their personality was definitely formed, before their heart was
+able to find its choice. The love of the man chooses and the young girl
+often confuses the happiness of being loved with the happiness of
+loving, an experience which later on is gone through in a tragic way. To
+the many questions which are related to heredity and natural selection,
+belongs one which notices the significance of nature's purpose to cause
+strong opposites to exert upon one another the strongest attraction.
+This attraction often during married life changes into antipathy; it
+almost results in impatience against the characteristics which
+originally had so deep an attraction. Nature in this case seems to wish
+to reach its end with the greatest lack of consideration for the
+happiness of the individual. So often the contradictions of parents seem
+really to be moulded in full in the child. Occasionally these
+contradictions are expressed as a deep discord, but in both cases there
+often arises an exceptional being. To attain correct results in this
+case, belongs to the numerous still open possibilities.
+
+Differences of opinion are most apparent in the theory of heredity,
+where there is a struggle between Darwin's view, that even acquired
+characteristics are inherited, and Galton's and Weissmann's conviction
+that this is not the case. In connection with this stands, also, the
+question of the marriage of consanguineous relations; some regard these
+marriages as dangerous, _per se_, for the posterity; others only as
+dangerous from the point of view that the same family trait is often
+found in both parents, and so becomes strongly impressed on the
+children. For example, congenital shortsightedness of both parents
+develops into blindness of the children, their stupidity becomes idiocy,
+their melancholy, insanity.
+
+The Occident has gradually abolished the Oriental marriage law to which
+Moses gave validity, while other Oriental legislators, for example,
+Manes and Mohammed, are still followed to a great extent. In China, too,
+similar prohibitions have a binding power. Here and there the feeling of
+the significance of heredity has vaguely appeared in some Occidental
+writers. Sir Thomas More, like Plato, required a physical examination
+before entering into marriage. It was not until the nineteenth century
+that the question of the rights of the child in this respect began to be
+noticed. It was Robert Owen who in one way awakened the general right
+feeling in favour of children, by investigations begun in 1815. They
+showed that children under eight years old were forced to work by blows
+from leather whips, to work from fifteen to sixteen hours a day, with
+the result that a fourth or fifth of them ended as cripples. Another
+Englishman, Malthus, published in 1798 an essay on the _Principle of
+Population_, and directed the attention of society to the conditions
+which had caused him to write his work. He pointed to the deficiency of
+food supply produced by over-population and the obstacles it offered to
+legitimate marriages. Again, these conditions, he showed, resulted
+partly in great mortality among children, partly in the murder of
+children. Malthus saw the significance of selection and the danger of
+degeneration. With perfect calmness of conscience he met the storm he
+had evoked. Personally a blameless and tender hearted man, Malthus, as
+all other reformers of moral ideas, had to allow the shameless
+accusations of corruption and immorality to pass over his head. Harriet
+Martineau, who advocated Malthus's views, had the same experience. When
+she wrote her novels on this subject she knew very well to what she was
+exposing herself; but this remarkable woman, who died unmarried and
+childless, was at an early period of her life filled with a feeling for
+the holiness of the child. When nineteen years old, at the time of the
+birth of a small sister, she fell on her knees and devoutly thanked God
+that she had been allowed to be the witness of the great wonder of the
+development of the human being from the beginning. The same feeling
+caused her in her novels to expound the duty of voluntary limitation of
+population. She was pained by the thought of the fate endured by
+children, when they were so numerous that their parents were unable to
+maintain and educate them. This part of the subject of the right of the
+child called forth in all countries books for and against it. Everywhere
+the question is discussed. I shall briefly handle the differences of
+opinion about other sides of the right of the child.
+
+In Francis Galton's celebrated work, _Hereditary Genius_, almost all has
+been said that is required to-day from the point of view of the
+improvement of the race. Galton, as early as the seventies, opposed
+Darwin's view that acquired characteristics were inherited. In this
+respect he had a fellow-champion in the German Weissmann, who on his
+side was opposed, among others, by the English Darwinian Romanes.
+
+Galton invented from a Greek word a name for the science of the
+amelioration of the race, Eugenics. He showed that civilised man, so
+far as care for the amelioration of the race is concerned, stands on a
+much lower plane than savages, not to speak of Sparta which did not
+allow the weak, the too young, and the too old to marry, and where
+national pride in a pure race, a strong offspring, was so great that
+individuals were sacrificed to the attainment of this end. Galton, like
+Darwin, Spencer, A. R. Wallace, and others, has brought out the fact
+that the law of natural selection, which in the rest of nature has
+secured the survival of the fittest, is not applicable to human society,
+where economic motives lead to unsuitable marriages, made possible by
+wealth. Poverty hinders suitable marriages. Besides the development of
+sympathy has come into the field as a factor which disturbs natural
+selection. The sympathy of love, chooses according to motives that
+certainly tend to the happiness of the individual, but this does not
+mean that they guarantee the improvement of the race. And while other
+writers hope for a voluntary abstinence from marriage in those cases,
+where an inferior offspring is to be expected, Galton, on the other
+hand, is in favour of very strict rules, to hinder inferior specimens of
+humanity from transmitting their vices or diseases, their intellectual
+or physical weaknesses. Just because Galton does not believe in the
+inheritance of acquired characteristics, selection has the greatest
+significance for him.
+
+On the other side, he advocates using all means to encourage such
+marriages, where the family on both sides gives promise of distinguished
+offspring. For him, as later for Nietzsche, the purpose of married life
+is the production of strong, able personalities.
+
+Galton makes it plain that civilised man, by his sympathy with weak,
+inefficient individuals, has helped to continue their existence. This
+tendency on its own side has lessened the possibility of the efficient
+individuals to continue the species. Wallace, too, and several others,
+have on different occasions declared that men in relation to this
+question must have harder hearts, if the human race is not to become
+inferior. The moral, social, and sympathetic factors, they say, which in
+humanity work against the law of the survival of the fittest, and have
+made it possible for the lower type, to continue and to multiply in
+excess, must give way to new points of view where certain moral and
+social questions are concerned. So the natural law will be supported by
+altruism, instead of as now being opposed by this sentiment.
+
+Spencer's thoughts contain a great truth. They have been quoted in just
+this connection. He says: We see the germ of many things that later on
+are developed in a way no one now suspects. Profound transformations are
+worked in society and its members, transformations which we could not
+have hoped for as immediate results, but which we could have looked for
+in confidence as final consequences. The effort to find natural laws
+which cause racial progress or deterioration is one of these germinal
+ideas. As to scientific investigation in this field, we can apply
+another maxim of the same thinker, one often overlooked by science. "The
+passion to discover truth must be accompanied by the passion to use it
+for the welfare of mankind." But science must really reach universally
+accepted conclusions before we can expect humanity to begin seriously
+its self-purification; but it is certain to come then. When we read in
+ethnographical and sociological works what restrictions in marriage are
+imposed by savage people on themselves, and religiously obeyed on the
+ground of superstitious prejudice, we have a right to hope that
+civilised men will one day bow before scientific proofs. This hope is
+not too optimistic.
+
+Wallace pleads not for such absolute regulations as Galton, in order to
+prevent the marriages of the less worthy and to encourage the marriages
+of the superior types of humanity. He perceives that the problem is
+tremendously complicated. One thing is, that the personal attraction of
+love is extremely essential from the point of view of the improvement of
+the race. If human beings could be bred like prize cattle, it is not
+likely that a superior type of humanity would be produced. In the Middle
+Ages, the human race deteriorated, Galton said, because the best fled to
+the monasteries and the worst reproduced themselves. But if Galton's
+strict requirements had to be carried out in every case before a
+marriage could be allowed, not only would marriage lose its deepest
+meaning, but the race also would lose its noblest inheritance.
+
+But even with a strict limitation of Galton's principles and with a wise
+limitation of his requirements, science has already shown the truth of
+so many of the first, that the significance of the last, taken as a
+whole, must be granted. We know that in the inherited tendencies of
+children, often another form is taken from that which appears in their
+parents. Of three hundred idiots, one hundred and forty-five had
+alcoholic parents. Epilepsy, too, is often produced by the same cause.
+It is known that apparently sound individuals are often attacked at the
+same age by a disease to which their parents were subject. On the other
+hand, there are fortunately proofs that individuals endowed with power
+of will can resist certain dangerous inherited weaknesses. In the
+discussion on this subject, it should also be justly brought out, that
+it is possible for the unsound tendency of one parent to be neutralised
+in the case of children, by the soundness of the other. But this result,
+as well as the many other questions involved, as I have shown above, are
+far from being established.
+
+The question as to the inheritance of mental diseases has been
+especially examined by Maudsley. In this case, too, nervous and psychic
+diseases of the parents often change their character in the children. He
+requires medical testimony before marriage, and asks that the appearance
+of mental diseases after marriage shall form a legitimate ground for
+divorce. And he hopes that a pure descent, in a new sense of the word,
+will be as important for the marriages of the future, as for
+aristocratic marriages in early times. One of Maudsley's statements is
+so interesting that it should be mentioned here. Fathers, he says, who
+have directed their whole energy towards attainment of wealth, have
+degenerate children; for this sort of nerve strain undermines the system
+as infallibly as alcohol or opium. If this statement be true, we would
+add another point of view to the many already existent, that show how
+hostile to life is our best social order, which aims at power and gain.
+It proves how necessary is that transformation of existence which will
+make work and production serve a new end. Each man should claim to live
+wholly, broadly, and in a way worthy of humanity. He should be able to
+leave behind him a posterity provided with all capacities for a similar
+life. When this day dawns people will regard, as a terrible atavism,
+that expression on the face of a child, which an artist of the present
+day has preserved in a picture of a boy represented as a future
+millionaire.
+
+I will mention now from literary sources, some of Nietzsche's work on
+this subject. Although this author did not base his ideas of the
+"superman" directly on Darwin's theories, yet they are, as Brandes has
+lately shown, the great consequences of Darwinism, that Darwin himself
+did not see. In no contemporary was there a stronger conviction than in
+Nietzsche that man as he now is, is only a bridge, only a transition
+between the animal and the "superman." In connection with this,
+Nietzsche looked upon the obligations of man for the amelioration of the
+race as seriously as Galton, but he expressed his principles with the
+power of poetic and prophetic expression, not with scientific proof.
+
+Literature on this subject is increasing every day; different opinions
+press one another hard. As long as this is the case, there is every
+reason to observe the warning of the German sociologist Kurella, who
+says that we must reckon with social as well as with anthropological
+factors if we wish to prevent the degeneration of the human species. A
+vital point in his position is, that it is a matter of indifference
+whether the Darwinian theory of the transmission of acquired
+characteristics, or its contrary is victorious. The former is the theory
+of an unchangeable germ plasm transmitted by the parents to the
+children; so that better types can only originate through a new
+combination of the characteristics of father and mother, and also by
+natural selection in the struggle for existence. We must be careful
+before beginning to act in a social and political way on the basis of
+anthropological motives. He finally lays down with perfect justice, that
+the material to be gathered from the works of Spencer, Galton, Lombroso,
+Ferri, Ribot, Latourneau, Havelock Ellis, J. B. Haycraft, Colajanni,
+Sergi, Ritchie, and others, must be systematically worked over. The
+sociologist must be zoölogist, anthropologist, and psychologist before
+his plans for civilising man, and for elevating the human race could be
+carried out.
+
+As to intellectual characteristics it has been maintained that
+exceptionally gifted men have mostly inherited their characteristics
+from the mother. This fact has in our day, so very much increased the
+interest taken in the mothers of famous men. This truth is supposed to
+hold good for a son, but if the daughter is gifted, her talent is held
+to come from the father. Another and certainly a better founded
+phenomenon seems to be this: That when in a family characteristics find
+their culmination in a world genius, this genius either remains
+childless or his children are not only ordinary, but often
+insignificant. It may be that nature has exhausted her power of
+production in these great personalities, or as is often assumed, the
+creative power of genius in an intellectual direction, diminishes the
+creative power in the physical direction.
+
+Along with the question of heredity stands that of the development of
+races. In the beginning of the _Origin of Species_ Darwin showed how
+essential pure descent is for the production of a noble race. This
+theory is appealed to by a modern anti-Semitic writer, who represents
+the Jew as a typical example of pure race, an idea which one of the most
+conspicuous representatives of Judaism, Disraeli, has also expressed in
+the following words: "Race is everything; there is no other truth, and
+every race which carelessly allows mixed blood, perishes." Yet other
+specialists consider some racial mixture as highly advantageous to the
+offspring.
+
+Professor Westermark has offered a good reason for the significance
+attached to beauty in the case of love, and therefore its importance for
+the race. He has shown how man has conceived physical beauty to be the
+full development of all of those characteristics which distinguish the
+human organism from the animal, and which mark sex distinctions, and,
+most of all, race distinctions. He thinks individuals with these
+characteristics are best suited for their life work. Accordingly it is
+the result of natural selection that exactly those individuals are found
+most beautiful and are most desired, who first as human beings best
+fulfil the general demands of the human organism, as sexual beings
+fulfil those of their sex, and as members of the race are best suited to
+the conditions which surround them. In the struggle for existence, those
+are overcome, who are descended from human beings, whose instincts of
+love are directed to individuals badly adapted to that struggle; while
+those who are victorious are children happily so adapted. In this way,
+taste has developed by which, what is best adapted to environment
+appears as the highest beauty. This is equivalent to health, the power
+to resist the attacks of the external world. While every considerable
+deviation from the pure type in sex and race, has a lesser degree of
+adaptability; that is of health, and also of beauty.
+
+Another writer has used the foot as an example of this principle. The
+small, high-arched foot with the fine ankle is always, he says,
+regarded as the most beautiful. But such a foot is only combined with a
+fine, strong, and elastic bony structure. Such a foot besides has, by
+its great elasticity, a considerably higher power of bearing weight than
+the flat foot. The high-vaulted foot, in walking and jumping, increases
+the activity of the lungs and the heart. This again makes the walk
+elastic, strong, and easy, agile and stately. These traits, for the same
+reason as the beauty of the foot itself, are looked upon as a racial
+sign. This physical power and ease influence the mind, and produce
+self-confidence, and so increase the feeling of superiority and the joy
+of living, marks of distinction in human beings.
+
+Whether the illustration in this special case holds good or not, it
+proves nothing against the truth of the theory on which it rests, and
+which is gradually becoming prevalent; the view I mean, according to
+which souls and bodies are mutually developed through adaptability to
+their surroundings.
+
+So it is necessary not only to investigate what conditions give the best
+selection, but also what external ones strengthen or weaken the
+characteristics found in natural selection. We must again see the
+importance of bodily exercise. Painful experiences have taught us to
+prevent the consequences of overstrain, over-exertion in competitive
+imbecility, and mania for sport. Such results have specially shown
+themselves to be harmful for women in respect to motherhood. Sport and
+play, gymnastics and pedestrianism, life in nature and in the open air,
+a regenerated system of dancing, after the model of the Swedish peasant
+dances, will be most excellent bases for the physical and psychical
+renewal of the new generation.
+
+In plans concerning this renewal, people have pointed to the influence
+of art; it has been shown how Burne-Jones created the new English type
+of woman. It was formed by an adaption to the quiet, distinguished
+style, by a process that went slowly on. This was the type regarded by
+him as the model one. It is maintained that we only need to see a pair
+of young English girls in front of one of his pictures, in order to
+notice how not only the faces but the expressions show a resemblance.
+The artist has impressed his trait on youth before it was conscious of
+it. Before these forms they grew up, they have seen them in their
+picture books, they have been dressed in clothes cut in the fashion of
+the master's pictures. There is another reason. Mothers of the present
+day are supposed to have passed on to their children the Burne-Jones
+type in the same way in which the charm of the Greeks was influenced by
+the beauty of their statuary. In antiquity it was believed, even in
+other details, (for example, in attaining the much-longed-for blonde
+hair) that this end could be secured by observing the proper directions.
+
+As to the significance of external influences of this kind on mothers,
+there is too little material still to build up conclusions. On this
+point, learned men also disagree. I have only, therefore, incidentally
+mentioned this factor among others. All should be established before we
+can get a final and certain insight into the conditions of human birth.
+In the absence of scientific knowledge I can only refer to the
+literature and comprehensive investigations commenced in the preceding
+century, that throw light on the riddle of man's coming into the world.
+Many of these matters are still involved in obscurity. But man's spirit
+is resting on the waters; gradually a new creation will be called forth
+from them.
+
+In connection with this, must be discussed the development of new ideas
+of law in these spheres. Heathen society in its hardness, exposed weak
+or crippled children. Christian society on the other hand, has gone so
+far in its mildness, that it prolongs the life of the child who is
+incurably ill, physically and psychically, even if he is misshapen and
+so becomes an hourly torment to himself and his surroundings. Yet
+respect for life is still not strong enough in a social order, which
+keeps up among other things, the death penalty and war, that one can
+without danger suggest the extinction of such a life. Only when death is
+inflicted through compassion, will the humanity of the future show
+itself in such a way, that the doctor under control and responsibility
+can painlessly extinguish such suffering. On the other hand, this
+Christian society still maintains the distinction between legitimate
+children and the children of sin, a distinction which more than anything
+else has helped to obstruct a real ethical conception of the duties of
+parents. Every child has the same rights in respect to both father and
+mother. Both parents have just the same obligation to every child. Until
+this is recognised there will be no basis for the future morality of
+the common life between man and woman. Some day society will look upon
+the arrangements of the love relation as the private affair of
+responsible individuals. Those who are lovers, those who are married
+will regard themselves as completely free, and will also be so regarded.
+Binding promises in respect of emotions, demands of exclusive possession
+over personality, have already come to be regarded by fine feeling and
+fully developed human beings as a relic of erotic sentiments on a lower
+plane. These sentiments were the outcome of desire for mastery, vanity,
+cruelty, and blind passion. People are beginning to see that perfect
+fidelity is only to be obtained by perfect freedom; that complete
+exchange of individuality can only take place in perfect freedom; that
+complete excellence can only come into being in perfect freedom. Each
+must cease to try to force and bend the emotions, opinions, habits, and
+inclinations of the other towards him- or herself. Each must regard the
+continuance of the feeling of the other as a happiness, not as a right.
+Each must regard the possible cessation of this feeling as a pain, not
+as an injustice. Only in this way can there arise between the two souls
+such pure, full, freedom that both can move with absolute independence,
+and complete unity.
+
+Freedom is no danger to fidelity. The kind of fidelity required by the
+church and by the law has certainly been a notable means of education.
+But the method, as it is, is opposed to the end. For it has produced the
+feeling of possession. This has led to loss of respect in the worship of
+love. The requirements based on force have awakened hostility in soul
+and sense; the fear of public opinion has produced all sorts of
+dishonesty between man and wife, between them and the world. When the
+bonds of compulsion fall away feeling will be strengthened. For when the
+external supports of fidelity are wanting, the power required for it
+will come from the inner life. Although human beings will be exposed
+always to the possibility of serious mistakes about themselves and the
+object of their love; although time can always change human beings and
+their emotions; although, even in a marriage which has resulted from
+mutual love, conditions can arise which make Nietzsche's ideal
+legitimate, that it is better to break up the marriage than to be broken
+up by it; yet on the whole freedom will encourage fidelity, which itself
+will always have a support through the experience of its psychological
+and ethical value.
+
+It is not through a series of lightly entered into and lightly dissolved
+connections that one is prepared for the happiness of great love.
+Voluntary fidelity is a sign of nobility, because it assumes the will to
+concentrate about the centre of life's meaning; because it signifies the
+unity with our own proper innermost ego. This is as true of fidelity in
+love as of all other kinds of fidelity. Only when love is the practical
+religion of the work-day, and the devotion of the holiday, when it is
+kept under the constant supervision of the soul, when it brings with it
+a constant growth, (why should not the fine old word "sanctification" be
+used) of personality, is love great. Then it comes into possession of a
+higher right than some earlier union, because it then means really
+fidelity and nothing else towards our own highest ego. But where it does
+not have this character, it does not possess this right. It is then a
+petty emotion even when it is made pardonable by great passion. The
+children which issue from temporary unions are often as imperfect as
+their origin. Great love is, as a young doctor once said, only that
+which grips so deeply, that after its loss one no longer feels as a
+whole, but as a half of a whole. Yet nature has protected itself against
+annihilation by giving the possibility of love more than once. But what
+nature's ideal is cannot be doubted. The race which would come into
+existence, provided young men and women were given the possibility of
+uniting when the first love took possession of them,--that love which is
+the deepest,--this race would be sound and strong, different from what
+our own race is now. But when young people love now they seldom have the
+means for union, and when they have the means, then that which leads
+them to the marriage union is not the deepest feeling they have ever
+felt, but only an impulse, which, even if real, is still only a
+substitute.
+
+Such a transformation of the conditions of society and of the individual
+view of the true worth of life will enable young men and women, between
+the ages of twenty and thirty, to found their own home and under simple
+conditions, to secure their happiness. Here would be one of the most
+essential foundations for the origin of a new race, which would have the
+ancient feeling for the hearth as an altar, and would have the life of
+love as the service of a divinity. Only through such a transformation
+might it be expected that the deepest misery of society, prostitution,
+could be restrained. Only after such a transformation could we with full
+right require from our youth that self-mastery which is the best
+pre-condition of the sound development of the new generation.
+
+As things are at present, it is certain that just as there are really
+immoral, unmarried mothers, so there are others deeply moral, who would
+be mothers with a great pure love to the father of their child, but who
+for various reasons should not be united with them in legal marriage.
+And even if the contraction of marriage were simplified, such motherhood
+on the part of single women, should continue to exist.
+
+Bjoernsen, when he gave lectures in Norway on sexual morality,
+maintained the view that the woman who wished for motherhood, but who
+was not adapted in her opinion for marriage, should be fully entitled to
+the first, without the last being regarded as necessary, on condition
+that she was willing to fulfil to the child her maternal duties. This
+idea certainly has a future. In Germany there was a well-known case in
+which a fully mature woman, not a mere girl, saw shortly after her
+marriage that the temperaments and conditions of both parties to the
+marriage would make it an unhappiness for both. She separated,
+therefore, brought her child into the world unmarried, educated it
+publicly and with self-sacrifice. Now she has along with the peace which
+comes from work and the happiness of motherhood, the possibility of
+fulfilling her duty also as daughter, while married life would have
+destroyed this for all parties. This is one of the many cases out of the
+great collection of life, that shows how foolish is that requirement of
+society to press human nature, in its manifold types, into one mould,
+with a sphere of duty arranged in the same way for all.
+
+But the sphere of duty, an ever-widening one, is the sphere which
+embraces the right of the child. Yet its lines will be drawn in the
+future bounded in quite a different way from now. It will then be looked
+upon as the supreme right of the child that he shall not be born in a
+discordant marriage. Above everything, therefore, marriage must be free.
+This means that the two parties can freely separate after mutual
+agreement. In entering into marriage and in dissolving it, only certain
+duties towards the children are to be assumed. Such legal provisions
+might well be superfluous even in this case; in others, they might be
+important. But in none are they to become an obstacle to the development
+of this relation to the children. On the other hand, the compulsory
+marriage laws of to-day, as well in relation to divorce as to the
+guardianship given the man, have become obstacles to the higher
+development of the common life of man and woman.
+
+The vigorous drawing together of the bonds of marriage will not protect
+children from growing up in a destroyed home. This protection will be
+secured by deeper earnestness in entering upon marriage, but above all
+by a deeper sense of responsibility to the children themselves. This
+will make it possible for the parents who see themselves deceived in
+their married happiness to keep a peaceful resignation, a high
+character, as they continue to live together, if they feel that this is
+the best solution of the conflict, for the children who are already
+born. But this resolution does not mean the continuance of real married
+life, but parenthood alone. Only so can it be really useful to the
+children that the marriage should not be dissolved. The parents, who are
+profoundly and finally alienated must not bestow life on any new being.
+
+Marriages lightly entered into are many; lightly entered into divorces
+are few, at least where there are children. It is not the prescriptions
+of the law, but those of blood which work as a restraining influence
+here even at the present day. The decisive sentence is not spoken by
+society but by the children. But these deep motives are just as decisive
+in the case of a free union as in the case of a legal one; if the father
+or the mother is only kept with the children by compulsion, the children
+have not much to lose. The important thing for unwritten duties, duties
+which largely can not be determined by law, is to awaken the conscience
+of fathers and mothers in order to create a better morality. Perhaps for
+this, new legislation is necessary for the present. Certainly antiquated
+legal conceptions should be done away with; they have done good duty as
+a past training for morality. Now they stand in the way of the higher
+morality. The man or the woman who plays the rôle of seduction, spoiling
+the life of a young woman or a young man, or disturbing the peace of a
+happy marriage, this type of character, is being treated with
+ever-increasing contempt. The more one learns to distinguish the
+heartless play of masculine or feminine desire for conquest, the
+selfish soulless claims of the senses, from those of love, the more does
+the conception of morality become equivalent to the feeling of
+responsibility towards the new generation.
+
+The gratification of natural impulses, which act contrary to the real
+profound intention of nature, is what destroys individuals and peoples.
+But as has been said, these devastations cannot be successfully
+restrained by the extermination of man's material nature.
+
+It is a favourable symptom when a poet opposes the mastery of material
+nature, apart from the feeling of responsibility. But it is harmful when
+this sensuousness is made, as Tolstoi does, equivalent to the conception
+of love. Love must not be debased to simple sensuousness, nor must it be
+etherealised to a simple spiritual quality, if the human race is to be
+freed from the debasing mastery of impulse. This happens, as I have
+often shown before, and in an earlier part of this work as well, by the
+elevation of sensuousness to love. I mean by this that the spiritual
+unity of beings, the indulgence of tenderness, the sympathy of souls,
+the community of work, and the happiness of comradeship, will be as
+really decisive factors in the lofty emotions of love, and in the charm
+of love, as the attraction of the senses. This wealth in the elements of
+mutual dependence is what keeps fidelity in love both inwardly and
+outwardly. This soft current of the soul's depths keeps the sensuous
+charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal marriage and free union,
+very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui, if love has
+contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual feeling of
+dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense, and
+which unites the spirit and the sympathies.
+
+The duty and responsibility towards the children will be all the more
+strict as society learns to regard it as one of its principal duties to
+hinder all thoughtless and undeserved suffering.
+
+The morality of the future will not be found in sacrificing to the
+holiness of the family so-called illegitimate children, who are often by
+nature richly endowed, but who by the prevailing legal system receive
+such treatment, that they often become what they are called, and so are
+filled with vengeance against society and the perverse conceptions of
+law whose victims they are. Child murder, phosphorous poisonings,
+"angel-making"--all these are connected with these perverse legal ideas.
+But all of these results are still less pernicious than those which
+society draws upon itself through those "disgraced" children, who go to
+ruin not physically but psychically. In them, there are not only
+frequently good powers lost, but socially destructive powers developed.
+When the whole of Europe shuddered over the murder of the Empress
+Elizabeth, one fact above every other seemed to me terrible. The
+murderer confessed, "I know nothing of my parents."
+
+The time will come in which the child will be looked upon as holy, even
+when the parents themselves have approached the mystery of life with
+profane feelings; a time in which all motherhood will be looked upon as
+holy, if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and if it has called
+forth deep feelings of duty.
+
+Then the child, who has received its life from sound, loving human
+beings and has been afterwards brought up wisely and lovingly, will be
+called legitimate, even if its parents have been united in complete
+freedom. Then will the child, who has been born in a loveless marriage,
+and has been burdened by the fault of its parents with bodily or mental
+disease, be regarded as illegitimate, even if its parents have been
+united in marriage by the Pope at St. Peter's. The shadow of contempt
+will not fall on the unmarried tender mother of a radiantly healthy
+child, but on the legitimate or illegitimate mother of a being made
+degenerate by the misdeeds of its forefathers.
+
+In a much discussed drama called _The Lion's Whelp_, there occurs the
+following dialogue between an older and younger man:
+
+
+     THE OLDER MAN: The next century will be the century of the child,
+     just as this century has been the woman's century. When the child
+     gets his rights, morality will be perfected. Then every man will
+     know that he is bound to the life which he has produced with other
+     bonds, than those imposed by society and the laws. You understand
+     that a man cannot be released from his duty as father even if he
+     travels around the world; a kingdom can be given and taken away,
+     but not fatherhood.
+
+     THE YOUTH: I know this.
+
+     THE OLDER MAN: But in this all righteousness is still not
+     fulfilled--in man's carefully preserving the life which he has
+     called into existence. No man can early enough think over the other
+     question, whether and when he has the right to call life into
+     existence.
+
+
+This dialogue has supplied me with a title for this book. It is the
+point of departure of my assertion, that the first right of the child
+is to select its own parents.
+
+What here must be first considered is the thought constantly being
+brought out by Darwinian writers, that the natural sciences, in which
+must now be numbered psychology, should be the basis of juristic science
+as well as of pedagogy. Man must come to learn the laws of natural
+selection and act in the spirit of these laws. Man must arrange the
+punishments of society in the service of development; they must be
+protective measures for natural selection. In the first place this must
+be secured by hindering the criminal type from perpetuating itself. The
+characteristics of this type can only be determined by specialists. But
+the criminal must be prevented from handing on his characteristics to
+his posterity.
+
+So the human race will be gradually freed from atavisms which reproduce
+lower and preceding stages of development. This is the first condition
+of that evolution by which mankind will be able to let the ape and tiger
+die. Then comes the requirement that those with inherited physical or
+psychical diseases shall not transmit them to an offspring.
+
+As to this type of heredity opinions are still very much divided. Great
+authorities are in conflict with one another on the question of
+tuberculosis. Some contend that it is hereditary, others declare that it
+is only transmitted by infection. Accordingly when a child is born of a
+tuberculous mother, and is taken away from her, there is no danger for
+the child. Views are also divided on the subject of cancer. Regarding
+other diseases, however, there is complete certainty. Legislation has
+already interfered in the case of epilepsy, although the law in practice
+is not always applied. But in the case of syphilis, alcoholism, and many
+kinds of nervous complaints, diseases which afflict children most
+certainly, in various ways, legislation has yet done nothing.
+
+There is an old axiom that we are obliged to thank our parents for life.
+Our parents, I know from my own experience, can themselves have been the
+heirs of bodily and mental health, resulting from the fact that maternal
+and paternal ancestors all made early, right, and happy marriages. But
+generally, parents must on their part, ask the children's pardon for the
+children's existence.
+
+It makes no difference, whether we talk with people sunken in necessity
+or crime, or with those suffering from nervous and other diseases, or
+finally with people who are spiritually maimed. In most cases we are
+convinced that the main cause of their condition as indicated by them,
+goes back to their birth, or to the time of their childish
+consciousness. Sometimes their parents have been too young or too old,
+their fathers or mothers invalids. Sometimes they are the offspring of
+intemperance. Again their mother may have been overburdened by the
+torment of work, or by a large family of children; or they may have
+received their life in marriages concluded without love, or after the
+cessation of love. They have been unwelcome, or born under feelings of
+revulsion, bearing in their blood the germ of discord or disgust of
+life. Numerous abnormal tendencies, among them misanthropy in women, can
+be traced back to these causes. Finally they have been brought up in a
+home where they have suffered from the burden of bad examples, or
+conflicting influences.
+
+So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that
+young men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of
+one character or another, have begun to see that it is their duty
+rather to abstain from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate
+inheritence to a new generation. I knew a woman in whose family on her
+father's and mother's side, mental disease was inherited. Therefore,
+though healthy herself, she refused to marry the man she loved. I know
+of another who broke her engagement, because she was convinced that the
+man whom she loved was a drinker, and she did not want to give her
+children such a father. It is especially on this point that women sin in
+marrying from ignorance, because they do not know that epilepsy and
+other diseases, especially alcoholism, are often caused because the
+child has had a drunkard for a father. A young woman could have no more
+certain test for the continuance of her feelings for a man, than whether
+she feels exalted joy or tormenting distress, at the thought of seeing
+his characteristics transmitted to their child.
+
+Men sin against the coming race not only by excessive drinking, but in
+other respects where the results are still more destructive.
+
+Besides the conscience of men must begin to awaken. This will express
+itself partly in the requirement to abstain from marriage when they know
+that they have to transmit a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres
+of morality as in the following examples:
+
+A young man, himself a physician, thought he was healthy when he
+married. He discovered his mistake and found himself confronting the
+choice of wronging his wife or separating from her. As they were deeply
+in love, the only possible way was separation. He chose death which he
+inflicted on himself in such a way that his wife thought it was caused
+by accident.
+
+Another man acted in the same way after he had been married several
+years and had three children; he found out that he was his wife's
+half-brother.
+
+But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are
+concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the
+development of several generations before it will be the woman's
+instinct, an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or
+psychically degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her
+children. The instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but
+it is dulled too by an antiquated legal conception, according to which
+the woman must subject herself as a duty to requirements against which
+her whole being revolts. In this respect a woman has only one duty, an
+unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely
+that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and
+purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete
+common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a
+duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment
+of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their
+life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show
+plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord.
+Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and powerful
+specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to pieces
+through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality caused
+by their very origin.
+
+As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can
+do nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children
+must be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their
+future duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can
+impress on the conscience of the children not any abstract conception
+of purity, but the concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire.
+So they will keep their health, their attractiveness, their
+guilelessness, for the being they are to love; for the children who from
+this love will receive their life.
+
+The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low,
+small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have
+depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when
+the impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or
+when this end is attained without consideration for the production of an
+offspring qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is
+that which diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life.
+This type of love really degrades human beings, is immoral from the
+standpoint of the modern view, which wills life to be, but above all,
+wills the progress of life to ever higher forms.
+
+Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties.
+These they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily
+obligations, in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any
+intention of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they
+must also know that it is a still greater transgression of their duty if
+the life of a child is called forth with cold hearts and cold temper,
+whether this happens in a marriage based on worldly motives or one
+maintained on moral grounds in which the previously existing discord is
+transmitted to a new being.
+
+Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of
+numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal
+convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle
+against the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its
+higher aims. They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage,
+that marriages can be made without love. This is a process of thought
+resembling the conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea
+with some defect, since it is possible in any event that it will be
+damaged. They speak of the impurity of the senses, of the advantages of
+a marriage based on friendship and reason, of the calming power of duty.
+All of these are chilly processes of reason by which souls, filled with
+the warmth of life, are killed. Daughters must be helped by their
+mothers, wisely and delicately, in order to be protected from hasty
+acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when their feelings
+themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls and their
+nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from
+other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions
+alone, will there be a great transformation of present ethical
+standards. Men think that they can do with marriage what they will; that
+they can enter upon it with any kind of motive; they think that they
+must marry from feelings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to
+atone for some fault; that they have the right to enter upon a marriage
+without love because they long for home life. While these things are
+regarded as legitimate, men stand on the same ethical level as the
+person who commits murder because he has first stolen, or has stolen
+because he was hungry. The great crime against the holiness of
+generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most
+sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences
+order the destiny of a new generation.
+
+While children continue to be born in the cold atmosphere of duty, or in
+the stormy atmosphere of discord, while people continue to regard such
+marriages as moral, while people can transmit to their children all
+kinds of intellectual mutilation and bodily unsoundness, and their
+parents continue to be called honorable, so long will the world be
+without the slightest conception of that morality which will mould the
+new mankind.
+
+This morality has still more exalted precepts. To-day it seldom happens
+that a young girl enters marriage in ignorance, but in my generation I
+know cases where the ignorance of the bride resulted in insanity. In
+another case this ignorance led to thoughts of suicide; in a third, the
+child was regarded with coldness by its mother; in the fourth, the child
+had abnormal psychic qualities. Still it is not sufficient for the ideal
+beauty of marriage and the harmony of the child that the woman knows in
+general what is before her. A young man said once to me that most
+marriages are spoilt at the very beginning, because the man brings with
+him the point of view and the habits of those degraded women, from whom
+he has received his initiation into love; frequently he annihilates
+forever the tenderest element in his relation to his wife. He damages
+the most beautiful factor in their mutual feelings. Man must learn to
+have reverence and patience, and I know men who have shown these
+characteristics really because they saw that their wives gave, as is not
+unfrequently the case, their souls and their hearts before their senses
+were awakened. Only the constant close association taught them to desire
+a completed marriage. A child should receive life only through this
+common impulse. Many children are born, as it is, in legalised
+prostitution, in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in the consciences
+of many women and men, the slightest shadow of religious reverence, of
+æsthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of existence. And yet we
+continue in the name of morality to veil for youth the nakedness of
+nature and we neglect to inspire their feeling of devotion towards their
+own being as the shrine in which the mystery of life must some day be
+fulfilled.
+
+In this mystery there are still hidden fields only penetrated by the
+intuition. Here and there a profound poet has surmised the innumerable
+affinities or repulsions which under changing spiritual and material
+dispositions with altering opinions, condition the life of love in
+modern human beings, the mystic influences which sometimes forever,
+sometimes partially, can change the deepest feeling. All these mystic
+influences, the tender woof of all these fine threads, will then be a
+part of the living fabric of the child. These secret processes explain
+the great differences between children of the same parents,--children
+who externally are born and brought up in quite similar conditions.
+
+In all these promptings of instinct, in all these categorical
+imperatives of the nerves and the blood, human beings must be at the
+same time obedient listeners and strict masters. On this depends the
+future happiness of love, and with it a happier future race.
+
+The people of to-day live under inherited morals and newly acquired
+transgressions of morality. Both must be conquered before soul and sense
+in love can become inseparable, or in other words, before this unity is
+recognised as the only possible moral basis of the relation between man
+and woman.
+
+Talented men, as well as one-sided advocates of women's rights, think
+that the development will take quite a different course, after the low
+impulse which is at the basis of love has been laid bare and
+scientifically analysed. They say that the superior person will satisfy
+the impulse shamelessly and animally, without any emotional decoration;
+or he will isolate himself from its influence and devote to more noble
+purposes that vital power, that emotional capacity, which is now
+consumed by love.
+
+Nothing impossible is to be found in this point of view. I have shown
+more than once that woman by her maternal functions, uses up so much
+physical and psychical energy, that in the sphere of intellectual
+production she must remain of less significance. What I at an earlier
+period assumed intuitively, has been substantiated since then by a
+specialist. A Finnish doctor has shown how the vital power of lower
+organisms, is concentrated in sexual production. But the higher man
+goes, so much more power is made free. This power which is not consumed
+in the production of new generations, can serve intellectual production.
+Each of the two different productive expressions of human vital action
+must to a certain extent limit the development of the power of the
+other, and restrict its capacity of work. The same writer contends that
+this is the natural cause of the more limited fertility of civilised
+man, and will be, according to the pessimists named above, the decisive
+factor in the prophesied downfall of love.
+
+According to my conception of the word, it is love on the contrary,
+which will win the victory by the relative weakening of impulse, and by
+scientific analysis of the same. Men will no longer mistake impulse for
+love. Of course this impulse is always present in love, but in the same
+way in which the sculpture of the cave man is present in the work of
+Michael Angelo. Man will then, with all the powers of his being, be able
+to love, when love, according to the happy expression of Thoreau, is not
+a glow, but a light. Then he will see for the first time, what wealth
+life can have through love, when love becomes a happiness worthy of man
+because it becomes an æsthetic creation, a religious worship; when the
+completed unity of those who love is expressed in a new being,--a being
+that will some day be really grateful for the life it has received.
+Where the amelioration of the human race is concerned, the
+transformation of customs and feelings is always the essential thing.
+Influence of legislation in comparison with it is ever slight. But as
+has been said before, legislation has its role to play. Especially
+where there are diseases which can certainly be transmitted, society
+must interfere to restrict marriage. In Germany and America a good
+proposal has been made, for the period of transition in this direction.
+It is suggested that the law shall require as an obligatory condition
+for marriage, a certificate of a medical witness with complete data as
+to the health of both parties. Those who contract marriage will continue
+to have their freedom of choice but at least they would not enter
+ignorantly upon marriage as they do now, and expose themselves and their
+children to disastrous consequences. It appears to me to be at least as
+important for society to have a medical certificate as to capacity for
+marriage, as it is for military service. In the one case, we deal with
+giving life, in the other with taking it away. And although the latter
+has certainly been, up till now, regarded as a more serious occasion
+than the former, still an awakening social conscience should demand
+progress in this direction. It is conceivable that from this beginning
+new customs will develop; further legislation may be dispensed with;
+human beings will agree to sacrifice the most dangerous of all
+liberties, giving life to a defective offspring, while prohibition of
+marriage now would not hinder parenthood. For the great mass might
+continue, outside of marriage, to rob children of the possibilities of
+health and happiness, by burdening them with inherited diseases or bad
+tendencies.
+
+Nietzsche, who knew little of love because he knew nothing of woman, and
+who therefore on this subject says little worthy of attention, has still
+spoken more profoundly on the subject of parenthood than any
+contemporary writer. He saw what impurity, what poverty are concealed
+under the name of marriage. He saw how meretricious, how ignorant
+education is. In his writings are to be found prophetical and poetical
+words describing the end aimed at in parenthood, and showing what true
+parenthood should be.
+
+
+     I will that thy victory and thy emancipation shall yearn for a
+     child. Living memorials shalt thou build for thy victory, and for
+     thy emancipation.
+
+     Thou must build upward to a height beyond thyself. But first I
+     would have thee thyself built with a square foundation, body and
+     soul.
+
+     See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only.
+
+     Let a true marriage help thee to this end.
+
+     A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with
+     initiative like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle
+     shouldst thou create.
+
+     Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the
+     one,--the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence
+     for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for
+     those whose wills are united in this one act of will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK
+
+
+There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism
+between theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in
+questions concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement
+are in many cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against
+the idea that they could have any share in the sort of emancipation of
+personality that includes freedom for all the powers and activities of
+the personality. Individualism, and the assertion of self are for them
+degrading words with a sinful significance. That the emancipation of
+women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth
+century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that
+history has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Freedom for the powers and
+the personality of woman have never appeared to them except as an ideal
+struggle for justice, as a noble victory to be won. In its deepest
+meaning this is as true of every other effort at self-affirmation, the
+end of which is the recognition of the right of human personality to the
+full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom, where
+responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such
+affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls
+into an unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
+
+This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the
+course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in
+terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real
+emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers
+of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a
+question, a social institution with officers, a church system with
+dogmas. Certainly we still hear in books and speeches that the woman
+question is being discussed and urged, in its relation to the happiness
+and development of the whole of humanity. But in reality the woman
+question, since it became a fact, a cause with an end of its own, since
+its champions have lost more and more their appreciation of its
+connection with other great questions of the day, is tending to
+increase the civil rights and the fields of woman's labour. In both
+cases people really have the women of the upper classes in view. This
+has been the end, and it is thoroughly justified and justifiable. But,
+in striving for this end, those who are aiming at it have come more and
+more into opposition to the first and highest of all rights, the rights
+of the individual woman to think her own thoughts, to go her own ways,
+even when these thoughts and these ways follow other courses than those
+of the advocates of woman's rights. While this group is, on one hand,
+very far from conceding to the individual woman the freedom which
+belongs to her, it is, on the other hand, blind to the results of the
+self-assertion of the whole female sex. In taking up work more and more
+external in character, they are blind to the profound and revolutionary
+effects of this movement, on the conditions of labour in the present
+day, on the existence of man and the family, on society as a whole.
+
+Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman,
+turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were
+occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was
+employed,--these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the
+woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of
+feminine capacities, nature, and environment.
+
+The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had
+become a butcher, "Go thou and do likewise," and an American young lady
+working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic
+phenomena.
+
+The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which
+enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a
+business, and dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating
+manifoldness of life, and has become an egoistic self-concentrated
+campaign. On this account I, and many others of my generation, with many
+more of the younger generation, stand outside of the movement, although
+we actively wished, and still wish, for the freedom of woman. The
+champions of woman's rights, like the champions of other movements for
+rights, illustrate the truth of the old Swedish saying, that "what we
+are pursuing is really only a runaway horse attached to our waggon." How
+blindly the fanatics of woman's rights have rushed by the other needs of
+the time can be best measured by considering their attitude towards the
+greatest question of the day--I mean the social question.
+
+The old advocates of woman's rights maintain that the adult woman must
+have the same right as the adult man to "protect" herself, and they ask
+why the woman is hindered from working because she is married, or
+because she has children. Protective legislation drives woman from the
+factories and workshops; and this legislation is very far, they tell us,
+from meriting the support of women. Women, on the contrary, they say,
+should demand the same protective legislation for women as for men. They
+ask for technical instruction and an extended field of work for women.
+
+This whole argument is quite logical from the point of view that
+limitation of woman's labour is opposed to one of the foremost
+principles of our time,--the self-determination of the individual. This
+implies the right of the adult woman, as well as the adult man, to
+choose her own work. Privileges on the ground of sex only hinder the
+woman from being put on an equality with man before the law.
+
+But all these arguments are based on the sophistical notion which
+perverts the whole feminist movement. The idea is to free woman from the
+limitations of nature. It involves, too, the other sophistical notion
+with which capitalistic society meets every demand of protective
+legislation for men, women, or children. Such legislation is said to be
+an interference with the individual's right of choice.
+
+Every human being who is socially alive is aware that this right to
+control one's life is the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a
+society built up on a capitalistic basis. It is doubly empty where woman
+is concerned. I have never heard a woman desire that woman should fulfil
+military duties as an equivalent for having civil rights like man. But
+this would be the consequence of the argument that woman should have no
+privileges on the ground of her sex. The greatest privilege that can be
+thought of in modern society is to be spared the discomforts and loss of
+time that come from military training, to be exempt from the dangers and
+the terrors of war. That women are not absolutely incapable of service
+in warfare, women have shown on many occasions, especially in the Boer
+War. So when the advocates of women's rights hesitate before this
+extreme consequence of their principle, and introduce the functions of
+motherhood as a cogent ground for the privilege of being freed from
+military service in time of war (even if women at some time should
+receive the same civil rights now enjoyed by man), they are in the
+highest degree illogical. Other women with more logic declare that on
+another battle-field, a still more destructive one, that of the factory
+system, the same maternal functions require certain privileges for
+woman, and these same functions must result in subjecting her to certain
+limitations of her individual right to control her life. That is, she
+cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by nature, without interfering with
+the rights of another, the potential child.
+
+It lies in the individual sphere of woman's choice as of man's choice
+not to choose marriage, or to desire it without parenthood; and for
+exemption from the latter, real altruistic as well as real egoistic
+reasons can be urged. It lies in the individual choice of the woman, as
+well as of the man, to isolate herself from what may be regarded as an
+obstacle to her individual development, or to her freedom of movement.
+She can do without love or motherhood, if the one or both of these are
+regarded from this point of view. Woman has the full right to allow
+herself to be turned into a third sex, the sex of the working bees, or
+the sexless ant, provided she finds in this her highest happiness.
+
+A good while ago I was ingenuous enough to maintain that motherhood was
+the central factor of existence for most women. In the discussion of
+this question I considered several facts: woman's work imposed by
+necessity, woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom of her power,
+woman's intellectual life modified by many other influences of
+contemporary thought,--all these have forced the maternal instinct into
+the background for the time being. Here was a danger which, it seemed,
+was not too late to expose. There are women in whom the feeling of love
+is really and absolutely stunted; there are others who do not find in
+modern man the soulful and profound harmony in love that they quite
+rightly demand; there are others, more numerous, who wish for love but
+do not wish for motherhood. They absolutely fear it. The famous German
+authoress Gabrielle Reuter has spoken of this fear, this alarm of
+motherhood continually vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude of
+self-defence,--a fear which to-day has taken possession of so many
+strenuous and creative women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so
+strong, so dominant in them that one might almost believe it a dark
+perverse instinct, which, like all unnatural instincts, has been
+conceived and born through cruel necessities, and through these
+necessities has become overmastering. It is as if a secret voice in the
+depths of their nature was telling these women that, by paying their
+tribute to their sex, they would lose that power, brilliancy, and
+sharpness of intellect by which they have elevated themselves above
+their sex; and perhaps certain kinds of women are right in having this
+fear.
+
+I am convinced, just as the German writer is, that every actual
+phenomenon of disease and of health alike is a necessary result from
+given causes; and I am more convinced than the advocates of women's
+rights ever were, that it is in the sphere of human freedom to choose
+one's own type of development, happiness, or ruin. I am not inclined to
+say anything further to the women who do not desire motherhood.
+
+It would be very disastrous if these women, who have never been moved by
+tenderness when they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who have
+never longed to surrender themselves entirely to another being, were to
+become mothers. Their children would be more unfortunate than they
+themselves.
+
+Many women like these are to be found to-day, and if things remain as
+they are, they are bound to increase in numbers. In some of them,
+however, the maternal instinct is not dead, but only dormant. Modern
+women with their capacity for psychic analysis, with their physical and
+psychical refinement, are often repelled by the crudeness, the
+ignorance, or the importunities of man's nature. The whole factor of
+love in the being of these women is shrivelled up as a bud that has
+never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a woman friend,
+they find an expression for that sacrifice whose real aim they deny or
+overlook, a something which ends often by avenging itself in a tragic
+way.
+
+I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire
+motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the
+unborn generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute
+selfishness. This selfishness is often disguised under a great impulse,
+an impulse which, like that of the preservation of the species, masters
+existence. I mean the impulse of self-protection. But it is just this
+that should make the "obligatory" egoism of the modern working woman
+appear so terrible to those who are busied with the emancipation of
+woman.
+
+To talk of the freedom of woman, of her individual right to control her
+actions, when she works like a beast of burden to reach a minimum of
+existence, to keep from dying of starvation, to talk of the freedom of
+women where conditions are such that the free choice of work, for man as
+well as for woman, is an empty phrase--to put it mildly, it is
+senseless. I will throw some light on the results of freedom by the
+following illustration:
+
+When women in England worked in white lead factories, seventy-seven
+women were examined in one factory. It appeared in the time covered by
+the investigation that there were among this number ninety miscarriages,
+twenty-seven cases of still-born children; beside, forty young children
+died of convulsions produced by the poisoning of their mothers. The
+effects of this occupation were most harmful in the case of women from
+eighteen to twenty-three years of age. Lameness, blindness, and other
+infirmities resulted from this kind of work.
+
+An English doctor has shown from exact investigations conducted during
+a number of years, that the enormous mortality among young children in
+factory districts arises chiefly because the child is deprived of a
+mother's care a few weeks after birth. A child needs its mother's milk
+at least six months, and the mother's milk cannot be substituted by
+artificial means, least of all when the substitutes are used with
+carelessness. In certain textile factory districts, in Nottingham, for
+example, where lace is produced, and where people have complained of the
+law limiting women's work, out of each thousand children, two hundred
+die annually. Mortality in factory districts is four to five times
+greater than in country districts; and yet the death of children is,
+relatively speaking, a lesser evil. More unfortunate still is it that
+those who survive always suffer partial weakness from the lack of a
+mother's care at a tender age.
+
+In Silesia, where children and quite young girls are employed in the
+glass industry, the work has so distorted their bodily structure that
+when they bear children, their sufferings are intense. Such unique
+material do they offer for the study of obstetrics, that doctors make
+pilgrimages to Silesia to learn from their cases.
+
+Before women have reached maturity, when they can, according to the
+advocates of women's rights, protect themselves, they are ruined
+physically. If it is said that the facts mentioned above belong to the
+question of the protection of children, not to that of the protection of
+women, the answer lies close at hand. The physical and moral interest of
+children and of women are so mutually related, that they cannot be
+separated. Crippled women have children who are stunted at the time of
+their birth. The burden of toil they take up with weakened power of
+resistance and they transmit this weakness to their offspring. Cause and
+effect are so intimately associated here, that they cannot be accurately
+apportioned between the work of women and the work of children.
+
+Even the advocates of women's rights must, allow that the limit of their
+claims to right is to be found where the right of another begins. They
+cannot suppose that the individual right of the woman to control her
+life should go so far that a woman could take a piece of a neighbour's
+property to lay out a garden, or use for an industrial scheme a part of
+the water power belonging to some one else.
+
+Can they not see that woman's individual freedom is limited by the
+rights of another, by the rights of the potential child? The potential
+child has its own proper rights, its own vital power. This property, the
+woman has not the right to encroach upon in advance.
+
+A woman, who from one motive or another, great or small, permanently
+keeps outside of the marriage relation, has complete right to ruin
+herself by work, provided she does not, as a result of so doing, become
+a burden to others through incapacity.
+
+But the woman who looks forward to motherhood as a possibility for
+herself, or the woman who is expecting to become a mother, should not,
+through an unlimited amount of voluntary work or of work forced upon her
+contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for life and work of an
+unborn generation, in such a way that she will bring into the world
+weak, invalid, or physically incapable children, who will later on be
+neglected.
+
+It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates of women's rights that their
+talk about the individual freedom of the woman to control her career,
+their contention that no limitation need restrict woman's power of
+deciding her own vocation, because they are married or are mothers,
+mean the most crying injury, not only to children, but to women
+themselves. For the demand of equality, where nature has made
+inequality, brings about the injury of the weaker factor. Equality is
+not justice. Often it is just the opposite, the most absolute injustice.
+
+The strongest reasoning will not convince those advocates of women's
+rights who discuss woman's labour from the old-fashioned level of
+individualism, unaffected by the social feeling of solidarity, which is
+the solution offered by our age. But fortunately protective legislation
+does not depend on the women who advocate the rights of women. The
+workingmen's movement, aided by women and men of all classes who are
+active in it, will carry through this legislation. The movement for the
+normal working day is steadily gaining ground.
+
+Experience has shown that, because of the greater intensity of the work
+done, just as much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a longer time.
+The first concern has been the work of children and of younger adults.
+The effect of factory life on the health of women themselves, as well as
+on their children, has excited general attention. In England first,
+then in other European countries, it has become recognised as necessary
+that a normal period of work should be laid down for women as well. The
+programme was and continues to be threefold:--a maximum working time for
+women's work; limitation, or, better still, the cessation of night work
+on the part of women; the prevention, too, of the work of women in mines
+and in certain other industries dangerous to health; finally the
+protection of women who are about to become mothers. In most European
+countries there is now a maximum working time fixed at eight to eleven
+hours. Night work, work in mines, and extra work, is either forbidden or
+considerably limited, and a rest period of three to eight weeks is
+established for women at childbirth.
+
+From all points of view, an eight-hour working day should be the highest
+limit for woman's work. There are more reasons for it in her case than
+for man's work. The eight-hour day means not only for the woman as for
+the man the possibility of enjoying her life in permanent health; it
+secures time for improving recreation. For the married woman it is an
+indispensable requirement. Without it her home cannot be kept in order
+and comfort, her children cannot be physically cared for; without it
+she is not able to co-operate in their education. The normal working day
+is, therefore, more necessary for the woman than for the man, because on
+her, rather than on him, comes the burden of household work. The dangers
+of night work, as of work in mines, are from the standpoint of health
+and morality so plain, that no further reason need be urged to defend
+protective legislation in this case.
+
+But not only the theoretical principles of women's rights are urged
+against this legislation. Socialists as well as the advocates of women's
+rights are responsible for different objections of a more solid
+character. It is urged that legislation will increase the number of
+unemployed women who, in order to live, will be forced into
+prostitution, but it is forgotten that the same result comes from low
+wages in many occupations, and that these low wages are caused by an
+over-supply of working women. It is said, also, that if protective
+legislation hinders or prevents women from working, they will not be
+able to care for their children and the children will be employed in the
+factory in their stead. The way out of the last difficulty is absolutely
+plain: the complete prohibition of all work by children under fifteen
+years of age.
+
+It is urged also that if women are hindered by legislation from
+fulfilling the demands of their occupation, the result will be, not that
+they are protected in their occupation, but that the occupation is
+protected against them. The remedy in this case is certainly difficult,
+but not impossible to find. Let only the tenth part of the energy now
+used in agitation for the free right of women to labour be employed in
+preparing women for such labour as they are suited to undertake. But
+even when this cannot be done protective legislation carries with it its
+own corrective. It is always urged that the occupation will be destroyed
+by protective legislation. Then new methods and new machines will be
+invented to replace cheap labour power. Those who are protected often
+themselves complain that they suffer economically under protective
+legislation, but a long experience will show them how, through the
+reciprocal effects of all factors in production, the temporary failures
+will be balanced. A potent remedy for this effect of protective
+legislation may be looked for in the assertion, found in the programmes
+of all labour parties, of the right of the unemployed to have work, and
+a fixed minimum wage. These demands along with that for a normal working
+day, in which is included rest at night and rest on Sunday, and other
+measures for the protection of workingmen against accident and old age,
+are the chief methods by which the labour question, both for men and
+women, will be solved. Until these aims are realised Ruskin's judgment
+on modern industrialism which kills the real humanity in man holds good
+both for men and for women. We make, he says, everything except real
+men; we bleach cotton; we harden and improve steel; we refine sugar; we
+make porcelain and print books; but to refine a single living soul, to
+reform it, to improve it never enters into our reckoning of profit.
+
+The women of the working classes must continue to endure the suffering,
+to bear the dangers, to subject themselves to the forces which
+solidarity in this great struggle implies. Only under these conditions
+can men as well as women elevate themselves, partly by their own
+combination, partly by the extension of the principle, more and more
+coming to be recognised, that society, through its legislation, can
+determine the conditions under which its members work. So will be
+produced conditions of life and of work worthy of mankind,--a
+healthier, stronger, and more beautiful race. In this ever continuing
+progress every part is related to every other part.
+
+Unorganised, ordinary and therefore badly paid work, done by woman,
+diminishes the wages of man and his opportunity of work. Work in a
+factory unfits the woman for the conduct of the household, for her
+duties as a mother. In the turmoil, heat, and rush of the factory her
+nerves are destroyed and with them her finer emotions. The woman loses
+not only the right hand, but also the right heart for family life. Badly
+conditioned women make marriage more difficult for the man; through
+celibacy, his mortality is increased. Low wages, or times of lack of
+employment, cause bad dwellings, bad clothes, and bad nourishment. The
+tortured or ill-conditioned woman is not able to prepare anything good
+with the small amount of money which the man may earn. From all of this
+come intemperance and disease. Through these causes, combined with those
+already noted, the population of factory districts degenerates, in
+republican Switzerland, not less than in absolutistic Russia.
+
+It is true that such limitations of work in many cases are felt, as
+well by the single woman as by the family. The restriction of child
+labour may bring immediate discomfort. But all this is a passing evil.
+It can be corrected, as soon as it is clearly seen in what direction the
+advance along all the line is being made. This kind of progress moves in
+zigzag fashion. What decides whether temporary limitation of freedom
+makes for progress or not is whether one finds, in turning from the
+individual, or small groups, to the great whole, that the last is
+gaining, that in the future, freedom and happiness for all will be
+increased by this temporary limitation of freedom.
+
+In other relations of life it is a just law that he who goes into a game
+must abide by its rules. But this rule cannot be applied to that very
+cruel game which we call life. We do not go into it of our own will.
+Children have the right not to be obliged to suffer for the mistakes and
+errors of their parents. How this suffering can be best avoided in case
+of an inharmonious marriage must be decided by the different
+individuals, as a question belonging to them alone. As I have already
+shown, change of custom in relation to the time, age, and motives for
+marriage is the surest protection for the children, a protection that
+will gradually be extended. Under a serious conviction of woman's duty
+as a member of her sex, it will be regarded as a crime for a young wife
+voluntarily to ill-treat her person, either by excessive study, or
+excessive attention to sports, by tight-lacing, or consumption of
+sweets, by smoking or the use of stimulants, by sitting up at night,
+excessive work, or by all the thousand other ways by which these
+attractive simpletons sin against nature, until nature finally loses all
+patience with them.
+
+It must be demanded of the laws of society that they hinder involuntary
+crimes of unprotected women against their feminine nature.
+
+This is the great work of woman's emancipation; everything else compared
+with it is non-essential. Through their failure to see this the present
+representatives of women's rights are working against progress, though
+they themselves apply the word reactionary to all who assert that the
+only way by which the woman question as a whole can be solved is through
+the social revolution. In this revolution protective legislation is an
+important factor.
+
+According to my method of thinking, and that of many others, not woman
+but the mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so
+precious that society advances its own highest well-being when it
+protects the functions of the mother. These functions are not limited to
+birth nor to the nourishment of the child; but they go on during the
+whole time of its training. I believe that in the new society where all
+women and men alike will be compelled to work (not children, not
+invalids, and not the aged) people will regard the maternal function as
+so important for the whole social order, that every mother under fixed
+conditions, subject to certain control, during a certain period, and for
+a certain number of children, will obtain from society an allowance for
+education. She will receive this during the time in which her children
+require all her care, while she herself is freed from work outside the
+home. Naturally this does not exclude the case of mothers who from one
+or another reason cannot devote themselves to the care and training of
+their children; they can by their own productive work secure a
+substitute. But for the majority of women, the proposal made above would
+undoubtedly be the real solution of many problems which now seem
+insoluble. I do not believe that social development will maintain the
+old ideal of the father as the one who takes care of the family. I
+hope, rather, that the new conception of having every individual look
+after himself will gain more ground. The father will then be, in the
+real sense of the word, the educator, when the care for the maintenance
+of the family does not press him down to the ground. A woman will then,
+as mother of the family, not be in dependence on the man,--a position
+she feels as humiliating, if as a girl she earned her own living. People
+are bound to return to this new form of matriarchy, when they begin to
+consider care of the new generation, as the great business the mother
+takes over for society. During its progress society must guarantee her
+existence. In many cases, the answer of the married woman who works
+outside the home would be as follows: That her happiness would consist
+in quietly looking after her children, and in being able to keep house,
+but that she must have an income that would make her independent of her
+husband. A Swedish evening paper, the special organ of the feminist
+movement, two years ago started an investigation on the productive work
+of married women. The answers, contrary to the expectations of the
+paper, were nearly unanimous in showing what dangers for children, and
+what interference with household comfort, were caused by the woman
+working outside the home. An impartial investigation of the causes of
+the increasing brutality of the young would show certainly that the
+rapid increase in crime in several countries among the young is caused
+partly by their prematurely taking up productive work, and partly by
+early lack of home life, the result of the mother working outside the
+home.
+
+If the world is agreed that children must still continue to be born and
+that a home furnishes generally the best means for training them during
+the first years of their life, the present consequences of woman's work
+done outside the home must cause pessimism; such work must be stopped.
+After we have thought over the matter, it is plain that nothing is now
+more needed than such plans of social order, such programmes of
+education, as will give the mother back to her children and to her home.
+
+Everything that philanthropy now does to heal the injurious and
+disintegrating effects of the capitalistic industrial system is on the
+whole wasted power. Children's crèches, kindergartens, providing meals
+for children, hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all their noble
+efforts replace a hundredth part of the life energy, taken directly or
+indirectly from the new generation by women working outside the home.
+
+There are some people who expect the problem of domestic life to be
+solved by collective institutions which will take care of the children,
+and give them meals. Just as brewing, baking, slaughtering, making
+candles and clothes, have more and more ceased to be done in the home,
+much of the work which now absorbs the greatest part of household
+activity, cooking, washing, mending and cleaning clothes, will, I firmly
+believe, finally be done by collective effort, by the help of
+electricity and machines. But I hope the tendency of man towards
+individualisation will overcome the tendency towards impersonal, uniform
+application of power _en masse_, in everything by which the innermost
+relations of life and private habits are deeply affected. A strong
+family life will, I hope, be regarded as the basis for true happiness
+and for the development of personality. When women are free from the
+barbarous relics of present methods of housekeeping,--the market basket,
+the kitchen utensils, the scrubbing brush gone from every house,
+electricity everywhere spreading warmth and life,--they will still be
+forced to do a certain amount of work. This cannot be avoided even by
+the help of the most perfect apparatus and by co-operative methods,
+provided the house is not to be replaced by the barrack. And since the
+custom of keeping servants will soon cease because, probably, there will
+be no servants to keep, all women will be forced to do housework, or
+find the remedy already discovered in America where bureaus supply
+domestic help for a fixed time for a fixed price. In London, too, there
+is at present a guild for general houseworkers who are trained for
+occupation and work under regularly established conditions. In the
+country, not only wives but daughters will be needed for agricultural
+labour, when there are no more hired labourers to be had. This will be a
+natural corrective against that pressure towards outside fields of
+labour, that has taken the daughters in multitudes away from home, and
+has crowded and overflowed the cities with them.
+
+Finally if we weigh the economic loss occasioned by the fact that women
+after five or ten years' preparation have to give up work or study as a
+result of marriage, it is easy to see that the modern work of women has
+had results which must soon lead to earnest thought, in balancing up the
+accounts for or against the system. From the point of view of the woman
+herself, from the children's point of view, from the man's point of
+view, and finally, from the productive point of view, it has become
+pretty plain that society must either change the conditions of woman's
+labour or see a progressive disintegration in home life. Society must
+either transform the conditions of life and work, or it will witness the
+degeneration of the sexes.
+
+All philanthropy--no age has seen more of it than our own--is only a
+savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense
+offering makes the air more endurable for passers-by, but it does not
+hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.
+
+Selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation, will perhaps end by
+forcing the leaders of society to direct their actions from the social
+point of view. Then the woman question will become a question of
+humanity; then will its champions perhaps come to see that there can be
+no enduring good for the woman, if she works under conditions injurious
+to men and to children. It will be seen that the old axiom can be justly
+applied to the demands made in the name of woman's individuality;
+supreme right becomes supreme injustice. Justice is not to be reached
+by having the woman work under conditions which ruin both her and the
+whole generation physically. In other respects she must be able to use
+her free choice, and be educated enough to make good use of it. Justice
+consists in protecting innumerable women, who are not able as yet to
+protect themselves, against the abuses of which capital is guilty in
+employing their labour power.
+
+It is an instructive feature in the history of class conflict, and of
+the movement for women's progress, that as women began by driving men
+out of certain fields of labour, so now unmarried women try to force
+married women from the labour market. In America, where everything goes
+at full speed, an association has been founded among unmarried women
+with this intention. These and similar phenomena belong to the system of
+free competition, the creation of the "leading thought of our time, the
+right of the individual to determine his own vocation." Perhaps when the
+war of women against women becomes the rule, the women's rights women
+will see that the problem of woman's work is more complicated than they
+imagine. They have continued to look at it till now only from the point
+of view of a woman's right to take care of herself. Perhaps they will
+then understand that individualism, apart from the feeling of
+solidarity, leads to social conflict, class against class, sex against
+sex, unmarried against married, young against old. So it will be seen
+that only in the transformation of the whole of society can woman attain
+her full rights without impairing, through her advance, the rights of
+others.
+
+The sooner the women's rights party understands this, the better.
+Instead of fighting protective legislation, they should advocate it;
+instead of regarding unions and strikes with disfavour, they should help
+labouring women to organise unions, and support strikes where strikes
+are justified.
+
+Our century, which has opened up to women new fields of labour, has made
+life very hard for her by forcing her in the competitive struggle. As
+wives, as married or unmarried mothers, as divorced women, as widows,
+women often not only have the burden of their own support to bear, but
+they have frequently the rôle of guardian of a family, working for an
+invalid or intemperate husband; for children, or sisters, or aged
+parents. These women, whether they belong to those who labour with the
+brain or with the hand, are worn out, partly by earning their own
+living, partly by household tasks. While the man goes from home to his
+work, refreshed by rest, the woman often goes already tired out, and she
+comes back to the house perhaps to work at night. It is as clear as day
+that by so doing she loses her bodily health and mental equanimity, both
+needed by her children. It is astonishing how many working women despite
+all this have enough energy for intellectual effort in reading and
+thinking. They soon see, women like these, that an occupation is not
+emancipation. The best that can be said is that it is only a means to
+emancipation. Those who work with their hands are not the worst off in
+this respect. Bookkeepers, telephone and telegraph operators,
+post-office employees, shop girls, waiters in public establishments, and
+servants in private houses, who must often serve the public standing,
+and who are often deprived of rest at night and on Sunday, are
+practically labour's worst slaves. Who can wonder if the possible income
+obtained by an immoral life is reckoned by the employer, when he secures
+for his establishment, at low wages, the services of attractive young
+girls? Small wonder it is that such employees, worried to death in
+shops, telephone bureaus, post and telegraph offices, should often be
+driven to hysteria, insanity, and suicide.
+
+The advocates of women's rights are not blind to all these
+incongruities. They ask equal salaries for men and women, and claim,
+often with justice, and often without, that women's work is too
+inadequately compensated. But they do not see that they have contributed
+to the evil by constantly urging women to work in all possible
+occupations, and that a low rate of wages and an overcrowding of all
+fields of labour is the result. It is far more necessary to pay
+attention to these things than to open up new fields of labour to women,
+if their vital energy is not to be dried up, if they are not to lose
+their youthful freshness and attractiveness prematurely, and their
+possibilities for development and happiness as human beings, wives, and
+mothers.
+
+A loss of freedom accomplished gradually, this is, on the whole, the sad
+result of the so-called emancipation of women in our century, if the
+subject is looked at broadly, apart from the few thousand women of the
+upper classes in good paying positions. For several decades, I have felt
+strongly against the importance given by the advocates of women's rights
+to the work of women outside of the home, for the reasons I have given
+above. I have applied to such work the objection formulated by Feuerbach
+in these words: "Mediocrity always weighs correctly, only its weight is
+false."
+
+Wherever we look, in Europe or America, we find new and injurious
+results from the new conditions, from the free activity of women's work
+through the development of industry on a large scale, through the
+transformation of home work, and the growing conviction on the part of
+women that "celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," to quote the
+words of a distinguished supporter of woman's rights.
+
+Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in these unhappy results
+through a reaction that would again rob the woman of her essential
+freedom in relation to her choice of work, and the control of her life.
+
+The line of progress is tending towards a new society, where all will be
+compelled to work and all will find work; where all will work moderately
+under healthy conditions for an adequate wage. Then neither the
+unmarried nor the married woman will lose her strength by exhausting
+work done to earn a living, or impair the powers she needs for
+motherhood. If she becomes a mother, in most cases she will really
+rejoice at the possibility offered to her by society of working for
+society, as a mother and an educator.
+
+We are yet very far from such a society, but every social regulation
+should, as we have said, be tested as to whether it brings us nearer
+this ideal or leads us farther away from it. The question should be
+asked whether the direction of thought is encouraged or restricted, that
+will in the end transform everything, the conviction I mean that
+economic production is here in the world for the sake of men, not, as
+now, men for the sake of production; that work is to be done for the
+sake of freedom, not, as now, freedom created for the sake of work.
+
+When I tried in my book called _The Misuse of the Power of Woman_ to
+urge women to test the consequences of this process, my thesis was as
+follows: In our programme of civilisation, we must start out with the
+conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman
+and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for
+society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more
+are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing
+children of the care of a mother. Or, we must begin with the assumption
+that motherhood is not essential: then everything must continue to go
+on as it is going on now, and work directed towards external spheres
+with its satisfaction in the joy of creation, of ambition, of gain, of
+enjoyment, of independence, will be more and more the end towards which
+women will arrange their plan of life. For this end they will modify
+their fundamental habits and remould their feelings. The naïve belief
+that every woman, who has the liberty to do so, is following her own
+nature, shows a complete ignorance of psychology and history. Some ideal
+considered worth striving for, the prevailing view of a period, will
+obtain supremacy over nature. This is shown best in the stunted feeling
+of motherhood peculiar to the eighteenth century, by the plain results
+of mediæval asceticism. By a new ideal innumerable women are now driven
+from a life directed inwards to a life directed outwards.
+
+I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow
+her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman. But
+the opinion held by the feminine advocates of woman's emancipation, in
+regard to the nature and the aims of the everyday woman, does violence
+to the real nature of most women. It is one of the most remarkable
+manifestations of the times that, while women preach about the rights of
+woman and her will to work and to act unrestrained by family ties, men
+like Ibsen, for example, in _When We Dead People Awake_, show that the
+real Fall of Man in life is transgression of the law of love, meaning
+that man through this transgression not only diminishes his personality,
+but lessens his creative capacity.
+
+It would appear as though men were approaching the conception of love
+once held by women, while women were beginning to regard love as a petty
+episode in life compared with what are really its true concerns, an
+episode which gives life the colour of a sensual, sentimental,
+psychological, or sportsmanlike adventure, an episode which she treats
+as a game which she can get into, and just as easily get out of. From
+this new position in which extremes meet, suffering, previously
+undreamed of, must arise. Such results coming to the emancipated woman
+will I hope reveal to her the eternal laws of her own being, laws from
+which she cannot be freed without destroying herself.
+
+I would not put the slightest hindrance, however, in the way of a single
+isolated woman pursuing her own path freely, if it leads her even to
+the most unusual forms of labour and attempts to make a living. But for
+the sake of women themselves, for the sake of children, for the sake of
+society, I wish men as well as women to think earnestly over the present
+position of things. They will see that in the near future, one of two
+things must be chosen. Either there must be such a transformation of the
+way in which modern society thinks and works that the majority of women
+will be restored to motherhood, or the disintegration of the home and
+the substitution of general institutions will inevitably result. There
+is no alternative.
+
+Undoubtedly it required the whole egoistic self-assertion of woman, all
+her efforts towards individuality, her temporary separation from home
+and from family, her independent efforts to make a living to convince
+man and society of the following truths: that woman is not solely a
+sexual being, not solely dependent on man, the home and the family, no
+matter in what form these may exist. Only in this way could woman fulfil
+her destiny as wife and mother with really free choice. Only in this way
+could she secure the right of being regarded as man's intellectual equal
+in the field of the home and the family, the recognition that in her
+way she was just as complete a being as he.
+
+But it is clear that this fragment of feminine egoism must have a
+further consequence. With the rights of sex the feeling of solidarity
+must be awakened. The woman must see that her emancipated and developed
+human personality will lead to this solidarity by the realisation of her
+especial vocation as woman. Women in parliament and in journalism, their
+representation in the local and general government, in peace congress
+and in workingmen's meetings, science and literature, all this will
+produce small results until women realise that the transformation of
+society begins with the unborn child, with the conditions for its coming
+into existence, its physical and psychical training. It must be the
+general conviction that the new instincts, the new feelings, the new
+thoughts, the new ideas, which mothers and fathers pass on into the
+flesh and blood of their children, will transform existence. When, after
+many successive generations, the new spiritual kingdom of this world has
+arisen, there will come into being these greater ideas through which
+life may be renewed.
+
+Until that time secular misdeeds, political injustice, economic
+struggles,--all these socially destructive abuses will go on from
+generation to generation. Mankind remains the same though its acts may
+take different shapes. Thinkers will always find new ideas, scholars new
+methods and systems, artists new æsthetic creations, but on the whole
+everything must remain the same. Only when woman heeds the message which
+life proclaims to her, that, through her, salvation must come--will the
+face of the earth be renewed. Oratorical talk of the high task of
+mothers and of the great profession of education are empty phrases,
+until we see that the possibility of humanity and civilisation winning
+some day the victory over savagery depends on the physiological and
+psychological transformation of man's nature. This transformation
+requires an entirely new conception of the vocation of mother, a
+tremendous effort of will, continuous inspiration. Those who believe
+they can fulfil their duties as mothers and at the same time can
+accomplish other valuable work have never made the experiment of
+education. The long continued habit of alternately caressing and
+striking one's children is not education. It needs tremendous power to
+do one's duty to a single child. This by no means signifies giving up to
+the child every hour of one's time, but it does mean that our soul is
+to be filled by the child, just as the man of science is possessed by
+his investigations and the artist by his work. The child should be in
+one's thoughts when one is sitting at home or walking along the road,
+when one is lying down or when one is standing up. This devotion, much
+more than the hours immediately given to one's children, is the
+absorbing thing; the occupation which makes an earnest mother always go
+to any external activity with divided soul and dissipated energy.
+Therefore the mother, if she gives her children the share they need, can
+devote to social activities only her occasional attention. And for the
+same reason she should be entirely free from working to earn her living
+during the most critical years of the children's training.
+
+Neither in the upper nor in the lower classes, have I ever heard of any
+mother forced to do work of this kind or one engaged in artistic
+productions through the stimulus of her talents, who was able to satisfy
+her children in the period when they were growing up.
+
+Adele Gerhard and Helen Simon under the title of _Motherhood and
+Intellectual Work_ published a very interesting investigation in which I
+found my own observations substantiated. The book showed that a mother
+who wished to train her children and at the same time engage in an
+occupation, or take part in some public activity, could give to neither
+her whole personality. The result is a mediocre education for the
+children and for herself; mediocre work done with a divided soul. This
+is allowed to be true by all of those really conscientious mothers who
+have maintained a high aim in their work and in the bringing up of their
+children. They are dilettantes in both directions; what they do is half
+done owing to the effort to unite two separate fields of work.
+
+From the point of view of women's rights, it is said, in reply to these
+opinions of mine, that motherhood can be made infinitely easier by a
+natural method of life, that work can be very well combined with it. It
+is said that children soon grow out of needing the protection of their
+mother, that the mothers can then devote themselves entirely to their
+work. They contend besides that motherhood is no unconditional
+obligation; that people are fully justified in making different
+individual arrangements; one woman wishes to become a mother, another
+not. The one gets married with the hope of becoming a mother; the other
+with the resolution of avoiding maternity. The third does not marry at
+all. Attempts to generalise on this matter in which individual freedom
+has every right to be recognised, they consider reactionary. Full
+freedom for the woman, married or unmarried, to choose her work and to
+continue it; full freedom to choose motherhood or to do without it, this
+they say is the way to free woman, this is the line of progress. Here
+woman is subject to that economic law which has made it necessary for
+her to work for her own living. Just as woman's household work has been
+superseded by factory work, so too, they say, will the maternal
+obligations of woman be fulfilled collectively, and the difficulties on
+which the so-called reactionary members of the women's rights movement
+base their arguments, will in the future only arise in exceptional
+cases. As regards these arguments, I have already shown that I recognise
+fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose
+her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women
+collectively and of society collectively.
+
+From this general, not from the individual standpoint, I am trying to
+convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the
+race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her
+physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
+
+But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be
+fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is
+trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring
+up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In
+it, the completed man--the Superman--will be bathed in that sunshine
+whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EDUCATION
+
+
+Goethe showed long ago in his _Werther_ a clear understanding of the
+significance of individualistic and psychological training, an
+appreciation which will mark the century of the child. In this work he
+shows how the future power of will lies hidden in the characteristics of
+the child, and how along with every fault of the child an uncorrupted
+germ capable of producing good is enclosed. "Always," he says, "I repeat
+the golden words of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as one
+of these,' and now, good friend, those who are our equals, whom we
+should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects; they should have
+no will of their own; do we have none? Where is our prerogative? Does it
+consist in the fact that we are older and more experienced? Good God of
+Heaven! Thou seest old and young children, nothing else. And in whom
+Thou hast more joy, Thy Son announced ages ago. But people believe in
+Him and do not hear Him--that, too, is an old trouble, and they model
+their children after themselves." The same criticism might be applied to
+our present educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words
+as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed the
+new commandments in which they say they believe. They continue to
+educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in
+original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed.
+The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above,
+_i.e._, that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ
+of virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in education the old
+rule of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil, instead of the
+new method, the system of allowing nature quietly and slowly to help
+itself, taking care only that the surrounding conditions help the work
+of nature. This is education.
+
+Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by Carlyle
+when he said that the marks of a noble and original temperament are
+wild, strong emotions, that must be controlled by a discipline as hard
+as steel. People either strive to root out passions altogether, or they
+abstain from teaching the child to get them under control.
+
+To suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with
+another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime common to those
+who announce loudly that education should only develop the real
+individual nature of the child.
+
+They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is
+justified. Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that
+evil can be changed into good.
+
+Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned
+for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the
+same time, there is the other certainty, that through progressive
+evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may
+be transformed. Only when this stage is reached will education begin to
+be a science and art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous
+effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere
+in accordance with the principle of the indestructibility of matter. We
+shall never believe that a characteristic of the soul can be destroyed.
+There are but two possibilities. Either it can be brought into
+subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane.
+
+Madame de Staël's words show much insight when she says that only the
+people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success
+in training children the first condition is to become as a child
+oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending
+baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors.
+What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the
+child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. It means to treat
+the child as really one's equal, that is, to show him the same
+consideration, the same kind confidence one shows to an adult. It means
+not to influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him to become
+but to be influenced by the impression of what the child himself is; not
+to treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with
+the seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character.
+
+Somewhere Rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature
+does not fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of
+education. What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the
+directions of nature, and recognised that the great secret of education
+lies hidden in the maxim, "do not educate"?
+
+Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day
+methods of training children. Education is determined to create a
+beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow.
+To let him move about freely in this world until he comes into contact
+with the permanent boundaries of another's right will be the end of the
+education of the future. Only then will adults really obtain a deep
+insight into the souls of children, now an almost inaccessible kingdom.
+For it is a natural instinct of self-preservation which causes the child
+to bar the educator from his innermost nature. There is the person who
+asks rude questions; for example, what is the child thinking about? a
+question which almost invariably is answered with a black or a white
+lie. The child must protect himself from an educator who would master
+his thoughts and inclinations, or rudely handle them, who without
+consideration betrays or makes ridiculous his most sacred feelings, who
+exposes faults or praises characteristics before strangers, or even uses
+an open-hearted, confidential confession as an occasion for reproof at
+another time.
+
+The statement that no human being learns to understand another, or at
+least to be patient with another, is true above all of the intimate
+relation of child and parent in which, understanding, the deepest
+characteristic of love, is almost always absent.
+
+Parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace is never
+greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace under all
+external unrest. The child has to enter into relations with his own
+infinite world, to conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams. But
+what does he experience? Obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole
+livelong day. The child is always required to leave something alone, or
+to do something different, to find something different, or want
+something different from what he does, or finds, or wants. He is always
+shunted off in another direction from that towards which his own
+character is leading him. All of this is caused by our tenderness,
+vigilance, and zeal, in directing, advising, and helping the small
+specimen of humanity to become a complete example in a model series.
+
+I have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying" because he
+wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished to drag him
+into the city. Another child of six years was disciplined because she
+had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,--a
+natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical
+examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a
+spontaneous utterance of the childish heart when a small boy, after an
+account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did
+not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he
+might be allowed to go to hell on Saturday evening to play with the bad
+little boys there.
+
+The child felt in its innermost consciousness that he had a right to be
+naughty, a fundamental right which is accorded to adults; and not only
+to be naughty, but to be naughty in peace, to be left to the dangers and
+joys of naughtiness.
+
+To call forth from this "unvirtue" the complimentary virtue is to
+overcome evil with good. Otherwise we overcome natural strength by weak
+means and obtain artificial virtues which will not stand the tests which
+life imposes.
+
+It seems simple enough when we say that we must overcome evil with good,
+but practically no process is more involved, or more tedious, than to
+find actual means to accomplish this end. It is much easier to say what
+one shall not do than what one must do to change self-will into strength
+of character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please into
+amiability, restlessness into personal initiative. It can only be
+brought about by recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic
+or perverse, is as natural and indispensable as the good, and that it
+becomes a permanent evil only through its one-sided supremacy.
+
+The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He
+forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to
+duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing
+rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in
+school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow
+the camels of grown people.
+
+The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children
+nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is
+usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of
+the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the
+education which is allowed to go on by itself. But educators who, day in
+and day out, are consciously transforming the environment and
+themselves are still a rare product. Most people live on the capital and
+interest of an education, which perhaps once made them model children,
+but has deprived them of the desire for educating themselves. Only by
+keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant
+influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a
+companion half-way good enough for one's children.
+
+To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting
+one's feet on a narrow path; it means never placing ourselves in danger
+of meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without
+words that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. It means the humble
+realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are
+infinite, while the ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does
+the educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age,
+is making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvellous
+shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each
+impression. The slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least
+act of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for
+life in the finely strung soul of the child. While on the other side
+unexpected friendliness, kind advances, just indignation, make quite as
+deep an impression on those senses which people term as soft as wax but
+treat as if they were made of cowhide.
+
+Relatively most excellent was the old education which consisted solely
+in keeping oneself whole, pure, and honourable. For it did not at least
+depreciate personality, although it did not form it. It would be well if
+but a hundredth part of the pains now taken by parents were given to
+interference with the life of the child and the rest of the ninety and
+nine employed in leading, without interference, in acting as an
+unforeseen, an invisible providence through which the child obtains
+experience, from which he may draw his own conclusions. The present
+practice is to impress one's own discoveries, opinions, and principles
+on the child by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be
+realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely
+new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the
+things with which he comes in contact. By a new soul he understands only
+a new generation of an old humanity to be treated with a fresh dose of
+the old remedy. We teach the new souls not to steal, not to lie, to
+save their clothes, to learn their lessons, to economise their money, to
+obey commands, not to contradict older people, say their prayers, to
+fight occasionally in order to be strong. But who teaches the new souls
+to choose for themselves the path they must tread? Who thinks that the
+desire for this path of their own can be so profound that a hard or even
+mild pressure towards uniformity can make the whole of childhood a
+torment.
+
+The child comes into life with the inheritance of the preceding members
+of the race; and this inheritance is modified by adaptation to the
+environment. But the child shows also individual variations from the
+type of the species, and if his own character is not to disappear during
+the process of adaptation, all self-determined development of energy
+must be aided in every way and only indirectly influenced by the
+teacher, who should understand how to combine and emphasise the results
+of this development.
+
+Interference on the part of the educator, whether by force or
+persuasion, weakens this development if it does not destroy it
+altogether.
+
+The habits of the household, and the child's habits in it must be
+absolutely fixed if they are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that
+habits are principles which have become instincts, and have passed over
+into flesh and blood. To change habits, he continues, means to attack
+life in its very essence, for life is only a web of habits.
+
+Why does everything remain essentially the same from generation to
+generation? Why do highly civilised Christian people continue to plunder
+one another and call it exchange, to murder one another _en masse_, and
+call it nationalism, to oppress one another and call it statesmanship?
+
+Because in every new generation the impulses supposed to have been
+rooted out by discipline in the child, break forth again, when the
+struggle for existence--of the individual in society, of the society in
+the life of the state--begins. These passions are not transformed by the
+prevalent education of the day, but only repressed. Practically this is
+the reason why not a single savage passion has been overcome in
+humanity. Perhaps man-eating may be mentioned as an exception. But what
+is told of European ship companies or Siberian prisoners shows that even
+this impulse, under conditions favourable to it, may be revived,
+although in the majority of people a deep physical antipathy to
+man-eating is innate. Conscious incest, despite similar deviations, must
+also be physically contrary to the majority, and in a number of women,
+modesty--the unity between body and soul in relation to love--is an
+incontestable provision of nature. So too a minority would find it
+physically impossible to murder or steal. With this list I have
+exhausted everything which mankind, since its conscious history began,
+has really so intimately acquired that the achievement is passed on in
+its flesh and blood. Only this kind of conquest can really stand up
+against temptation in every form.
+
+A deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one
+speaks of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system
+of education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
+
+While fine words are spoken about individual development, children are
+treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they
+were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents;
+and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every one
+else, people usually begin by attempting to make them respectable and
+useful members of society.
+
+But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in
+becoming a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such,
+while strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual
+human being.
+
+The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child
+by degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him
+his responsibility towards his environment. But in other respects, none
+of the individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life
+will be suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or
+others. The right balance must be kept between Spencer's definition of
+life as an adaptation to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's
+definition of it as the will to secure power.
+
+In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great rôle, but individual
+exercise of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains
+a fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors.
+
+Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about
+personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
+children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in
+their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so
+they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts
+which will have freedom when they are grown. People still hardly realise
+how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly
+repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men, the sweet
+girls, the respectable officials, and so on. And new types with higher
+ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought
+thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such
+types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up.
+
+Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. But she
+also constantly makes small deviations. In this way different species,
+even of the human race, have come into existence. But man himself does
+not yet see the significance of this natural law in his own higher
+development. He wants the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already
+stamped with approval to be reproduced by each new generation. So we get
+no new individuals, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or
+bad-tempered examples of the genus man. The still living instincts of
+the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity.
+Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to
+produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most valuable.
+The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what
+everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child
+tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard
+results in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part
+of the great mass, led by the Superman through the strength of his will,
+a will which could not have mastered strong personalities. It has been
+justly remarked that individual peoples, like the English, have attained
+the greatest political and social freedom, because the personal feeling
+of independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal form. Accordingly
+legal freedom has been constantly growing.
+
+For the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of society, it
+is essential that education shall awake the feeling of independence; it
+should invigorate and favour the disposition to deviate from the type in
+those cases where the rights of others are not affected, or where
+deviation is not simply the result of the desire to draw attention to
+oneself. The child should be given the chance to declare
+conscientiously his independence of a customary usage, of an ordinary
+feeling, for this is the foundation of the education of an individual,
+as well as the basis of a collective conscience, which is the only kind
+of conscience men now have. What does having an individual conscience
+mean? It means submitting voluntarily to an external law, attested and
+found good by my own conscience. It means unconditionally heeding the
+unwritten law, which I lay upon myself, and following this inner law
+even when I must stand alone against the whole world.
+
+It is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular one, that
+it is original natures, particularly talented beings, who are badly
+treated at home and in school. No one considers the sources of conduct
+in a child who shows fear or makes a noise, or who is absorbed in
+himself, or who has an impetuous nature. Mothers and teachers show in
+this their pitiable incapacity for the most elementary part in the art
+of education, that is, to be able to see with their own eyes, not with
+pedagogical doctrines in their head.
+
+I naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their conventional
+morality, no appreciation of the significance of the child's putting
+into exercise his own powers. Just as little is this to be expected of
+those Christian believers who think that human nature must be brought to
+repentance and humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast,
+must be tamed with the rod,--a theory which the Bible is brought to
+support.
+
+I am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and consequently
+should cease using old methods of education. This class may reply that
+the new ideas in education cannot be carried out. But the obstacle is
+simply that their new thoughts have not made them into new men; the old
+man in them has neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own
+soul, and that of the child, according to the new thoughts.
+
+Those who have "tried Spencer and failed," because Spencer's method
+demands intelligence and patience, contend that the child must be taught
+to obey, that truth lies in the old rule, "As the twig is bent the tree
+is inclined."
+
+_Bent_ is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal which
+extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience. But the new
+ideal is that man, to stand straight and upright, must not be bent at
+all, only supported, and so prevented from being deformed by weakness.
+
+One often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude desire for
+mastery still alive and breaking out when the child is obstinate. "You
+won't!" say father and mother; "I will teach you whether you have a
+will. I will soon drive self-will out of you." But nothing can be driven
+out of the child; on the other hand, much can be scourged into it which
+should be kept far away.
+
+Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as
+a pre-condition to a higher training. The child is then in such a high
+degree controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure
+is often the only language he fully understands. Consequently for some
+children discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice
+of certain habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely
+unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child can
+remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
+
+The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience
+must be absolute. If such obedience has become habitual from the
+tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child
+straight. The dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can only
+be made effective when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny
+atmosphere of home. And if people refrain from laying the foundations of
+obedience while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,
+Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the child is
+older and his caprice disagreeable.
+
+With a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently and
+immediately. The effort of training should be directed at an early
+period to arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions
+according to Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits
+will become impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.
+
+Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it
+has become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some other
+discomfort,--discomforts against which crying is the child's only
+weapon. Crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this does not
+master the will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea
+that older people strike small children, when small children cry. This
+is not an ethical idea. But when the crying child is immediately
+isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever
+annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation is the absolute
+result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for
+the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant
+or disagreeable. In both cases the child is silenced by interfering with
+his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on his
+will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will, and
+accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a base
+emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that combines it
+with one of the most important experiences of life. The one punishment
+keeps the child on the level of the animal. The other impresses upon him
+the great principle of human social life, that when our pleasure causes
+displeasure to others, other people hinder us from following our
+pleasures; or withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will.
+
+It is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to good
+behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is
+repeated, the child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn that
+whoever is disagreeable to others must remain alone. Thus a right
+application is made of a right principle. Small children, too, must
+learn not to touch what belongs to other people. If every time anything
+is touched without permission, children lose their freedom of action one
+way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free action is
+not to injure others.
+
+It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty Japanese rooms
+are ideal places in which to bring up children. Our modern crowded rooms
+are, so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. During the year
+in which the real education of the child is proceeding by touching,
+tasting, biting, feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the cry,
+"Let it alone." For the temperament of the child as well as for the
+development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery,
+adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided with
+some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of
+movement. But if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient,
+a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the
+greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which
+the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn
+that every place occupied by him has its limits.
+
+If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child should
+really dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming
+influence. When a mother strikes a child because he touches the light,
+the result is that he does this again when the mother is away. But let
+him burn himself with the light, then he is certain to leave it alone.
+In riper years when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar,
+the loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment. Most
+boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their favourite
+possession. But only the loss of it will be a real education through
+experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience which
+cannot be too strongly impressed.
+
+We hear parents who have begun with Spencer and then have taken to
+corporal punishment declare that when children are too small to repair
+the clothing which they have torn there must be some other kind of
+punishment. But at that age they should not be punished at all for such
+things. They should have such simple and strong clothes that they can
+play freely in them. Later on, when they can be really careful, the
+natural punishment would be to have the child remain at home if he is
+careless, has spotted his clothes, or torn them. He must be shown that
+he must help to put his clothes in good condition again, or that he will
+be compelled to buy what he has destroyed carelessly with money earned
+by himself. If the child is not careful, he must stay at home, when
+ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat alone if he is too late for meals.
+It may be said that there are simple means by which all the important
+habits of social life may become a second nature. But it is not possible
+in all cases to apply Spencer's method. The natural consequences
+occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes are too slow
+in their action. If it seems necessary to interfere directly, such
+action must be consistent, quick, and immutable. How is it that the
+child learns very soon that fire burns? Because fire does so always. But
+the mother who at one time strikes, at another threatens, at another
+bribes the child, first forbids and then immediately after permits some
+action; who does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience,
+but constantly gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and
+just as often in another, has not learned the effective educational
+methods of the fire.
+
+The old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to the
+character a fixed type rested on its consistent qualities. It was
+consistently strict, not as at present a lax hesitation between all
+kinds of pedagogical methods and psychological opinions, in which the
+child is thrown about here and there like a ball, in the hands of grown
+people; at one time pushed forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside,
+only to be brought back again, kissed till it is disgusted, first
+ordered about, and then coaxed. A grown man would become insane if
+joking Titans treated him for a single day as a child is treated for a
+year. A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as
+courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn
+courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to
+endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment
+him and are often the cause of sexual hyperæsthesia. The child's
+demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are
+sincere, but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special
+occasions. This is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are
+disregarded. Nor should the child be forced to express regret in begging
+pardon and the like. This is excellent training for hypocrisy. A small
+child once had been rude to his elder brother and was placed upon a
+chair to repent his fault. When the mother after a time asked if he was
+sorry, he answered, "Yes," with emphasis, but as the mother saw a
+mutinous sparkle in his eyes she felt impelled to ask, "Sorry for what?"
+and the youngster broke out, "Sorry that I did not call him a liar
+besides." The mother was wise enough on this occasion, and ever after,
+to give up insisting on repentance.
+
+Spontaneous penitence is full of significance; it is a deeply felt
+desire for pardon. But an artificial emotion is always and everywhere
+worthless. Are you not sorry? Does it make no difference to you that
+your mother is ill, your brother dead, your father away from home? Such
+expressions are often used as an appeal to the emotions of children. But
+children have a right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have
+them as undisturbed as grown people. The same holds good of their
+sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are
+constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people,
+their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But
+the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong
+to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there are few
+better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved
+unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to
+be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer
+of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and
+great,--Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child?
+If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as
+much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical
+tenderness without which a child's life is a constant torment.
+
+As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks
+of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts be provoked. Above
+all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately
+gives away. Gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital for
+work or sacrifice. In order to secure for children the pleasure of
+giving and the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments,
+as well as of replacing property of their own or of others which they
+may have destroyed, they should at an early age be accustomed to perform
+seriously certain household duties for which they receive some small
+remuneration. But small occasional services, whether volunteered or
+asked for by others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve,
+without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to
+give away something, people should not make a pretence of receiving it.
+This produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of
+being generous can be had for nothing. At every step the child should be
+allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be
+plucked from his roses. This is what is least understood in present-day
+training. Thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing. People find
+themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which stand in no relation
+with the realities of life. I mean, above all, what are still called
+means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows.
+
+Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
+means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
+have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
+through association of ideas.
+
+But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
+Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has
+been superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture,
+imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to
+the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline.
+But the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up
+as an animal. Those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of
+animals. Even animals can be trained without striking them, but they can
+only be trained by men who have become men themselves.
+
+Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the
+best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road
+as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory,
+teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practise
+fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development
+stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level
+which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the
+common inheritance of the race. If we have abandoned torture and painful
+punishments for adults, while they are retained for children, it is
+because we have not yet seen that their soul life so far as a greater
+and more subtle capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same
+progress as that of adult mankind. The numerous cases of child suicide
+in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal punishment;
+or have taken place after its administration. Both soul and body are
+equally affected by this practice. Where this is not the result, blows
+have even more dangerous consequences. They tend to dull still further
+the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice of the
+person punished. I once heard a child pointed out in a school as being
+so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a
+flogging. Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had
+made him what he was. If statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those
+who had been flogged would certainly be more numerous than those who had
+been pampered.
+
+Society has gradually given up employing retributive punishments because
+people have seen that they neither awaken the feeling of guilt, nor act
+as a deterrent, but on the contrary retribution applied by equal to
+equal brutalises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates
+the victim to exercise the same violence towards others that has been
+endured by himself. But other rules are applied to the psychological
+processes of the child. When a child strikes his small sister the mother
+strikes him and believes that he will see and understand the difference
+between the blows he gets and those he gives; that he will see that the
+one is a just punishment and the other vicious conduct. But the child is
+a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same, although
+the mother gives it a different name.
+
+Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by Comenius, who
+compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly
+tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands
+to put it into tune.
+
+These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating
+and confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable
+fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely
+related combinations.
+
+In order to give real training, the first thing after the second or
+third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow among the
+possibilities of education. It is best if parents, as soon as the child
+is born, agree never to strike him, for if they once begin with this
+convenient and easy method, they continue to use corporal discipline
+even contrary to their first intention, because they have failed while
+using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
+
+If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of
+education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's
+peace.
+
+But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human
+beings in other respects, I should like to request them to think over
+the development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and
+when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept
+in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times.
+Through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have
+been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to
+the great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard to
+awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same
+way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude
+methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must
+go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a
+noble and complete development.
+
+Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low
+stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the
+corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real
+preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator
+may be formed.
+
+Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible;
+what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of
+passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of
+development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the
+direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of
+lower capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may be
+impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising
+for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them.
+
+The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has as
+few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for
+this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece of
+stupidity. It works against the possibility of elevating the child
+beyond the level of the beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind
+flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will
+naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of
+education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies
+the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience,
+his brutality, not his intelligence.
+
+A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first
+punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse
+reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, '"Yes,
+to-night I really have something to tell God," and prayed with deep
+earnestness, "Dear God, tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me
+any more."
+
+Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than
+for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. They would then learn to
+educate with the head instead of with the hand. And as to public
+educators, the teachers, their position could be no better raised than
+by legally forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under
+penalty of final loss of position.
+
+That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue
+to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a
+very elementary conception of their work. They should constantly keep
+before them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in
+dealing with children. The most frequent as well as the most dangerous
+of the numerous mistakes made in handling children is that people do not
+remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do not
+regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past
+point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments
+and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or
+nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite
+despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of
+justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
+his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. Lacking these
+beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the crime of destroying
+the childhood of the new generation,--the only time in life in which the
+guardian of education can really be a kindly providence. So strongly do
+I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well
+as ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand of a
+human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot close my eyes
+after I have heard a child in the street threatened with corporal
+punishment.
+
+Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. As early
+as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man
+respects a word more than a blow. The exercise of physical force
+delivers the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. A child
+never believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge
+verbally, that the blows were due to love, that they were administered
+because they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that such
+a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself in a better
+way.
+
+Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal
+effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests.
+I do not now refer to the system of flogging employed by miserable
+people year in and year out at home, or, particularly in schools, that
+of beating children outrageously, or to the limits of brutality. I do
+not mean even the less brutal blows administered by undisciplined
+teachers and parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or
+fatigue or disgust,--blows which are simply the active expression of a
+tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the want of self-discipline
+and self-culture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties committed by
+monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies are stimulated by
+their disciplinary power and who use it to force their victims to
+silence, as certain criminal trials have shown.
+
+I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and teachers who,
+with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard as their duty to the
+child. These are accustomed to adduce the good effects of corporal
+discipline as a proof that it cannot be dispensed with. The child by
+being whipped is, they say, not only made good but freed from his evil
+character, and shows by his whole being that this quick and summary
+method of punishment has done more than talks, and patience, and the
+slowly working penalties of experience. Examples are adduced to prove
+that only this kind of punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the habit
+of lying and the like. Those who adopt this system do not perceive that
+they have only succeeded, through this momentarily effective means, in
+repressing the external expression of an evil will. They have not
+succeeded in transforming the will itself. It requires constant
+vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create an ever higher capacity for
+the discovery of intelligent methods. The fault that is repressed is
+certain to appear on every occasion when the child dares to show it. The
+educator who finds in corporal punishment a short way to get rid of
+trouble, leads the child a long way round, if we have the only real
+development in view, namely that which gradually strengthens the child's
+capacity for self-control.
+
+I have never heard a child over three years old threatened with corporal
+punishment without noticing that this wonderfully moral method had an
+equally bad influence on parents and children. The same can be said of
+milder kinds of folly, coaxing children by external rewards. I have seen
+some children coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. But
+in neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of will
+increased. Only when one is able to make the bath itself attractive is
+that energy of will developed that gains a victory over the feeling of
+fear or discomfort and produces a real ethical impression, viz., that
+virtue is its own reward. Wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit
+or fault by corporal punishment, a real ethical result is not reached.
+The child has only learnt to fear an unpleasant consequence, which lacks
+real connection with the thing itself, a consequence it well knows could
+have been absent. Such fear is as far removed as heaven from the
+conviction that the good is better than the bad. The child soon becomes
+convinced that the disagreeable accompaniment is no necessary result of
+the action, that by greater cleverness the punishment might have been
+avoided. Thus the physical punishment increases deception not morality.
+In the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and
+fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's
+souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. Only with the
+greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the
+superiority of the good established. The good comes to be seen as more
+productive of happiness to the individual himself and his environment.
+So the child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that
+punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the
+cause of punishment.
+
+Despite all the new talk of individuality the greatest mistake in
+training children is still that of treating the "child" as an abstract
+conception, as an inorganic or personal material to be formed and
+transformed by the hands of those who are educating him. He is beaten,
+and it is thought that the whole effect of the blow stops at the moment
+when the child is prevented from being bad. He has, it is thought, a
+powerful reminder against future bad behaviour. People do not suspect
+that this violent interference in the physical and psychical life of the
+child may have lifelong effects. As far back as forty years ago, a
+writer showed that corporal punishment had the most powerful somatic
+stimulative effects. The flagellation of the Middle Ages is known to
+have had such results; and if I could publish what I have heard from
+adults as to the effect of corporal punishment on them, or what I have
+observed in children, this alone would be decisive in doing away with
+such punishment in its crudest form. It very deeply influences the
+personal modesty of the child. This should be preserved above everything
+as the main factor in the development of the feeling of purity. The
+father who punishes his daughter in this way deserves to see her some
+day a "fallen woman." He injures her instinctive feeling of the sanctity
+of her body, an instinct which even in the case of a small child can be
+passionately profound. Only when every infringement of sanctity
+(forcible caressing is as bad as a blow) evokes an energetic,
+instinctive repulsion, is the nature of the child proud and pure.
+Children who strike back when they are punished have the most promising
+characters of all.
+
+Numerous are the cases in which bodily punishment can occasion
+irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who administers it,
+though he may triumphantly declare how the punishment in the specific
+case has helped. Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has
+injured them in one way or another, but when they take up the training
+of their own children they depend on the effect of such chastisement.
+
+What burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine fawning
+flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. It makes the lazy
+lazier, the obstinate more obstinate, the hard, harder. It strengthens
+those two emotions, the root of almost all evil in the world, hatred and
+fear. And as long as blows are made synonymous with education, both of
+these emotions will keep their mastery over men.
+
+One of the most frequent occasions for recourse to this punishment is
+obstinacy, but what is called obstinacy is only fear or incapacity. The
+child repeats a false answer, is threatened with blows, and again
+repeats it just because he is afraid not to say the right thing. He is
+struck and then answers rightly. This is a triumph of education;
+refractoriness is overcome. But what has happened? Increased fear has
+led to a strong effort of thought, to a momentary increase of
+self-control. The next day the child will very likely repeat the fault.
+Where there is real obstinacy on the part of children, I know of cases
+when corporal punishment has filled them with the lust to kill, either
+themselves or the person who strikes them. On the other hand I know of
+others, where a mother has brought an obstinate child to repentance and
+self-mastery by holding him quietly and calmly on her knees.
+
+How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how much
+daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and
+stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even where
+blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute
+straightforwardness and the downright personal courage to show oneself
+as one is. As long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no
+perfect honour will be found in children. So long as the home and the
+school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the
+child himself at the cost of humanity. The child uses on animals, on his
+young brothers and sisters, on his comrades, the methods applied to
+himself. He puts in practice the same argument, that "badness" must be
+cured with blows. Only children accustomed to be treated mildly, learn
+to see that influence can be gained without using force. To see this is
+one of man's privileges, sacrificed by man through descending to the
+methods of the brute. Only by the child seeing his teacher always and
+everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he come himself
+to despise force on all those occasions which do not involve the defence
+of a weaker person against physical superiority. The foundation of the
+desire for war is to be sought for less in the war games than in the
+teachers' rod.
+
+To defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are brought in
+evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they deserved such
+discipline in order to be made good. There is no lower example of
+hypocrisy in human nature than this. It is true the child may be sincere
+in other cases in saying that he feels that through punishment he has
+atoned for a fault which was weighing upon his conscience. But this is
+really the foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still
+continues to be preached as Christian, namely; that a fault may be
+atoned for by sufferings which are not directly connected with the
+fault. The basis of the new morality is just the opposite as I have
+already shown. It teaches that no fault can be atoned for, that no one
+can escape the results of his actions in any way.
+
+Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks he must
+most frequently punish with blows. But there is no case in which this
+method is more dangerous.
+
+When the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the well-known
+story of George Washington and the hatchet must appear in it,
+accompanied by the remark which a clever ten-year-old child added to the
+anecdote: "It is no trouble telling the truth when one has such a kind
+father."
+
+I formerly divided untruthfulness into unwilling, shameless, and
+imaginative lies. A short time ago I ran across a much better division
+of lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully conscious untruthfulness
+which must be punished, and "hot" lies; the expression of an excited
+temperament or of a vigorous fancy. I agree with the author of this
+distinction that the last should not be punished but corrected, though
+not with a pedantic rule of thumb measure, based on how much it exceeds
+or falls short of truth. It is to be cured by ridicule, a dangerous
+method of education in general, but useful when one observes that this
+type of untruthfulness threatens to develop into real untrustworthiness.
+In dealing with these faults we are very strict towards children, so
+strict that no lawyer, no politician, no journalist, no poet, could
+exercise his profession if the same standard were applied to them as to
+children.
+
+The white lie is, as a French scientist has shown, partly caused by pure
+morbidness, partly through some defect in the conception. It is due to
+an empty space, a dead point in memory, or in consciousness, that
+produces a defective idea or gives one no idea at all of what has
+happened. In the affairs of everyday life the adults are often mistaken
+as to their intentions or acts. They may have forgotten about their
+actions, and it requires a strong effort of memory to call them back
+into their minds; or they suggest to themselves that they have done, or
+not done, something. In all of these cases, if they were forced to give
+a distinct answer, they would lie. In every case of this kind, where a
+child is concerned, the lie is assumed to be a conscious one, and when
+on being submitted to a strict cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes
+confused, and blushes, it is looked upon as a proof that he knows he has
+been telling an untruth, although as a rule there has been no instance
+of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted confession from the child
+that he has lied. Yet in all these complicated psychological problems,
+corporal punishment is treated as a solution.
+
+The child who never hears lying at home, who does not see exaggerated
+weight placed on small, merely external things, who is not made cowardly
+by fear, who hears conscious lies always spoken of with contempt, will
+get out of the habit of untruthfulness simply by psychological means.
+First he will find that untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a
+repetition of it, scorn and lack of confidence. But these methods should
+not be applied to untruthfulness caused by distress or by richness of
+imagination; or to such cases as originate from the obscure mental ideas
+noted above, ideas whose connection with one another the child cannot
+make clear to himself. The cold untruth on the other hand, must be
+punished; first by going over it with the child, then letting him
+experience its effect in lack of confidence, which will only be restored
+when the child shows decided improvement in this regard. It is of the
+greatest importance to show children full and unlimited confidence, even
+though one quietly maintains an attitude of alert watchfulness; for
+continuous and undeserved mistrust is just as demoralising as blind and
+easy confidence.
+
+No one who has been beaten for lying learns by it to love truth. The
+accuracy of this principle is illustrated by adults who despise corporal
+punishment in their childhood yet continue to tell untruths by word and
+deed. Fear may keep the child from technical untruth, but fear also
+produces untrustworthiness. Those who have been beaten in childhood for
+lying have often suffered a serious injury immeasurably greater than the
+direct lie. The truest men I ever knew lie voluntarily and
+involuntarily; while others who might never be caught in a lie are
+thoroughly false.
+
+This corruption of personality begins frequently at the tenderest age
+under the influence of early training. Children are given untrue
+motives, half-true information; are threatened, admonished. The child's
+will, thought, and feeling are oppressed; against this treatment
+dishonesty is the readiest method of defence. In this way educators who
+make truth their highest aim, make children untruthful. I watched a
+child who was severely punished for denying something he had
+unconsciously done, and noted how under the influence of this senseless
+punishment he developed extreme dissimulation.
+
+Truthfulness requires above everything unbroken determination; and many
+nervous little liars need nourishing food and life in the open air, not
+blows. A great artist, one of the few who live wholly according to the
+modern principles of life, said to me on one occasion: "My son does not
+know what a lie is, nor what a blow is. His step-brother, on the other
+hand, lied when he came into our house; but lying did not work in the
+atmosphere of calm and freedom. After a year the habit disappeared by
+itself, only because it always met with deep astonishment."
+
+This makes me, in passing, note one of the other many mistakes of
+education, viz., the infinite trouble taken in trying to do away with a
+fault which disappears by itself. People take infinite pains to teach
+small children to speak distinctly who, if left to themselves, would
+learn it by themselves, provided they were always spoken to distinctly.
+This same principle holds good of numerous other things, in children's
+attitude and behaviour, that can be left simply to a good example and to
+time. One's influence should be used in impressing upon the child habits
+for which a foundation must be laid at the very beginning of his life.
+
+There is another still more unfortunate mistake, the mistake of
+correcting and judging by an external effect produced by the act, by the
+scandal it occasions in the environment. Children are struck for using
+oaths and improper words the meaning of which they do not understand; or
+if they do understand, the result of strictness is only that they go on
+keeping silence in matters in which sincerity towards those who are
+bringing them up is of the highest importance. The very thing the child
+is allowed to do uncorrected at home, is not seldom corrected if it
+happens away from home. So the child gets a false idea that it is not
+the thing that deserves punishment, but its publicity. When a mother is
+ashamed of the bad behaviour of her son she is apt to strike
+him--instead of striking her own breast! When an adventurous feat fails
+he is beaten, but he is praised when successful. These practices produce
+demoralisation. Once in a wood I saw two parents laughing while the ice
+held on which their son was sliding; when it broke suddenly they
+threatened to whip him. It required strong self-control in order not to
+say to this pair that it was not the son who deserved punishment but
+themselves.
+
+On occasions like these, parents avenge their own fright on their
+children. I saw a child become a coward because an anxious mother struck
+him every time he fell down, while the natural result inflicted on the
+child would have been more than sufficient to increase his carefulness.
+When misfortune is caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a rule,
+enough to prevent a repetition of it. If it is not sufficient blows have
+no restraining effect; they only embitter. The boy finds that adults
+have forgotten their own period of childhood; he withdraws himself
+secretly from this abuse of power, provided strict treatment does not
+succeed in totally depressing the level of the child's will and
+obstructing his energies.
+
+This is certainly a danger, but the most serious effect of corporal
+punishment is that it has established an unethical morality as its
+result. Until the human being has learnt to see that effort, striving,
+development of power, are their own reward, life remains an unbeautiful
+affair. The debasing effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great
+cruelties produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or
+success sets the value to deeds and actions.
+
+A complete revolution in this crude theory of value must come about
+before the earth can become the scene of a happy but considerate
+development of power on the part of free and fine human beings. Every
+contest decided by examinations and prizes is ultimately an immoral
+method of training. It awakens only evil passions, envy and the
+impression of injustice on the one side, arrogance on the other. After I
+had during the course of twenty years fought these school examinations,
+I read with thorough agreement a short time ago, Ruskin's views on the
+subject. He believed that all competition was a false basis of stimulus,
+and every distribution of prizes a false means. He thought that the
+real sign of talent in a boy, auspicious for his future career, was his
+desire to work for work's sake. He declared that the real aim of
+instruction should be to show him his own proper and special gifts, to
+strengthen them in him, not to spur him on to an empty competition with
+those who were plainly his superiors in capacity.
+
+Moreover it ought not to be forgotten that success and failure involve
+of themselves their own punishment and their own reward, the one bitter,
+the other sweet enough to secure in a natural way increased strength,
+care, prudence, and endurance. It is completely unnecessary for the
+educator to use, besides these, some special punishments or special
+rewards, and so pervert the conceptions of the child that failure seems
+to him to be a wrong, success on the other hand as the right.
+
+No matter where one turns one's gaze, it is notorious that the
+externally encouraging or awe-inspiring means of education, are an
+obstacle to what are the chief human characteristics, courage in oneself
+and goodness to others.
+
+A people whose education is carried on by gentle means only (I mean the
+people of Japan), have shown that manliness is not in danger where
+children are not hardened by corporal punishment. These gentle means are
+just as effective in calling forth self-mastery and consideration. These
+virtues are so imprinted on children, at the tenderest age, that one
+learns first in Japan what attraction considerate kindliness bestows
+upon life. In a country where blows are never seen, the first rule of
+social intercourse is not to cause discomfort to others. It is told that
+when a foreigner in Japan took up a stone to throw it at a dog, the dog
+did not run. No one had ever thrown a stone at him. Tenderness towards
+animals is the complement in that country of tenderness in human
+relationship, a tenderness whose result is observed, among other
+effects, in a relatively small number of crimes against life and
+security.
+
+War, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing more than
+different expressions of the tiger nature still alive in man. When the
+rod is thrown away, and when, as some one has said, children are no
+longer boxed on their ears but are given magnifying glasses and
+photographic cameras to increase their capacity for life and for loving
+it, instead of learning to destroy it, real education in humanity will
+begin.
+
+For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment
+can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant
+an example as Japan, I should like to mention a fact closer to us. Our
+Germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. It was
+introduced with Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into a
+religious duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were
+intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a part of
+spiritual guardianship. I once asked our great poet, Victor Rydberg, and
+he said that he had found no proof that corporal punishment was usual
+among the Germans in heathen times. I asked him whether he did not
+believe that the fact of its absence had encouraged the energetic
+individualism and manliness in the Northern peoples. He thought so, and
+agreed with me. Finally, I might note from our own time, that there are
+many families and schools, our girls' schools for example, and also
+boys' schools in some countries, where corporal punishment is never
+used. I know a family with twelve children whose activity and capacity
+are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of duty alone. Corporal
+punishment is never used in this home; a determined but mild mother has
+taught the children to obey voluntarily, and has known how to train
+their wills to self-control.
+
+By "voluntary obedience," I do not mean that the child is bound to ask
+endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them before he obeys. A
+good teacher never gives a command without there being some good reason,
+but whether the child is convinced or not, he must always obey, and if
+he asks "why" the answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as
+children, must obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided.
+The great necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood. This can be
+done without harsh means by training the child, even previous to his
+birth, by cultivating one's self-control, and after his birth by never
+giving in to a child's caprices.
+
+The rule is, in a few cases, to work in opposition to the action of the
+child, but in other cases work constructively; I mean provide the child
+with material to construct his own personality and then let him do this
+work of construction. This is, in brief, the art of education. The worst
+of all educational methods are threats. The only effective admonitions
+are short and infrequent ones. The greatest skill in the educator is to
+be silent for the moment and then so reprove the fault, indirectly, that
+the child is brought to correct himself or make himself the object of
+blame. This can be done by the instructor telling something that causes
+the child to compare his own conduct with the hateful or admirable types
+of behaviour about which he hears information. Or the educator may give
+an opinion which the child must take to himself although it is not
+applied directly to him.
+
+On many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part of the
+elder person is an excellent punishment, if the indignation is reserved
+for the right moment. I know children to whom nothing was more frightful
+than their father's scorn; this was dreaded. Children who are deluged
+with directions and religious devotions, who receive an ounce of
+morality in every cup of joy, are most certain to be those who will
+revolt against all this. Nearly every thinking person feels that the
+deepest educational influences in his life have been indirect; some good
+advice not given to him directly; a noble deed told without any direct
+reference. But when people come themselves to train others they forget
+all their own personal experience.
+
+The strongest constructive factor in the education of a human being is
+the settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its duty.
+Openheartedness, industry, straightforwardness at home develop goodness,
+desire to work, and simplicity in the child. Examples of artistic work
+and books in the home, its customary life on ordinary days and holidays,
+its occupations and its pleasures, should give to the emotions and
+imagination of the child, periods of movement and repose, a sure contour
+and a rich colour. The pure, warm, clear atmosphere in which father,
+mother, and children live together in freedom and confidence; where none
+are kept isolated from the interests of the others; but each possesses
+full freedom for his own personal interest; where none trenches on the
+rights of others; where all are willing to help one another when
+necessary,--in this atmosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can attain
+their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. As
+the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of
+refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of the
+generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its
+distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep
+secrets of existence, behind the visible, tangible, world of sense, the
+more will each new generation of children show a more refined and a more
+consistent mental life. It is impossible to attain this result under the
+torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We
+need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for
+those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely
+numerous that we now can not even name. Thus they will come to
+understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will
+believe; they will pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all
+these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise
+what new forms will be created in future generations. This
+transformation can be helped by the training of the present, by casting
+aside the withered foliage which now covers the budding possibilities of
+life.
+
+The house must once more become a home for the souls of children, not
+for their bodies alone. For such homes to be formed, that in their turn
+will mould children, the children must be given back to the home.
+Instead of the study preparation at home for the school taking up, as
+it now does, the best part of a child's life, the school must get the
+smaller part, the home the larger part. The home will have the
+responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary days as on
+holidays, that the children will really become a part of the home both
+in their work and in their pleasures. The children will be taken from
+the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the home. The
+mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life to the
+children. Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer
+will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.
+
+Such was the training of Old Scandanavia; the direct share of the child
+in the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life
+of our Scandanavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at
+twelve years of age), unity, character, and strength. Things specially
+made for children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings,
+support given to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially
+prepared for children,--these are the fundamental defects of our present
+day education. An eighteen-year-old girl said to me a short time ago,
+that she and other girls of the same age were so tired of the system of
+vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home,
+that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger,
+corporal discipline, and drudgery.
+
+One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial
+environment; the environment in which children and young people of the
+present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for the
+realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and
+responsibility, instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the
+school, the object of another's care.
+
+What is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is to
+be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do
+conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days and holidays
+without oversight, in every case where the child can help himself.
+Instead of the modern school child having a mother and servants about
+him to get him ready for school and to help him to remember things, he
+should have time every day before school to arrange his room and brush
+his clothes, and there should be no effort to make him remember what is
+connected with the school. The home and the school should combine
+together systematically to let the child suffer for the results of his
+own negligence.
+
+Just the reverse of this system rules to-day. Mothers learn their
+children's lessons, invent plays for them, read their story books to
+them, arrange their rooms after them, pick up what they have let fall,
+put in order the things they have left in confusion, and in this and in
+other ways, by protective pampering and attention, their desire for
+work, their endurance, the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities
+proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a
+preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed
+to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are
+trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return.
+Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and
+unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their
+elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in
+earlier generations were a beautiful custom among the young.
+
+To restore this custom, all the means usually adopted now to protect the
+child from physical and psychical dangers and inconveniences, will have
+to be removed. Throw the thermometer out of the window and begin with a
+sensible course of toughening; teach the child to know and to bear
+natural pain. Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it
+is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly
+unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes
+with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by
+nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do
+not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in this and in
+other matters.
+
+We must begin in doing for the child in certain ways a thousand times
+more and in others a hundred thousand times less. A beginning must be
+made in the tenderest age to establish the child's feeling for nature.
+Let him live year in and year out in the same country home; this is one
+of the most significant and profound factors in training. It can be held
+to even where it is now neglected. The same thing holds good of making a
+choice library, commencing with the first years of life; so that the
+child will have, at different periods of his life, suitable books for
+each age; not as is now often the case, get quite spoilt by the constant
+change of summer excursions, by worthless children's books, and costly
+toys. They should never have any but the simplest books; the so-called
+classical ones. They should be amply provided with means of preparing
+their own playthings. The worst feature of our system are the playthings
+which imitate the luxury of grown people. By such objects the covetous
+impulse of the child for acquisition is increased, his own capacity for
+discovery and imagination limited, or rather, it would be limited if
+children with the sound instinct of preservation, did not happily smash
+the perfect playthings, which give them no creative opportunity, and
+themselves make new playthings from fir cones, acorns, thorns, and
+fragments of pottery, and all other sorts of rubbish which can be
+transformed into objects of great price by the power of the imagination.
+
+To play with children in the right way is also a great art. It should
+never be done if children do not themselves know what they are going to
+do; it should always be a special treat for them as well as their
+elders. But the adults must always on such occasions, leave behind every
+kind of educational idea and go completely into the child's world of
+thought and imagination. No attempt should be made to teach them at
+these times anything else but the old satisfactory games. The
+experiences derived from these games about the nature of the children,
+who are stimulated in one direction or another by the game, must be kept
+for later use.
+
+Games in this way increase confidence between children and adults. They
+learn to know their elders better. But to allow children to turn all the
+rooms into places to play in, and to demand constantly that their elders
+shall interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species
+of pampering common to the present day. The children become accustomed
+to selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant educational
+effort brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. If
+children were free in their own world, the nursery, but out of it had to
+submit to the strict limits imposed by the habits, wills, work, and
+repose of parents, their requirements and their wishes, they would
+develop into a stronger and more considerate race than the youth of the
+present day. It is not so much talking about being considerate, but the
+necessity of considering others, of really helping oneself and others,
+that has an educational value. In earlier days, children were quiet as
+mice in the presence of elder persons. Instead of, as they do now,
+breaking into a guest's conversation, they learned to listen. If the
+conversation of adults is varied, this can be called one of the best
+educational methods for children. The ordinary life of children, under
+the old system, was lived in the nursery where they received their most
+important training from an old faithful servant and from one another.
+From their parents they received corporal punishment, sometimes a
+caress. In comparison with this system, the present way of parents and
+children living together would be absolute progress, if parents could
+but abstain from explaining, advising, improving, influencing every
+thought and every expression. But all spiritual, mental, and bodily
+protective rules make the child now indirectly selfish, because
+everything centres about him and therefore he is kept in a constant
+state of irritation. The six-year-old can disturb the conversation of
+the adult, but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed about eight o'clock,
+even when he, with wide open eyes, longs for a conversation that might
+be to him an inspiring stimulus for life.
+
+Certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order, nourishment
+and sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily movement, are concerned,
+can be made the foundations for the child's conceptions of morality. He
+cannot be made to learn soon enough that bodily health and beauty must
+be regarded as high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious
+to health and beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. In this sphere,
+children must be kept entirely independent of custom by allowing the
+exception to every rule to have its valid place. The present anxious
+solicitude that children should eat when the clock strikes, that they
+get certain food at fixed meals, that they be clothed according to the
+degree of temperature, that they go to bed when the clock strikes, that
+they be protected from every drop of unboiled water and every extra
+piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable slaves of habit. A
+reasonable toughening process against the inequalities, discomforts, and
+chances of life, constitutes one of the most important bases of joy of
+living and of strength of temper. In this case too, the behaviour of the
+person who gives the training, is the best means of teaching children to
+smile at small _contretemps_, things which would throw a cloud over the
+sun, if one got into the habit of treating them as if they were of
+great importance. If the child sees the parent doing readily an
+unpleasant duty, which he honestly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees
+a parent endure trouble or an unexpected difficulty easily, he will be
+in honour bound to do the like. Just as children without many words
+learn to practice good deeds when they see good deeds practised about
+them; learn to enjoy the beauty of nature and art when they see that
+adults enjoy them, so by living more beautifully, more nobly, more
+moderately, we speak best to children. They are just as receptive to
+impressions of this kind as they are careless of those made by force.
+
+Since this is my _alpha_ and _omega_ in the art of education, I repeat
+now what I said at the beginning of this book and half way through it.
+Try to leave the child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as
+possible; keep away all crude and impure impressions; but give all your
+care and energy to see that personality, life itself, reality in its
+simplicity and in its nakedness, shall all be means of training the
+child.
+
+Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for
+self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their development,
+neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults. But respect the joys
+of the child, his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an
+adult. Education will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely
+harder art, than the education of the present day, with its
+artificialised existence, its double entry morality, one morality for
+the child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and lax for
+the adult and _vice versa_. By treating the child every moment as one
+does an adult human being we free education from that brutal
+arbitrariness, from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have
+transformed him. Whether parents act as if children existed for their
+benefit alone, or whether the parents give up their whole lives to their
+children, the result is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know
+equally little of the feelings and needs of their children. The one
+class are happy when the children are like themselves, and their highest
+ambition is to produce in their children a successful copy of their own
+thoughts, opinions, and ideals. Really it ought to pain them very much
+to see themselves so exactly copied. What life expected from them and
+required from them was just the opposite--a richer combination, a better
+creation, a new type, not a reproduction of that which is already
+exhausted. The other class strive to model their children not according
+to themselves but according to their ideal of goodness. They show their
+love by their willingness to extinguish their own personalities for
+their children's sake. This they do by letting the children feel that
+everything which concerns them stands in the foreground. This should be
+so, but only indirectly.
+
+The concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the home, its
+habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their
+sound development, must stand in the foreground. But at present, in most
+cases, children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are
+sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will
+without possessing real freedom; they live under a discipline which is
+spasmodic in its application.
+
+When one daughter after another leaves home in order to make herself
+independent they are often driven to do it by want of freedom, or by the
+lack of character in family life. In both directions the girl sees
+herself forced to become something different, to hold different
+opinions, to think different thoughts, to act contrary to the dictates
+of her own being. A mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter,
+said not long ago that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented
+daughters. Such an asylum would be as necessary as a protection against
+pampering parents as against those who are overbearing. Both alike,
+torture their children though in different ways, by not understanding
+the child's right to have his own point of view, his own ideal of
+happiness, his own proper tastes and occupation. They do not see that
+children exist as little for their parent's sake as parents do for their
+children's sake. Family life would have an intelligent character if each
+one lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to do
+the same. None should tyrannise over, nor should suffer tyranny from,
+the other. Parents who give their home this character can justly demand
+that children shall accommodate themselves to the habits of the
+household as long as they live in it. Children on their part can ask
+that their own life of thought and feeling shall be left in peace at
+home, or that they be treated with the same consideration that would be
+given to a stranger. When the parents do not meet these conditions they
+themselves are the greater sufferers. It is very easy to keep one's son
+from expressing his raw views, very easy to tear a daughter away from
+her book and to bring her to a tea-party by giving her unnecessary
+occupations; very easy by a scornful word to repress some powerful
+emotion. A thousand similar things occur every day in good families
+through the whole world. But whenever we hear of young people speaking
+of their intellectual homelessness and sadness, we begin to understand
+why father and mother remain behind in homes from which the daughters
+have hastened to depart; why children take their cares, joys, and
+thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the old and the young generation
+are as mutually dependent as the roots and flowers of plants, so often
+separate with mutual repulsion.
+
+This is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple
+bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the
+first class; the latter torment their children in a naïve way, while the
+former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is
+a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who
+through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character,
+makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals.
+Such artists are often simple women who have passed no examinations,
+founded no clubs, and written no books. The highly cultivated mothers
+and the socially useful mothers on the other hand are not seldom those
+who call forth criticism from their sons. It seems almost an invariable
+rule that mothers should make mistakes when they wish to act for the
+welfare of their sons. "How infinitely valuable," say their children,
+"would I have found a mother who could have kept quiet, who would have
+been patient with me, who would have given me rest, keeping the outer
+world at a distance from me, with kindly soothing hands. Oh, would that
+I had had a mother on whose breast I could have laid my head, to be
+quiet and dream."
+
+A distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her
+well-thought-out plans for her children fail--those children in whom she
+saw the material for her passion for governing, the clay that she
+desired to mould.
+
+The writer just cited says very justly that maternal unselfishness alone
+can perform the task of protecting a young being with wisdom and
+kindliness, by allowing him to grow according to his own laws. The
+unselfish mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of her life
+energy, powers of soul and spirit to a growing being and then open all
+doors to him, leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths,
+and ask for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But to
+most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son in the book
+just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she tortures another; if
+she has not this capacity by nature, why in the world should I recognise
+her as my mother at all."
+
+Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous
+system in a state of irritation. They make work hard and play joyless,
+whenever they take a part in it. At the present time, too, the school
+gets control of the child, the home loses all the means by which
+formerly it moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life. The
+school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school
+gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at
+pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs,
+sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more to
+outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for
+holiday. Young people, often, have no other impression of home than that
+it is a place where they meet society which bores them.
+
+Parents surrender their children to schools in those years in which
+they should influence their minds. When the school gives them back they
+do not know how to make a fresh start with the children, for they
+themselves have ceased to be young.
+
+But getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is very
+interesting to observe a face that is getting old. What time makes out
+of a face shows better than anything else what the man has made out of
+time. Most men in the early period of middle age are neither
+intellectually fat nor lean, they are hardened or dried up. Naturally
+young people look upon them with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that
+there is such a thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize
+for its whole work of inner development. But they look in vain for this
+second eternal youth in their elders, filled with worldly nothingnesses
+and things of temporary importance.
+
+With a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future plans and
+they go out in the world in order to choose their spiritual parents.
+
+This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man must sow a
+hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of children.
+
+When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight
+and size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on
+its young mother, I began to think about the education of my future
+children. Then as now my educational ideal was that the children should
+be happy, that they should not fear. Fear is the misfortune of
+childhood, and the sufferings of the child come from the half-realised
+opposition between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way
+in which these possibilities are actually handled. It may be said that
+life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our possibilities of
+happiness. But the difference between the sufferings of the adult from
+existence, and the sufferings of the child caused by adults, is
+tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings
+imposed upon him by adults and the more impatient the child is against
+unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more certainly will
+he some day be driven to find means to transform for himself and for
+others the hard necessities of life.
+
+A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition into
+child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence for it, wrote as
+follows: "Where we behold children we suspect there are princes, but as
+to the kings, where are they?" Not only life's tragic elements diminish
+and dam up its vital energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want of
+reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being.
+Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted
+nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only
+another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that
+it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and
+history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they
+have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as
+they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars.
+
+The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in the
+wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like
+white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father
+should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with
+his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own; not to the
+right of asking others to become the plaything of his caprices but to
+the right of living his full strong personal child's life along with a
+father and a mother who themselves live a personal life, a life from
+whose sources and powers the child can take the elements he needs for
+his own individual growth. Parents should never expect their own highest
+ideals to become the ideals of their child. The free-thinking sons of
+pious parents and the Christian children of freethinkers have become
+almost proverbial.
+
+But parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their own ideals
+which is the same thing as making children idealists. This can often
+lead to a quite different system of thought from that pursued by the
+parent.
+
+As to ideals, the elders should here as elsewhere, offer with timidity
+their advice and their experience. Yes they should try to let the young
+people search for it as if they were seeking fruit hidden under the
+shadow of leaves. If their counsel is rejected, they must show neither
+surprise nor lack of self-control.
+
+The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since
+posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth
+in the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its
+forefathers. It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond
+the bounds of their daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate
+of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the
+child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the
+woof of world events. We must realise that every pebble by which one
+breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its
+influence through centuries and centuries in ever widening circles.
+Through our fathers, without our will and without choice, we are given a
+destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. Through
+our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain measure,
+as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race.
+
+By a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing the whole
+process in the light of the religion of development, the twentieth
+century will be the century of the child. This will come about in two
+ways. Adults will first come to an understanding of the child's
+character and then the simplicity of the child's character will be kept
+by adults. So the old social order will be able to renew itself.
+
+Psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. I will not go back to
+those artists in education called Socrates and Jesus, but I commence
+with the modern world. In the hours of its sunrise, in which we, who
+look back, think we see a futile Renaissance, then as now the spring
+flowers came up amid the decaying foliage. At this period there came a
+demand for the remodelling of education through the great figure of
+modern times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for
+realities. In his _Essays_, in his _Letters to the Countess of Gurson_,
+are found all of the elements for the education of the future. About the
+great German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius,
+Basedow, Pestalozzi, Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak.
+I will only mention that the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder,
+Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of natural training. In regard to
+England it is well known that John Locke in his _Thoughts on Education_,
+was a worthy predecessor of Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in
+its intellectual, moral, and physical relations, was the most noteworthy
+book on education in the last century.
+
+It has been noted that Spencer in educational theory is indebted to
+Rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said what the great German
+authorities, whom he certainly did not know, said before him. But this
+does not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Absolutely new thoughts
+are very rare. Truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by
+being pronounced again from the depth of the ardent personal conviction
+of a new human being.
+
+That rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other subjects,
+are constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows among other things that
+reasonable, or practically untried education has certain principles
+which are as axiomatic as those of mathematics. Every reasonable
+thinking man must as certainly discover anew these pedagogical
+principles, as he must discover anew the relation between the angles of
+a triangle. Spencer's book it is true has not laid again the foundation
+of education. It can rather be called the crown of the edifice founded
+by Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the great German specialists in
+pedagogy. What is an absolutely novel factor in our times is the study
+of the psychology of the child, and the system of education that has
+developed from it.
+
+In England, through the scientist Darwin, this new study of the
+psychology of the child was inaugurated. In Germany, Preyer contributed
+to its extension. He has done so partly by a comprehensive study of
+children's language, partly by collecting recollections of childhood on
+the part of the adult. Finally he experimented directly on the child,
+investigating his physical and psychical fatigue and endurance,
+acuteness of sensation, power, speed, and exactness in carrying out
+physical and mental tasks. He has studied his capacity of attention in
+emotions and in ideas at different periods of life. He has studied the
+speech of children, association of ideas in children, etc. During the
+study of the psychology of the child, scholars began to substitute for
+this term the expression "genetic psychology." For it was found that the
+bio-genetic principle was valid for the development both of the psychic
+and the physical life. This principle means that the history of the
+species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth
+substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. The psychology
+of the child is of the same significance for general psychology as
+embryology is for anatomy. On the other hand, the description of savage
+peoples, of peoples in a natural condition, such as we find in Spencer's
+_Descriptive Sociology_ or Weitz's _Anthropology_ is extremely
+instructive for a right conception of the psychology of the child.
+
+It is in this kind of psychological investigation that the greatest
+progress has been made in this century. In the great publication,
+_Zeitschrift für psychologie_, etc., there began in 1894 a special
+department for the psychology of children and the psychology of
+education. In 1898, there were as many as one hundred and six essays
+devoted to this subject, and they are constantly increasing.
+
+In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many
+distinguished pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and
+others. In Germany this subject has its most important organ in the
+journal mentioned above. It numbers among its collaborators some of the
+most distinguished German physiologists and psychologists. As related to
+the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's _Philosophischen Studien_,
+and partly the _Vierteljahrschrift für Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie_.
+In France, there was founded in 1894, the _Année Psychologique_, edited
+by Binet and Beaunis, and also the _Bibliotheque de Pedagogie et de
+Psychologie_, edited by Binet. In England there are the journals, _Mind_
+and _Brain_.
+
+Special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological
+apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. In Germany
+the first to be founded was that of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig.
+France has a laboratory for experimental psychology at Paris, in the
+Sorbonne, whose director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America
+experimental psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894, there
+were in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental
+psychology and four journals. There should also be mentioned the
+societies for child psychology. Recently one has been founded in
+Germany; others before this time have been at work in England and
+America.
+
+A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's laboratory
+in Heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain
+can do in the way of work and impressions.
+
+An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the
+modern school system, will be able to get along without originally
+creative men, because the receptive activities of modern man will absorb
+the co-operative powers of the brain to the disadvantage of the
+productive powers. And even if this were not a universally valid
+statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some
+day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process
+called a school curriculum.
+
+A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological
+science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal
+who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the
+field of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called
+technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like,
+are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental
+overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue.
+All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic
+whether one regards the quantity produced or its value as an exercise.
+Rest should be nothing more than rest,--freedom to do only what one
+wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, following
+Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats,
+and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be
+rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy.
+He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by
+strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the
+character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary
+terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear
+calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.
+
+Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won
+international recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the most
+significant material up to the present time for determining the
+influence of studies on physical development and the results of
+intellectual overstrain.
+
+It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to
+get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home
+will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the
+child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical
+and psychical maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking
+human beings in schools and in homes, education.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HOMELESSNESS
+
+
+From time to time the present age is criticised, as if its corruption
+contrasted with the moral strictness of earlier periods. Such charges
+are as crude and as groundless as is most of the same kind of criticism
+that is common to every generation of man's history. They have been
+repeated ever since man began to strive consciously for other ends than
+the momentary gratification of his undisciplined impulses.
+
+One need only to consult the men of the present generation and the still
+living representatives of the past generation, to be assured that bad
+conduct at school is not characteristic of our time. Let any one read
+the account of life at universities in earlier periods when the younger
+students were of the same age as schoolboys in high schools and it will
+soon be plain that the cause of the evil is not modern literature nor
+modern belief.
+
+The really direct causes of this difficulty must be looked for in human
+emotions. This side of the question I do not intend to discuss here. It
+can only be solved by an expert in psychology and physiology; by one
+who, along with this capacity, is a pedagogical genius. There might not
+be sufficient material for such a task, even if an individual could be
+found able to put together the original elements in the systems of
+Socrates, Rousseau, Spencer, and give them life. Under no other
+condition could a real contribution be made adequate to meet the
+requirements of the present day in the field of education. My intention
+is only to make some remarks on the secondary cause of the evil, for not
+sufficient attention has been devoted to this side of the problem. The
+cause I have in view is the increasing homelessness of all branches of
+society. Living with one's parents as children do who go to school in
+the city is not the same as living at home. Family life in the working
+classes is unsettled by the mother working out of the house. In the
+upper classes the same result is produced by the constantly increasing
+pressure of social pleasures and obligations.
+
+Formerly it was only the husband and father whom outside interests took
+from the home. Now the home is deserted by the wife and mother also,
+not alone for social gatherings but for clubs for self-improvement,
+meetings, lectures, committees; one evening after another, just at the
+time which she should be devoting herself to her children who have been
+occupied in the morning at school.
+
+The ever-growing social life, the incessant extension of club and
+out-of-door life, result in the mother sending her children as early as
+possible to school, even when there is nothing but the conditions above
+mentioned to prevent her from giving the children their first
+instruction herself. As a rule the present generation of mothers who
+have had school training could do this quite well, in the case of
+children who do not need the social stimulus of the school. Indeed
+before the school time begins, and in the hours out of school, children
+are as a rule taken by a maid servant to walk or to skate and so on.
+Children of the upper classes in most cases receive just as much,
+perhaps more, of their education from the nursery maid or from the
+school than from the mother. The father need not be mentioned at all,
+for as a rule he is an only occasional and unessential factor in the
+education of the child.
+
+Many will say by way of objection, that at no time has so much been
+done for the education of children as at present; that parents were
+never so watchful over the physical and psychical needs of the children;
+that at no time has the intercourse between children and parents been so
+free; at no time have schools been so actively at work.
+
+This is true but much of this tends to increase the homelessness of
+which I am speaking. The more the schools develop the more they are
+burdened with all the instruction for children, the more hours of the
+day they require for their demands. The school is expected to give
+instruction even in such simple matters as making children acquainted
+with their national literature, and handwork, which mothers could do
+perfectly well, certainly as well as our grandmothers. The greater the
+attention given at school to such essentially good things as gymnastics,
+handwork, and games, the more children are withdrawn from home. And even
+when at home, they are hindered by lessons and written exercises from
+being with their father and mother, on those exceptional occasions when
+the parents are at home. If we take into consideration the way in which
+the modern school system uses up the children's time, and present
+social and club life take up the time of parents, we come to the
+conclusion I began with, that domestic life is more and more on the
+decline.
+
+The reforms that must be demanded from the schools in order to restore
+the children to the home cannot be discussed now, since it is my
+intention to deal here only with those matters which must be reformed by
+the family itself, if reforms at school are to really benefit the young.
+
+Reforms of this kind have been made in schools but mothers complain that
+children have too little work at home or too few hours at school; that
+they, the mothers, absolutely do not know how they can keep the children
+occupied in so much free time.
+
+What may justly be considered the great progress in the family life of
+the present day, the confidential intercourse between parents and
+children, has not taken an entirely right direction. The result has been
+that children have been permitted to behave like grown people, sharing
+the habits and pleasures of their parents, or that the parents have
+ceased to live their own life. In neither of these two ways can a deep
+and sound relation between children and parents be produced.
+
+We see on the one side a minority of conscientious mothers and fathers,
+who in a real sense live only for the children. They mould their whole
+life for the life of the children; and the children get the idea that
+they are the central point of existence. On the other side, we see
+children who take part in all the life and over-refinements of the home.
+They demand like adults the amusements and elegancies of life; they even
+give balls and suppers at home or in hotels for their school companions.
+In these social functions, the vanity and stupidity of adults are
+conscientiously imitated.
+
+Then we require from these boys and girls, when they reach a time of
+life in which the passions awake, a self-control, a capacity of
+self-denial, a stoicism towards temptations to which they have never
+been trained, and which they have never seen their parents exercise.
+
+Most homes of the upper classes have not the means to keep up the life
+that is lived in them. By the money of creditors, or by an exorbitant
+profit made at the cost of working people, or by careless consumption of
+the very necessary savings to be laid by for hard times, or against the
+death of the family provider, a luxurious style of living is maintained.
+But even when in rare cases there is real ability to live in this way,
+parents would not do it, if the best interests of the children were
+taken into account.
+
+Elders may speak of industry as much as they like; if the father's and
+mother's work for children has no reality about it, the parents would do
+best to be silent. The same must be said of warnings and arbitrary
+prohibitions to children concerning the satisfaction of their desire for
+enjoyment, if the parents themselves do not influence the children by
+their own example.
+
+On the other hand there are just as disturbing consequences when
+industrious parents conceal their self-denial from their children, when
+they deprive themselves in the effort to spare their children the
+knowledge that their parents are not in a position to clothe them as
+well as their companions or to give them the same pleasures. Least of
+all is home life successful in helping children through the difficulties
+of their earlier years, when discipline has killed confidence between
+them and their parents, when they become insincere from want of courage
+and careless from want of freedom; when parents present themselves to
+the children as exceptional beings, asking for blind reverence and
+absolute subjection. From such homes in old days fine men and women
+could proceed, but now extremely seldom. Young people recognise in our
+days no such requirements; confidential intercourse with parents has
+robbed them of this nimbus of infallibility.
+
+Homes which send out men and women with the strongest morality, with the
+freshest stimulus to work, are those where children and parents are
+companions in labour, where they stand on the same level, where, like a
+good elder sister or an elder brother, parents regard the younger
+members of the household as their equals; where parents by being
+children with the children, being youthful with young people, help those
+who are growing up, without the exercise of force, to develop into human
+beings, always treating them as human beings. In a home like this
+nothing is especially arranged for children; they are regarded not as
+belonging to one kind of being while parents represent another, but
+parents gain the respect of their children by being true and natural;
+they live and conduct themselves in such a way that the children gain an
+insight into their work, their efforts, and as far as possible into
+their joys and pains, their mistakes and failures. Such parents without
+artificial condescension or previous consideration gain the sympathy of
+children and unconsciously educate them in a free exchange of thought
+and opinions. Here children do not receive everything as a gift;
+according to the measure of their power they must share in the work of
+the home; they learn to take account of their parents, of servants, and
+one another. They have duties and rights that are just as firmly fixed
+as those of their parents; and they are respected themselves just as
+they are taught to respect others. They come into daily contact with
+realities, they can do useful tasks, not simply pretend that they are
+doing them; they can arrange their own amusements, their own small money
+accounts, their own punishments even, by their parents never hindering
+them from suffering the natural consequences of their own acts.
+
+In such a home a command is never given unless accompanied at the same
+time with a reason for it, just as soon as a reason can be understood.
+So the feeling of responsibility is impressed upon the children from the
+tenderest age. The children are as seldom as possible told not to do
+things, but such commands when given are absolute because they always
+rest on good reasons, not on a whim. Mother and father are watchful, but
+they do not act as spies on their children. Partial freedom teaches
+children to make use of complete freedom. A system of negative commands
+and oversight produces insincerity and weakness. An old illiterate
+housekeeper who earned a living by taking school children to board was
+one of the best educators I have ever seen. Her method was loving young
+people and believing in them--a confidence that they as a rule sought to
+deserve. Moreover a good home is always cheerful, its affection real,
+not sentimental. No time is wasted in it in preaching about petty
+details or prosing. Mother and sisters do not look shocked when the
+small boy tells a funny story or uses strong language. A joke is not
+regarded as evidence of moral corruption, nor keen views as an
+indication of depravity. Liveliness, want of prudishness, which can be
+combined, so far as the feminine part of the household is concerned,
+with purity of mind and simple nobility, are characteristics for which
+there can be no substitutes. In such a household concord prevails, the
+young and old work, read, and talk together, together take common
+diversions; sometimes the young people, sometimes their elders, take the
+lead. The house is open for the friends of the children; they are free
+to enjoy themselves as completely as possible but in all naturalness
+without allowing their amusements to change the habits of the home.
+
+It is told of the childhood of a great Finnish poet, Runeberg, that his
+mother when she invited the young guests of her son to dance as long as
+they could, added, "When you are thirsty, the water cooler is there, and
+by it hangs the cup"; and more delightful dances, the old lady who told
+the story never remembered to have seen. This old-fashioned distinction,
+the courage to show oneself as one is, is absent from modern homes, and
+lack of courage has resulted in lack of happiness.
+
+The simple hospitable homely pleasures that have now been superseded by
+children's parties, lesson drudgery, and by parents living outside of
+the home must come back again if what is bad now is not to become worse.
+Evil is not to be expelled by evil; it is to be overcome by good. If the
+home is not to be again sunny, quiet, simple, and lively, mothers may go
+out as much as they like to discuss education and morality in the
+evening. There will be no real change. Mothers must seriously perceive
+that no social activity has greater significance than education, and
+that in this nothing can replace their own appropriate influence in a
+home. They must make up their minds to real reform, such reforms as
+those introduced by a lady in Stockholm; burdened though she was with
+social engagements and public obligations, she refused to accept any
+invitation except on one day of the week, in order to spend her evenings
+quietly with her children. How long will the majority of mothers
+sacrifice children to the eternal ennui and vacuity of our modern social
+and club life?
+
+There is no intention here to recommend that social life and public
+activities shall be deprived of the influence of experienced and
+thinking mothers. But I only wish to point to the cases of overstrain
+now caused by the stress of excessive sociability and outside activity.
+This kind of over-exertion, more especially, injures the home through
+the mother. In our day as in all other periods, be our opinions in other
+respects what they may, pagan, Christian, Jewish, or free thinking, a
+good home is only created by those parents who have a religious
+reverence for the holiness of the home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SOUL MURDER IN THE SCHOOLS
+
+
+Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a
+penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the
+reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter
+finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where
+each point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the
+inadequate means at the reformer's command.
+
+The modern school has succeeded in doing something which, according to
+the law of physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once existent
+matter. The desire for knowledge, the capacity for acting by oneself,
+the gift of observation, all qualities children bring with them to
+school, have, as a rule, at the close of the school period disappeared.
+They have not been transformed into actual knowledge or interests. This
+is the result of children spending almost the whole of their life from
+the sixth to the eighteenth year at the school desk, hour by hour,
+month by month, term by term; taking doses of knowledge, first in
+teaspoonfuls, then in dessert-spoonfuls, and finally in tablespoonfuls,
+absorbing mixtures which the teacher often has compounded from fourth-
+or fifth-hand recipes.
+
+After the school, there often comes a further period of study in which
+the only distinction in method is, that the mixture is administered by
+the ladleful.
+
+When young people have escaped from this régime, their mental appetite
+and mental digestion are so destroyed that they for ever lack capacity
+for taking real nourishment. Some, indeed, save themselves from all
+these unrealities by getting in contact with realities; they throw their
+books in the corner and devote themselves to some sphere of practical
+life. In both cases the student years are practically squandered. Those
+who go further acquire knowledge ordinarily at the cost of their
+personality, at the price of such qualities as assimilation, reflection,
+observation, and imagination. If any one succeeds in escaping these
+results, it happens generally with a loss of thoroughness in knowledge.
+A lower grade of intelligence, a lower capacity for work, or a lower
+degree of assimilation, than that bestowed upon the scholar by nature,
+is ordinarily the result of ten or twelve school years. There is much
+common-sense in the French humourist's remark. "You say that you have
+never gone to school and yet you are such an idiot."
+
+The cases in which school studies are not injurious, but partially
+useful, are those where no regular school period has been passed
+through. In place of this there was a long period of rest, or times of
+private instruction, or absolutely no instruction at all, simply study
+by oneself. Nearly every eminent woman in the last fifty years has had
+such self-instruction, or was an irregularly instructed girl. Knowledge
+so acquired, therefore, has many serious gaps, but it has much more
+freshness and breadth. One can study with far greater scope and apply
+what one studies.
+
+Yet it is still true to-day that, however vehemently families complain
+about schools, they do not see that their demands in general education
+must change, before a reasonable school system, a school system in all
+respects different from the prevailing one, can come into existence. The
+private schools, few in number, that differ to a certain extent from the
+ordinary system are swallows that are very far from making a summer.
+Rather they have met the fate of birds who have come too early on the
+scene.
+
+As long as schools represent an idea, stand for an abstract conception,
+like the family and the state, so long will they, just as the family and
+the state, oppress the individuals who belong to them. The school no
+more than the family and the state represents a higher idea or something
+greater than just the number of individuals out of which it is formed.
+It, like the family and the state, has no other duty, right, or purpose
+than to give to each separate individual as much development and
+happiness as possible. To recognise these principles is to introduce
+reason into the school question. The school should be nothing but the
+mental dining-room in which parents and teachers prepare intellectual
+bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must have the right
+to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the parents have
+the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by it, the
+food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must be
+driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the
+individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform
+plans will be drawn up in vain.
+
+But just as certain simple chemical elements are contained in all
+nourishment, there are certain simple elements of knowledge that make up
+the foundation of all higher forms of learning. Reading and writing
+one's own language, the elements of numbers, geography, natural science,
+and history, must be required by the schools, as the obligatory basis
+for advanced independent study.
+
+The elementary school beginning with the age of nine to ten years, I
+regard as the real general school. The system of instruction must assume
+that the children have breadth, repose, comprehensiveness, and capacity
+for individual action. All these qualities are destroyed by the present
+"hare and hound" system and by its endless abstractions. Such are the
+results of course readings, multiplicity of subjects, and formalism, all
+defects that have passed from the boys' schools into the girls' schools,
+from the elementary schools into the people's schools. They too are
+burdened by all these faults, which, though deplored by most people, can
+only be cured by radical reform.
+
+The instruction must be arranged in groups, certain subjects placed
+among the earlier stages of study while others are put aside for a
+later period. And in this connection it is not sufficient to consider
+the psychological development of the child. Certain subjects must be
+assigned to certain times of the year.
+
+The courses in these schools must come to an end at about the age of
+fifteen or sixteen. From them our young people can pass either into
+practical life, or go on to schools of continuation and application. It
+would be desirable to adopt the plan recommended by Grundtvig, that one
+or more vacation years should follow, before studies are taken up again.
+Girls, especially, would then come back to their studies with
+strengthened bodily powers and an increased desire for knowledge. It is
+now a common experience that the desire to learn, even in the case of
+talented young people, becomes quiescent, if they go on continuously
+with their studies, as they often do, from the sixth to the twentieth
+year and longer.
+
+To mark out the courses of such a school would offer tremendous
+difficulties. But these difficulties will not be found insuperable,
+after people have agreed that the souls of children require more
+consideration than a school programme.
+
+Among objections coming from parents, may be heard the following: That
+while the state refuses to take initiative in school reform, no one
+would dare to embark on a road which makes the future of their children
+so uncertain. In the meantime children must be allowed to learn what all
+others learn. When the state has taken the first step, the parents would
+be willing they say to follow with remarkable eagerness.
+
+What, I ask, has been always the right way to carry out reforms? There
+must be first an active revolt against existing evils. This particular
+revolt is yet not sufficiently supported, especially on the part of
+parents. The children themselves have begun to feel the need of protest,
+and, if not earlier, I hope that when the present generation of school
+children become fathers, mothers, and teachers, a reform will come
+about.
+
+No one can expect a system to be changed, until those who disapprove of
+it show that they are in earnest, show that they are taking upon
+themselves the sacrifices necessary to protect themselves from the
+unhappy results of the system. Families complain of the excessive
+aggregation of subjects, and yet they constantly burden the school with
+new subjects, even when these subjects are things the family can
+undertake itself. While families complain of overstrain, but make no use
+of the elective system in schools, where it has been introduced, while
+parents are willing to risk nothing to realise their principles, we
+cannot wonder that the state does not embark on reforms of any kind.
+
+There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school."
+While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one
+another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the
+training for their future life is a bad one--a life in which the common
+work and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's
+ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school
+for a special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in
+the high sense of the word, and besides no school in which people learn
+for life.
+
+I have therefore always warmly held that the school should be no boys',
+no girls' school, no elementary and no people's school, but should be a
+real general or public school as in America, where both sexes, the
+children of all grades of society, will learn that mutual confidence,
+respect, understanding, by which their efficient co-operation in the
+family and state may be made possible. The common school, so arranged,
+is perhaps the most important means to solve definitely the problem of
+morality, the woman question, the marriage question, the labour
+question, in less one-sided and more human ways. From this point of view
+the establishment of the common school is much more than a pedagogical
+question; it is the vital question of our social order.
+
+Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides
+of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to
+be done is to break the wall down. The school, as described above, is
+the first breach in this wall.
+
+A school like this would be like leaven. The many never reform the few;
+it is the few who gradually introduce reforms for the many. Because the
+few have strong enough dissatisfaction with present defects, courage
+great enough to show their disgust, a belief in the new truths real
+enough, they are ready to prepare the ground for the future.
+
+Such a school must be guided by the same principle which has humanised
+morality and law in other spheres. It must consider individual
+peculiarities. Personal freedom will thus have as few hindrances as
+possible to obstruct it. The rights of others must not be approached
+too close. The limits, where the rights of others can be affected, must
+be maintained, even enlarged.
+
+This humanising process will be introduced into the schools, when
+scholars are no longer regarded as classes, but each individual for
+himself. The schools will then commence to fulfil one of the many
+conditions necessary to give young people real nourishment and so
+develop them and make them happy.
+
+Such a school life will make its first aim to discover in early years
+uncommon talent, to direct such talent to special studies.
+
+Secondly, for those who lack definite talent, a plan of study will be
+arranged, in which their individuality too can be developed, and their
+intellectual tension increased. This condition is, if possible, more
+important than the first, for unusual talents are accompanied by greater
+power of self-conservation. Ordinary or lesser talented people, _i.e._,
+the larger majority, are rather confused by a plurality of studies and
+are much easier impaired, as personalities, by the uniformity of the
+prevailing system.
+
+The rights of unusually gifted people, and those of other classes too,
+can be considered when, as mentioned above, the school curriculum is so
+arranged, that certain subjects are studied during part of the school
+year, another class of subjects during another part. Moreover, certain
+subjects are to be studied at different times, not finished once for
+all.
+
+The instruction must be so arranged that real independent study, under
+the direction of the teacher, will be the ordinary method. The
+presentation of the subject by the teacher will be the exception, a
+treat for holidays, not for every day.
+
+The instruction too must take the scholar to the real thing, as far as
+possible, not direct him to report about the thing. Such a school must
+break up absolutely the whole system of lecturing, arranged in
+concentric circles. In certain cases, it must return to the methods of
+the old-fashioned school, which concentrated its attention on humanistic
+study. But dead languages should not be the subjects around which its
+studies should centre.
+
+Early specialisation must be allowed, where there are distinct
+individual tendencies for such work;
+
+Concentration on certain subjects at certain points of time;
+
+Independent work during the whole period of school;
+
+Contact with reality in the whole school curriculum;--these must be the
+four corner-stones of the new school.
+
+But the time is far distant still, when government schools will begin to
+build on this basis. What follows is meant, therefore, to apply, not to
+the great revolutions of school systems indicated above, but deals with
+improvements to take place at present.
+
+Learning lessons should be assigned to school hours as in France.
+Children should have an entirely free day in the week; study at home
+should be confined to the reading of literary works, tales of travel,
+and the like, which teachers can recommend in combination with the
+studies pursued at school.
+
+Tasks done at home are inconvenient; they do not increase the
+independence of the scholar; they are prepared as a rule with
+excessively free and often unwise help from the parents. At school such
+work would be done as a rule without help; besides, it is individual and
+quickly finished.
+
+In the school, time can be taken for study selected at the scholar's
+free choice. It can be arranged for in the following way. Take a class
+of about twelve scholars; in larger classes no reasonable or personal
+method of instruction is possible. There may be three scholars with
+distinct tastes, one for history, one for languages, one for
+mathematics. There may be two without any distinct talent for
+mathematics or languages. The other seven may have ordinary capacities.
+The first three must, during the whole term, apply themselves specially
+in certain hours, set aside for independent study, each in his chosen
+subject. The first will read some historical work on the periods taken
+up in the history class; the second will devote this time to
+mathematics; the third will read the books in foreign languages,
+mentioned in the language course. The other seven with ordinary gifts
+can devote this time to ordinary reading and handwork. In this way all
+will get some portion of history, mathematics, and languages, but those
+who are specially interested will have the opportunity of going deeper
+into the subject. If one of the three gifted scholars shows a great
+inclination for and a ready comprehension of all three subjects, he
+should study by himself at home, provided the more thorough study of one
+subject does not impair work on the other. The two who have special
+difficulty in mathematics or languages could either substitute one
+subject wholly for the other, or in those periods remain away from
+school, or, finally, the hours used by gifted scholars for individual
+study beyond the requirements of the common course could be devoted by
+these to work, under the teacher's supervision, in the course common to
+the whole class.
+
+To carry out this plan, there is need of such concentration of subjects
+as I have mentioned; there should be never more than one or at most two
+main subjects--history, geography, natural science--studied at once.
+Moreover no more than one language should be studied at the same time;
+practice in those already learnt is to be acquired by literary readings,
+written résumés, and conversation.
+
+Another kind of concentration is necessary. Not every subject should be
+split up into subdivisions but history should be made to include
+literary history, church history, etc. In geography at the early stage,
+a part of natural science should be included, and the history of art
+combined with both. Another not less important method implied in
+concentration is in all general courses to direct one's attention to the
+main questions, and to sacrifice the mass of details. Detailed work
+should not have been incorporated, as indispensable for general culture
+(from generation to generation), during the constant growth of the
+contents of knowledge.
+
+In regard to instruction, methods now popular should be forced out of
+the field. The two obligatory features, the careful hearing of lessons
+by the teacher, and the equally careful preparation of the next lesson,
+must be changed for other methods according to the age of the scholar,
+the special character of the subject, and of the scholar himself; or
+according to the particular stage of the subject. At one time the
+teacher should give an attractive, comprehensive account of a period, a
+character, a land, a natural phenomenon. Another time it will be enough
+to give a simple, introductory reference to the reading of one or more
+works on the subject, best of all an original authority. Sometimes he
+should require an oral account of what he has said, or what has been
+read; sometimes this should be done in writing. When the lesson is
+filled with many facts the scholar should write them down in the hour;
+another time he should summarise them from memory. An assigned amount
+too can be gone through along with the teacher's explanation; on another
+occasion, the assignment need not be gone over at all, but the scholars
+could show their capacity to understand it and comprehend it without
+assistance. Occasionally the task might be done in a short time from one
+day to another, sometimes it might take a longer period.
+
+But this work would, as has been said, take place ordinarily in the
+school. Purely literary readings and books of a similar type must be
+assigned for work at home, to be done during a considerable length of
+time. For we all know that the reading which has made a deep impression
+on us was only what was read freely; reading for which we ourselves
+could set the time, place, and inclination. And since, in this case, the
+important thing is the impression, not the knowledge, freedom is more
+important than in other subjects. Individual initiative can be furthered
+by having the teacher, as is done in France, explain in passing all
+words and subjects in a poem difficult to understand. The teacher too
+should now and then, by reading poetry aloud, stimulate the desire of
+the scholar to learn more of the same poet. A poem has the greatest
+effect when it is presented unexpectedly. When a history lesson is ended
+there should be read aloud a passage from an historical poem. Scholars
+do not forget either the poem, or the episode handled in it, even if
+they forget everything else. But test questions, used in the period of
+literature-study, go in at one ear and out at the other.
+
+A teacher who wishes to use this concentrated system in detail, that
+rests on the intelligent co-operation of the scholar, will naturally
+find that the method is to be derived from the personality of the
+teacher himself. I think the teacher of history should not take up the
+prehistoric period, but should give the scholar some good popular work
+on it and let him go to a museum; he should then require a written
+essay, to be illustrated by the scholar with drawings of characteristic
+types of archæological specimens. In the same way, he could give a
+comparative view of the same period among other people. Then, if there
+were a scholar especially anxious to learn, he could put in his hands a
+work about the primitive condition of man. Every teacher, man or woman,
+can easily think out, for the subjects they teach, analogous methods.
+The teacher of geography who is talking about Siberia can give some good
+general description of it to all the scholars for their private study.
+Those particularly interested would be recommended to read a narrative
+of travels in Siberia, Dostojewsky's _Out of the Dead House_, and so
+on. If the teacher of history were taking up Napoleon, he could read in
+the French hour a work like Vigny's _Servitude et Grandeur Militaire_.
+For the Dutch War of Independence, Motley's history, Goethe's _Egmont_,
+and Schiller's _Don Carlos_ could be read. A whole book could be written
+on plans like these, with indications how the different fields of
+knowledge could supplement one another, how history, geography,
+literature, and art could be intertwined just as on the other side
+geography and natural science. Similarly it would show how different
+teachers could be of use to one another in communicating to their
+scholars a fuller knowledge.
+
+I should like to propose an hypothesis for discussion and examination
+that I have formulated, after a wide experience in story-telling, both
+as a listener and as a narrator. If I might put together in a statement,
+without intending to prove it, the result of my experience in the
+subject named, I should say that the mental food which is most
+attractive for the child, also gives the most nourishment. This is the
+fact that the physiology of our day has proved in the case of the
+organic existence of the child. Pedagogy is beginning, consciously or
+unconsciously, to apply it to the mental sphere, yet without daring to
+hold that nature is so simple, that need and inclination can be so
+nearly related. Naturally, it cannot be maintained that what is most
+attractive for children's stories should constitute their whole
+training, as physiology maintains that what tastes most agreeable to the
+child, for example sugar, should form his sole nourishment.
+
+What every story-teller finds as specially attractive to children, is
+the epic smoothness, the clear comprehensiveness of the tale, its
+consistent objectivity. Every narrative which will win the attention of
+the child, whether it be from Scandinavian, classical, or biblical
+history, must have these characteristics of the tale. There are hardly
+any story-tellers who so completely absorb children as old nurses. They
+never forget any picturesque trait in the tale, they always give the
+same broad, full narrative. They tell their stories without explanations
+and without applications, with the real direct feeling of the child for
+grasping the subject. Everything which disturbs the smooth flow of the
+narrative, above all, when the narrator puts himself outside of it by
+indulging in a joke, strikes the child as a profound incongruity.
+Children are always more or less artistic in their nature, in the sense
+that they desire to receive an impression in its purity, not as a means
+to something else. They wish through the story to go through a real
+experience; at the same time they will say "No," if they are asked
+whether they would prefer to hear a real history to a story. This
+apparent contradiction can be explained in this way: the tale presents
+reality, as reality is conceived of by the naïve fancy of early ages,
+and is in just the form in which the imagination of the child can
+receive it.
+
+In telling stories, we find, besides, that what attracts children is the
+narrative of actions; in this roundabout way they get hold of emotions
+and sentiments. The development of the child--this is a truth which has
+to be worked out before it can really be taken in--answers in miniature
+to the development of mankind as a whole. And it follows from this that
+children combine idealism and realism, as epic national poetry does.
+Great, good, heroic, supernatural traits affect them most; but only in a
+concrete shape sensibly perceived, with the richness of the power which
+comes from life, without any adaptation to our present conceptions.
+
+We can test this by telling a real folk-lore tale, and Anderson's
+version of it. With a few exceptions children are unanimous in calling
+the first type the most beautiful.
+
+Besides what is attractive for lively children, with sound appetites, is
+quantity, but in no way multiplicity.
+
+First of all they ask whether the story is long after they have begun to
+hope that it is beautiful. They are glad to hear the same story
+innumerable times; they have an unconscious need for thorough
+assimilation, just as soon as what is given to them harmonises with
+their stage of development. This is true of all subjects. I know
+children who detest the "choice stories" from the Bible, with which
+their morning prayers are commenced, but who read the New Testament as a
+story-book. In this respect, all small children are like great ones, the
+artists. The imagination of children requires full, entire, deep
+impressions, as material for their energies that are incessantly
+creating and reconstructing. And if their sound feeling has not been
+disturbed by a dualism foreign to them it brings them with remarkably
+sure instinct to choose the sound, pure, and beautiful, and to reject
+the unsound, hateful, and crude. Finally, we find in story-telling that
+children much prefer continuity of impressions though they are said to
+express preference for change. We never hear children say, "Now tell a
+funny story, the one before was too gloomy." But if we commence telling
+gloomy stories they want one after another of the same type. If we had
+begun telling amusing stories, they never tire of laughing. The
+changeableness of children in playing, reading, and working is not so
+general a characteristic of childish nature as is believed. It is true
+only of children whose readings and games are not adapted to their
+nature and inclinations. Changeableness is, in a certain way, nature's
+self-defence against what is unconsciously injurious.
+
+As to comic narratives, it is found in story-telling that the child has
+the most keen sense for the humour of a situation. On the other hand
+they have hardly a trace of feeling for the humour that rests on deep
+intellectual contrasts, least of all for humour of the ironical type. If
+a narrative out of their own world is really to make impression on them,
+it must be like a tale, full of life, with action and surprises, broad
+and naïve in its style, without any noticeable aim. All the children's
+books which children through their life recollect and by which they are
+impressed, are those that at least in one way or another fulfil these
+conditions. The rest give other impressions, but even so they become no
+more harmless than arsenic wall-paper covered by fresh undyed layers. As
+to the humour of children, it can be easily tested. We can tell them the
+most comic psychological children's stories; ninety-nine out of a
+hundred they will declare to be terribly stupid, while a simple history
+presenting a funny situation doubles them up with laughter.
+
+Children do not feel drawn to abstract things; this is an old truth,
+whose correctness is established best by story-telling. All virtues and
+qualities, no matter how well concealed they may be, are very quickly
+pronounced stupid by children. For fables, children have seldom any
+taste, least of all for essays. The introduction of a fox or a bear into
+the story or in a real adventure makes the story-teller the dearest
+friend of children. But the most lively and childish essay on the bear
+or the fox leaves them cold, unless it is made real by some personal
+experience in the country or by a visit to a zoölogical garden. This
+truth is so recognised and proved from so many points of view, that I
+will simply say here that experience in story-telling gives additional
+evidence of it. Children show, in listening to stories, a finely
+developed sensitiveness to all attempts to descend to, or to adopt, the
+standpoint of the child, to everything that is artificial in the
+narrative. In intercourse with children, especially with those who
+represent progressive methods, can be seen how the reaction against the
+old lesson and hidebound methods has produced an artificial naïveté, a
+richness of illustrations, and a liveliness that children soon feel as
+something specially prepared for them, something not quite real. This
+way of partially giving to children their own imaginative power puts
+them to sleep, even when it succeeds at first in giving them a good
+entertainment in their lessons. For the illustrations and comparisons,
+as well as the consequences which another has thought out for them,
+obstruct the initiative of the child; besides they are all soon
+forgotten. It is the same with playthings; those they make themselves
+give inexhaustible pleasure, while those that are ready made only confer
+joy once or twice. They are shown and then broken in pieces in order to
+extract the clockwork, for this is the only possible way for the child
+to do something with it himself. Instruction is beginning to resemble
+children's playthings and children's books; it is too complete, too
+richly illustrated. It hinders individual free voyages of discovery of
+the imagination. Even good illustrations are often injurious; but we do
+not intend to speak at length on this subject. As a matter of fact
+children often feel themselves deceived by illustrations.
+
+The reserve in a story is also a property that attracts the child. Its
+pictures are indicated with a few definite but repeated details. The
+imagination is allowed to fill the picture with colours. The uniformity,
+the rhythm, and the symmetry, all qualities belonging to the folk-lore
+tale, are for the child extremely absorbing. They enjoy such repetitions
+as "the first, second, and third year" and so on, quite like the refrain
+in rhyme and poetry.
+
+But all these observations lead to a final result. The present
+reading-book system is neither the most attractive for children, nor
+does it best supply them with what they want. Instead of epic smoothness
+and unity, reading-books bring a confused mixture of all kinds, nursery
+rhymes, religious teaching, poetry, natural history, and history.
+Occasionally there comes a tale or a real poem, standing apart
+distinctly from its neighbours, in tone and in comprehensiveness.
+Instead of clear impressions, children get through the reading-book a
+disturbing jumble; instead of objectivity, they get instructive
+children's stories; instead of poetry, edifying versification; instead
+of action, reflection; instead of much of one thing, a little of
+everything; instead of continuity of impressions, constant change;
+instead of concrete impressions of life, essays; instead of naïve tales,
+things written down to their level.
+
+I ask what is the result of this reading-book system on the development
+of the child from six to sixteen years old?
+
+What, in general, is the result on the development of character when one
+flits from impression to impression, nipping in flight at different
+things, letting one picture after another slip away, making no halt
+anywhere?
+
+As to the effect on adults, immediate answers can be given. These
+answers are so unfavourable that they do not need to be repeated. But,
+should a principle which applies to the adult be less suitable for the
+child? It really applies much more to the child. Adults generally have
+some work, some occupation, some one centre around which they can
+arrange manifold events, change may often be advantageous for them; but
+the whole school day of the child is change; the way the child absorbs
+knowledge is by the teaspoonful. Is not this condition enough to urge us
+to work with all our might against the system of diffusion wherever it
+is unnecessary?
+
+In reading-books diffusion is not necessary; in foreign languages, as in
+his own tongue, the interest of the child is much more stimulated by a
+book than by a reader; his vocabulary is increased. But even if this
+were not the case, what the child gains through reading-books, in quick
+readiness in the mother tongue or in foreign languages, does not
+compensate for the loss their use signifies in development in the way
+already mentioned.
+
+The schools deal improperly with the mental powers of youth, through
+their lack of specialising, of concentration, in their depreciation of
+initiative, in their being out of touch with reality.
+
+High schools and colleges are absolutely destructive to personality.
+Here, where only oral examinations should take place from time to time,
+where all studies should tend to be individual, the hunger of the
+scholar for reality is hardly satisfied in any direction. Nothing is
+done to help his longing to see for himself, to read, to judge, to get
+impressions at first-hand, not from second-hand reports.
+
+Certainly here, too, the direction of the teacher is necessary. He can
+economise superfluous work by clarifying generalisations; he can
+criticise a one-sided account in order to complete the picture fully
+himself. Often the teacher must excite interest by a vigorous account
+from his own point of view; by a fine psychological study, he can
+illustrate a complex historical picture. He will help the scholar to
+find laws, governing the phenomena which he has come to know by his own
+experiments, or he can suggest comparisons which lead to such
+experiments. Here, also, oral and written exercise must have great
+weight.
+
+But the end of all instruction in college, as in the school, should not
+consist in examinations and diplomas; these must be obliterated from the
+face of the earth. The aim should be that the scholars themselves, at
+first hand, should acquire their knowledge, should get their
+impressions, should form their opinions, should work their way through
+to intellectual tastes, not as they now do, taking no trouble
+themselves, but being supposed to acquire these gifts through
+interesting lectures given by the teacher on five different subjects,
+heard every morning while the students are dozing, and soon forgotten.
+Facts slip away from every one's memory, quickest from the memory of
+those who have learned according to the dose and teaspoonful system. But
+education happily is not simply the knowledge of facts, it is, as an
+admirable paradox has put it, what is left over after we have forgotten
+all we have learnt.
+
+The richer one is in such permanent acquisitions, the greater the profit
+of study. The more subjective pictures we have; the more numerous our
+vibrating emotions and associations of ideas are; the more we are filled
+with suggestively active impressions;--so much the more development we
+have, won by study for our personality. The fact that our students
+acquire so little, even if they have passed through every school with
+excellent marks, is a serious injustice they feel during their whole
+life. The beautifully systematised, ticketed, checkerboard knowledge
+given by examinations soon disappears. The person who has kept his
+desire for knowledge and his capacity for work by his free choice and by
+his independent labor can easily fill out the gaps left by this method
+of study in the knowledge he has acquired.
+
+Only the person who by knowledge has obtained a view of the great
+connected system of existence, the connection between nature and man's
+life, between the present and the past, between peoples and ideas,
+cannot lose his education. Only the person who, through the mental
+nourishment he has received, sees more clearly, feels more ardently, has
+absorbed completely the wealth of life, has been really educated. This
+education can be gained in the most irregular way, perhaps around the
+hearth or in the field, on the seashore or in the wood; it can be
+acquired from old tattered books or from nature itself. It can be
+terribly incomplete, very one-sided, but how real, personal, and rich it
+appears to those who for the period of fifteen years in school have
+ground out the wheat on strange fields, like oxen with muzzled mouths!
+Our age cries for personality; but it will ask in vain, until we let our
+children live and learn as personalities, until we allow them to have
+their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own knowledge,
+form their own judgments; or, to put the matter briefly, until we cease
+to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping
+later on in life to revive it again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE
+
+
+I should like to set down here briefly my dreams of a future school, in
+which the personality may receive a free and complete self-development.
+I purposely say "dreams," because I do not want any one to believe that
+I am pretending in the following outline to give a reformed programme
+for the present time.
+
+My first dream is that the kindergarten and the primary school will be
+everywhere replaced by instruction at home.
+
+Undoubtedly a great influence has proceeded from that whole movement
+which has resulted, among other things, in the Pestalozzi-Froebel
+kindergartens, and in institutions modelled after them. Better teachers
+have been produced by it; but what I regard as a great misfortune, is
+the increasing inclination to look upon the crèche, the kindergarten,
+and the school as the ideal scheme of education. Every discussion
+dealing with the possibilities of women working in public life exalts
+the advantage of freeing the mother from the care of children,
+emancipating children from the improper care of their mothers, and
+giving women possibilities of work outside of the home. Mrs. Perkins
+Stetson proposes as a compromise, that every mother, pedagogically
+qualified, shall take care of a group of children along with her own.
+But what her own children will receive under such conditions is
+sufficiently shown in the case of those poor children who grow up in
+educational institutions presided over by their parents; and also by the
+experience of the poor parents who are not able under these conditions
+to look after their own children.
+
+The crèche and the kindergarten were and continue to be a blessing
+undoubtedly for those innumerable mothers who work outside of their
+homes and are badly prepared for their duties. Some type of kindergarten
+will perhaps be necessary under particular circumstances as a partial
+substitute for the home, as, for example, when a child has no companions
+to play with, or when the mother herself is disinclined or not able to
+educate the child. This incapacity is ordinarily the result of an
+extremely nervous temperament, caused by weak will or depression.
+
+Mary Wollstonecraft's remarks, made more than a hundred years ago, still
+call for our approval. "If children are not physically murdered by their
+ignorant mothers, they are ruined psychically by the inability of the
+mother to bring them up. Mothers, in those first six years that
+determine the whole development of the child's character, turn them over
+to the hands of servants, whose authority is often undermined by the way
+in which they are treated. Then children are passed on to school to
+control the bad behaviour which the vigilance of the mother could have
+prevented, and which she controls with means that become the basis for
+all kinds of vices." But because such cases are still frequent and
+because there will always be mothers incapable of bringing their
+children up, it would be a premature assumption to believe that the
+majority of women cannot be trained to become parents, if the
+development of the woman has this end in view. One of the tasks of the
+future is the creation of a generation of trained mothers, who among
+other things will emancipate children from the kindergarten system.
+Children are handled in crowds from two and three years up, they are
+made to appear before the public in crowds, made to work on the one
+plan, made to do the same petty, idiotic, and useless tasks. In this
+way, we believe at the present time that we are forming men, while
+actually we are only training units. Any one who remembers how, as a
+child, he played on the beach or in the wood, in a big nursery or in an
+old-fashioned attic, or has seen other children playing in these
+surroundings, will know how such unrestrained play deepens the soul,
+increases the capacity for invention, and stimulates the imagination a
+hundredfold more than children's games and occupations devised by the
+arrangement, and promoted by the interference, of elder persons. Adults
+are accustomed to amuse children in crowds, a custom which comes from
+intellectual vulgarity, instead of leaving them alone to amuse
+themselves. Besides this system encourages children to produce what they
+do not need, and leads them to imagine that they are working by so
+doing. Children should be taught to despise all the numerous unnecessary
+things which put life on a false level and make it artificial. They
+should be taught to try to simplify it, to aim for its supreme values;
+this should be the end of education. The kindergarten system is, on the
+contrary, one of the most effective means to produce the weak dilletante
+and the self-satisfied average man.
+
+If there is any further need for the kindergarten in the near or distant
+future, let it be a place where children may have the same freedom as
+cats or dogs, to play by themselves, and for themselves, to think out
+something of their own, where they can be provided with means to carry
+out their own plans, where they have companions to play with them. A
+sensible woman may be near at hand to look on or to supervise, but only
+to interfere when the children are likely to hurt themselves. Let her
+draw something for them occasionally, tell them a story, or teach them
+an amusing game, but otherwise let her be apparently quite passive and
+yet untiringly active in the observation of the traits of character and
+of disposition which play of this free type reveals. In like manner the
+mother should observe the play of children, their treatment of their
+companions at play, their inclinations, and collect as much material as
+she can but interfere as little directly as possible. The mother finally
+by this constant, many-sided, strenuous, yet passive kind of observation
+gets a knowledge of the child that is partially exact. One being never
+learns to know another being entirely, not even when that being has
+received its life from the other, not even when that life is daily
+renewed by the other being, in order to reach the full happiness of
+spiritual motherhood. It has been well said that as people regard the
+birth of a child as the sign of physical maturity, the education of a
+child is regarded as a sign of psychical maturity. But through lack in
+psychological insight, most parents remain their whole life immature.
+They can have the best principles, the most zealous fidelity to duty,
+combined with absolute blindness to the nature of children, the real
+causes of their actions, and the different combinations of different
+characteristics.
+
+Take some examples of the worst blunders of this type; the small child
+is often called vain who studies, full of interest, his own identity in
+the glass; the child who, from fear or confusion at a hard or
+incomprehensible question, does not answer or obey is called stubborn;
+the child that cannot explain his actions in those small things which
+adults every day entirely forget is looked upon as lying; and even
+before the child has a conception of the right of property, when he
+pilfers, he is called thievish. The child who says that he knows that
+he is naughty, and wants to be naughty, is called obdurate and
+impertinent, while this statement is really a self-confession and shows
+a character to which one may appeal with the best results. The child,
+sunk in thought, who forgets the small things of daily life, people call
+thoughtless. Even when a child is really selfish and is really lying or
+lazy, these characteristics are treated as if they were something
+individual, while actually they are caused often by some serious fault
+which must be dealt with. These characteristics can proceed from a good
+quality which may be destroyed, if the fault is not treated suitably.
+
+But even parents who now observe their children with more psychological
+insight than was used in earlier times are not able to study them, if
+their children go to school and kindergarten at an early age. This want
+of insight produces mistakes which often cause deep antagonisms between
+children and their parents, the sort of thing which now embitters so
+many households. Only fathers and mothers who reverence the
+individuality of their children, and combine with this feeling a careful
+observation of them through their whole life, are able to avoid this
+typical fault of our own time. People expect to gather grapes from
+thistles, instead of being satisfied with haws. Parents must see that
+they cannot create where there is no material to be created. But they
+must be capable of developing the characteristics which they discover in
+the nature of their children. This work they must undertake with
+optimism and resignation, for it represents the teaching of real
+psychological study. This will stop those efforts, painful alike for
+children and parents, that are applied in directions which offer no
+reward to effort.
+
+But the study of the psychology of the child, begun at its birth,
+continued in its play, its work, its rest, means a daily comparative
+study, and requires the undivided attention of one person. It can only
+be done by a person who has charge of but a few children; in a crowd it
+is impossible. It is all the more impossible because children in a crowd
+resemble one another more or less; and this makes observation more
+difficult.
+
+The kindergarten is only a factory. Children learn in it to model,
+instead of making mud pies according to their own taste. This process is
+typical of what these small atoms of humanity go through themselves.
+From the first floor of the factory the objects that have been turned
+out there are sent to the next floor above, the school; and from this
+they then go out put up in packages.
+
+The aim of school training is to carry out, with all its might,
+production by quantities that expresses the demands of our time in all
+spheres. The invention of individual school methods may reduce the
+influence of "canned education."
+
+As long as there are large cities, poor children in them must be able to
+obtain the possibilities of country children. Their playthings must be
+made out of the world which surrounds them. The obligations of their own
+home must supply them with work. This is altogether different from the
+play work of the kindergarten that has no connection with the
+seriousness of reality. A wise mother or teacher will adopt from the
+kindergarten system just so much as will enable her to teach children to
+observe nature and their surroundings; will take from it what enables
+her to make them combine their activity with some useful end; their
+amusement with some kind of knowledge.
+
+The Froebel dictum, "Let us live for the children," must be changed into
+a more significant phrase, "Let us allow the children to live." This,
+among other things, means "let them be emancipated from the burden of
+learning by heart," from the forms of system, from the pressure of the
+crowd, in those years while the quiet, secret work of the soul is as
+vital for them as the growing of the seed in the earth. The kindergarten
+system is opposed to this; it is forcing up the seed to life on a plate,
+where it looks very pretty, but only for the time being.
+
+The school with its _esprit de corps_ opens the way public lack of
+conscience. Modern society manages thus to reproduce the crimes of every
+past period; manages too, to reproduce them through men who are
+conscientious in their own private life. For those without consciences,
+who lead criminal movements, would never be able to put the masses of
+people in motion, unless they were just masses and nothing more; unless
+they were made to follow collective laws of honour, collective patriotic
+feelings, collective conceptions of duty. The child learns to be
+obedient to his school, to be loyal to his comrades, just as later on in
+life he learns these qualities as they are presented in his university,
+his student society, and his profession. All of this he learns sooner
+than to reverence his conscience, his feeling of right, his individual
+impulse. He learns to wink at, pardon, and disguise the sins committed
+by his own circle of companions, his own club, and his own country.
+
+This is the way the world produces its "Dreyfus Affairs," its Transvaal
+Wars. If the aim is to create men and not masses, we should follow the
+educational programme of the great statesman Stein--"to develop all
+those impulses on which the value and strength of mankind depend." This
+is only possible when the child is taught, at the earliest age, the
+freedom and danger of his own choice, the right and responsibility of
+his own will, the conditions and duties of being put to the test
+himself. All of these elements of character are unconsciously opposed by
+the kindergarten; the home alone can develop them. The highest result of
+education is to bring the individual into contact with his own
+conscience. This does not mean that the individual cannot experience by
+degrees the happiness and the necessity of being a factor in the service
+of the whole, first in his home, then among his companions and in his
+country, and finally in the world. The difference is this: in the first
+case the man is a living cell, co-operating and building up living
+forms; in the other he is a piece of cut stone used in artificial
+construction.
+
+Both for the development of individuality, as well as for the
+cultivation of the emotions, the home is to be preferred to the
+kindergarten and to the school. In the limited small circle of the home
+the emotional element can be deepened and tenderness can be developed,
+by the acts called for in the realities of domestic life. The
+kindergarten first, and then the school, free children from their
+natural individual obligations and put in their place demands that can
+only be fulfilled _en masse_. The child enters into a number of
+superficial relations. This situation tends to make his emotions
+superficial; here is the great danger of beginning school life at a
+tender age. On the other hand a one-sided home life brings with it the
+danger of concentrating the emotions to an excess. Education at home in
+the years when the emotions become harmonious and receive their decisive
+training is just as important for the child as is later on a pleasant
+sociable life with others of the same age, after the twelfth year is
+passed. All intellectual cultivation done according to the most
+excellent method, all social feelings, are worthless unless they have as
+their basis an individual development of the emotions. Somewhere in our
+body we must have a heart, to act as a real balance against our head.
+Only the man who has learnt to love a few, deep enough to die for them,
+is able to live profitably for the many.
+
+I should like to see not only the kindergarten but the preparatory
+school transferred to the home. There things can be considered that are
+never taken into account in a general school. The child need not have
+the nourishment he does not want, and which he does not need, at the
+time he now generally receives it. In the home school, one child can put
+off reading to a later age, another can be taught reading early. The
+desire for action in one child can be satisfied; the book-hunger of the
+other encouraged. Bodily development, the desire to make a real
+acquaintance with external nature can be considered in home work, play,
+and out-of-door activities. Then we can begin to teach when the child
+himself asks for teaching; that is, when he wishes to hear or do
+something in which knowledge alone can assist him. The child can twice
+as easily learn at ten years, under these conditions, what he now learns
+at eight; at eight what he now learns at six, if he comes to his study
+with developed powers of observation and an eager desire for action.
+Schools can never attain a full insight into the peculiar character of
+personality, into the ways in which knowledge must be placed before
+different individuals, into the right time for taking a subject or
+giving it up. The home school must be considered the ideal method where
+the child studies with a small group of well-selected companions.
+Individuality can be considered, plans of study and courses can be
+neglected. Through such neglect only, is a real living instruction
+possible. The advantages the modern school has over the home are hardly
+worth discussing. The order of the school, its method, system, and
+discipline, so much praised by its advocates as advantages, are, from my
+point of view, nothing but disadvantages. Habits of fulfilling duties,
+or work, orderly and punctual activity, that belong to a sound
+education, can be attained in the home school through far less
+artificial means. Of course it is urged as another advantage of the
+school that the school child becomes a member of a small community where
+he learns social duties. But the home is the natural community where the
+child, in full seriousness, learns the real social duties of readiness
+to help, and readiness to act, while the present-day school artificially
+replaces that domestic social education, of which the child is now
+robbed by studies at school and preparation at home. The real value of
+school life among companions can be had from the home school without its
+ordinary dangers. These dangers are not only evil influences, but, more
+than anything else, that collective process of reaching a standard of
+stupidity, due to the pressure of public opinion that comes from
+association in masses. The fear of common opinion, of being laughed at,
+is created in the receptive years of childhood, so open to such
+influences. The slightest deviation in dress, or taste, is criticised
+unsparingly. If an investigation were conducted on the sufferings of
+children through the tyranny of their fellows, a tyranny which sometimes
+takes harsher, sometimes milder forms, it would upset the prejudice that
+the usefulness of the school in this respect cannot be replaced.
+
+Besides there is the levelling pressure of a uniform discipline, which
+stunts personality from above, while life with school companions
+restricts it on all sides. Every criticism on this formal pedantry is
+met with the answer, "In a school it is absolutely impossible to permit
+children to do what can be done in the household; only fancy if all
+children in the school were to sharpen their lead pencils or erase
+words in their exercises." There is no need to insist further on this
+point. Hundreds of petty rules must exist, we are told, for the sake of
+discipline. And even if the rules could be reduced to a fourth of their
+present cubic contents, even the best schools would still feel the
+pressure of uniformity. The more this pressure is resisted by
+individuals, so much the better.
+
+Education in the first years must aim to strengthen individuality. The
+whole of biographical literature supplies an almost uniform proof of the
+importance of not commencing too early the levelling social education of
+the school. Early attendance at school is one of the reasons why we so
+frequently meet, as Dumas says, so many clever children, and so many
+stupid adults.
+
+Almost all great men and women, who have thought and created for
+themselves, have received either no education in school at all, or have
+gone to school at a rather later period, with longer or shorter
+interruptions, or have been trained in different schools. In most cases
+it was an accident, some living point of view, a book read in secret, a
+personal choice of subject that gave these exceptional beings their
+training. In this respect Goethe's education was ideal, considered apart
+from some pedantry due to his father's influence. At his mother's
+work-table he learnt to know the Bible; French he learnt from a
+theatrical company; English from a language master, in company with his
+father; Italian, because he heard his sister being taught the language;
+mathematics from a friend in the household, a study which Goethe applied
+immediately, first in cardboard diagrams, later in architectural
+drawings. His essays he prepared in the form of a correspondence in
+different languages between different relatives, scattered in various
+parts of the world. Geography he eagerly studied in books of travel in
+order to be able to give his narrative local colour. He knocked about
+with his father, learnt to observe different kinds of handwork, and also
+to try himself small experiments of his own skill.
+
+But some one may say, all men are not geniuses, and accordingly the
+majority without distinct talent need the school. Is it possible that
+the connection between originality and irregular attendance at school is
+merely accidental? How often does the school sin in its watering down of
+originality! As for unoriginal people, the argument urged here is an
+application of the biblical axiom, that from him who has nothing even
+the little will be taken away. I mean the individual who has no distinct
+personality will be forced in the school to give up the little that he
+can call his own. The old-fashioned school where a few subjects were
+learnt by heart, where the teachers were often badly prepared, where the
+students could go to sleep or pretend to learn, where the courses were
+simple and attention concentrated on Latin, seems barbarous to us. But
+it had less danger for the personality than the present-day school with
+its thorough preparation, its interest in readings, its perfected
+methods, its capital instructors who take every little stone out of the
+student's road, and prepare as much delightful intellectual nourishment
+as possible, sometimes even in a cooked-up form. This "good school" with
+its over-insistence on versatility is responsible for the nervousness of
+our day. Its general intellectual apathy has caused the negativeness of
+our times.
+
+The quietest, most obedient child is thought the best pupil, that is,
+the most impersonal individual is the model. So we see how the school
+confuses its conception of values. The more the soul and body are
+passive, are willing to be controlled and receptive, so much the better
+are the results from the school standpoint. Mischievous children,
+obstinate characters, one-sided and original natures, are always martyrs
+at school because of their desire for action, their spirit of
+opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-going, amiable,
+commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own individual
+tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get good
+certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the
+first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced
+into shape--or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a
+pebble on the seashore. It is struck by one wave after another, day by
+day, term by term; on they come--forty-five minutes for religious
+instruction, the same period for history, then French, then sloyd, then
+natural history; the next day new subjects in new, small doses. In the
+afternoon, there is preparation at home, and writing exercises,
+previously arranged and marked out, then corrected with care, and the
+prepared readings made the basis of questioning by the most approved
+methods, the mother having at home first gone over them with the child.
+These powerful billows stupefy the brain, and take the edge off the
+souls of both teacher and scholar. Even the most active teachers move
+along fettered by requirements and prejudices, unconditional necessities
+and methodical principles. Only occasionally is a soul saved from this
+fate by total skepticism. Some exalt this pettifogging professionalism
+to a plan of salvation, others are untiringly busy in changing details,
+in discussing minor improvements. Every real thoroughgoing reform
+affecting the principle, not the methods alone, goes to pieces, because
+it conflicts with the system supported by the state. It fails, through
+the obedient acceptance of the system on the part of parents, through
+the incapacity of teachers to look at the whole results of the system,
+through their disinclination to all radical methods of improvement.
+
+The school, like the home and society, in general should aim to fight
+more vigorously and more successfully the influences belittling life,
+and should further its development towards ever higher forms. This end
+is opposed by the modern schools. It is a gross mistake to hold up their
+excellent material and their number as proofs of popular culture. How
+the people are educated in the schools, how the material is used, what
+subjects are pursued in them are the momentous questions.
+
+Goethe's saying that "fortune is the development of our capacities" is
+as applicable to children as to adults. What these capacities are can be
+determined soon in the case of the talented child; his future can be
+secured by obtaining for him the possibility of such a development. But
+there are common capacities, proper to every normal human being, and
+from their development, fortune too can be the outcome. Among such
+capacities is memory, which modern man has nearly destroyed. "We throw
+ashes," says Max Muller, "every day on the glowing coals of memory while
+men of past ages could retain in their minds the treasures of our
+present literature." To these capacities belong, among others, power of
+thought, not in the sense of philosophic thinking, but in the simpler
+use of the word, gifts of observation, ability to draw conclusions and
+to exercise judgment. Of the common universal human faculties the
+emotions suffer most at the hand of the modern school.
+
+One of the fundamentally wrong pedagogical assumptions, is that
+mathematics and grammar develop the understanding. This is only true
+after a higher stage is reached in these courses. But there is no one
+who seriously maintains that, so far as nature or man is concerned, he
+has used directly or indirectly, in a single observation, conclusion, or
+exercise of judgment, the theses, hypotheses, statements, problems, the
+rules and exceptions, of mathematics and grammar, with which his
+childish brain was burdened. I have heard from mathematicians and
+philologians the same heresy that I am proclaiming, that mathematics and
+grammar, when they are not pursued as sciences, must be reduced to a
+minimum. Provided a person has mathematical talent, the study of
+mathematics is naturally agreeable, through the development of a
+capacity in a certain direction. If one has the gift for languages, the
+same is true of linguistic study. But without such special talent, these
+subjects have no educational value, because the powers of observation,
+drawing conclusions, exercising judgment, are just as undeveloped as
+they were before the mathematical problem was solved or the grammatical
+rules learned.
+
+Life--the life of nature and of man--this alone is the preparation for
+life. What the world of nature and the world of man offers in the way
+of living forms, objects of beauty, types of work, processes of
+development, can, by natural history, geography, history, art, and
+literature, give real value to memory; can teach the understanding to
+observe, to judge and distinguish; can train the feeling to become
+intense, and through its intensity combine the varying material in that
+unity which alone is education. In brief, real things are what the home
+and school should offer children in broad, rich, and warm streams. But
+the streams should not be taken off in canals and dammed up by methods,
+systems, divisions of courses, and examinations.
+
+I never read a pedagogical discussion without the fine words
+"self-activity, individual development, freedom of choice," suggesting
+to me the music which accompanies the sacrificial feasts of cannibals.
+The moment these words are used, limitations and reservations are
+introduced by their advocates. Their proposed application is ludicrously
+insignificant, in contrast with the great principle in the name of which
+they urge these changes. And so the pupil continues to be sacrificed to
+educational ideals, pedagogical systems, and examination requirements,
+that they refuse to abandon. The everlasting sin of the school against
+children is to be always talking about the child.
+
+The sloyd system (manual dexterity, handwork, artistic production) has
+certain good results on children. Accordingly the sloyd must be
+introduced into the school, and all must be made to share the advantages
+of this training; but there are children for whom the sloyd is as
+inappropriate and as useless a requirement as learning Latin. The child
+who wants to devote himself to his books should be no more forced to
+take up the sloyd, than the child who is happy with his planing table
+should be dragged to literature.
+
+All talk about "harmonious training" must be given the place where it
+belongs--in the pedagogical culinary science. Certainly harmonious
+development is the finest result of man's training, but it is only to be
+attained by his own choice. It implies a harmony between the real
+capacities of the individual, not a harmony worked up from a pedagogical
+formula. The results from the school kneading trough with its mince-meat
+processes are something quite different.
+
+Isolated reforms in the modern school have no significance; they will
+continue to have none, until we prepare for the great revolution, which
+will smash to pieces the whole present system and will leave not one
+stone of it upon another. Undoubtedly a "Deluge" of pedagogy must come,
+in which the ark need only contain Montaigne, Rousseau, Spencer, and the
+modern literature of the psychology of the child. When the ark comes to
+dry land man need not build schools but only plant vineyards where
+teachers will be employed to bring the ripe grapes to the children, who
+now get only a taste of the juice of culture in a thin watery mixture.
+
+The school has only one great end, to make itself unnecessary, to allow
+life and fortune, which is another way of saying self-activity, to take
+the place of system and method.
+
+From the kindergarten period on the child is now, as has been said, a
+material moulded, sometimes by hostile, sometimes by friendly hands. The
+mildest, the apparently freest methods produce uniformity by insisting
+on the same work, the same impression, the same regulations, day by day,
+year by year. Besides in the school, classes are never arranged
+according to the child's temperament and tendency, but according to his
+age and knowledge. So he is condemned in deadly tediousness to waste an
+infinite amount of time while he is waiting for others.
+
+The very earliest period of instruction should use the power the child
+has for observation and work. These capacities should be made the means
+of his education, the standard for using his own observation. If the
+power of observation is vigorous, no general rules are to be drawn, but
+only particular ones. One child must read, play, or do handwork in a
+different degree to another. One can at an early age, the other only at
+a later period, take advantage of the education to be obtained from
+going to museums or from travel (the best of all travel is tramping).
+The indispensable elements will be reduced to their lowest measure; for
+what any one man needs to be able to do, in order to find himself at
+home in life, is not considerable. The minimum is to read well, to spell
+properly, to write with both hands, to copy simple objects, so that one
+learns picture writing just as alphabet writing. This skill is quite
+different from artistic gifts. Besides there must be instruction in
+looking at things geometrically, the four simple rules of arithmetic and
+decimal fractions, as much geography as will help one to use a map and a
+time-table, as much knowledge of nature as will give one a fundamental
+conception of the simplest requirements of hygiene; and finally, the
+English language, in order to put one in touch with the increasing
+intercourse in the great world. Through these requirements the child
+will be endowed with what he needs, in order to find himself at home in
+the world of books and of life. Let there be added to these the ability
+to darn a stocking, sew on a button, and thread a needle.
+
+Only the indispensable should be the obligatory foundation of further
+culture, which is only the trimming on a simple garment. The trimming
+receives its entire value because the individual has prepared it
+himself; it must not be made by a machine according to a model prepared
+in a factory.
+
+What is mentioned here supplies the same basis for all, but children
+should be able to throw themselves into the pastoral life of the Old
+Testament, into the life of the Greek and Scandinavian gods and heroes,
+into the life of popular legends and national history; but this should
+be done only through the books which they get for their amusement. At
+the present time all of these things are made pure subjects of study!
+
+Assume, then, that this foundation is laid. The school of the future,
+which will be a school for all, will advance general education, but the
+plan it follows will be adapted to every individual. In the school of my
+dreams there will be no report books, no rewards, no examinations; at
+graduation time examinations will be arranged for but they will be oral.
+In them detailed knowledge will not be considered; education as a whole
+will determine the decision of the examiners, who will personally
+accompany the children in the open air in order to become quietly
+acquainted with what they know of mankind, of past and present history.
+
+And the education which will make the training aim at this end will be
+diametrically opposed to that given by the teacher of the present day.
+The teacher will be required to make his own observations, he will guide
+the scholar in the choice of books, and show him how to work. But he
+will not give first his own observation, judgment, and knowledge in the
+form of lectures, preparations, and experiments. Occasionally he will
+without giving notice ask for an oral or written account of work, and so
+ascertain how thoroughly the scholar has gone into the subject. At
+another time, when he knows that the scholar is prepared for it, he
+will give a general treatment, a comprehensive review of the subject, a
+stimulating and stirring impression, as a reward for independent work.
+Finally, when the scholar wishes it, he will examine him formally, but
+his real work will be to teach the scholar to make his own observations,
+to solve his own problems, to find his own aids to study in books,
+dictionaries, maps, etc., to fight his way through his own difficulties
+to victory and so reach the only moral reward for his trouble with
+broadened insight and increased strength.
+
+The scholar who sits down and listens to, or looks at, the demonstration
+or experiment of the teacher does not learn to observe, nor does he
+whose exercise book is corrected with painful accuracy learn to write;
+nor does the one who pedantically carries out the system of models in
+the sloyd system learn to make articles fit for every-day use. The
+student must make his investigations himself, he must find the mistakes
+himself when their presence is indicated to him, he must himself think
+out the objects brought before him. Above all, the separate errors must
+not be corrected except when they are so constant and serious that they
+waste time. But the scholar himself must try to find out the correct and
+complete method of work and of expression. This is what training, what
+education is.
+
+Text-books will be attractive and virile, the "Reader" will disappear,
+the complete books in the original (the text may be revised if it is
+filled with confusing details) will be placed in the hands of children.
+The school library will be the largest, most beautiful, and important
+room; lending books in the schools will be an essential part of the
+curriculum.
+
+The future school of my dreams will be surrounded by large gardens,
+where, as in already-existing schools in some places, the feeling for
+beauty will be directly encouraged. The individual scholars will arrange
+the flowers in the school and at home. They will take them home in order
+to adorn the window garden, and every schoolroom in winter will have a
+garden of this kind. This will be the natural method of making the
+simplest of all esthetic enjoyments a universal need. But taste must not
+be developed by instruction in the art of arranging flowers; this is to
+be attained only by pointing out those that have been arranged in the
+most beautiful way. In this as in all other things, self-help is
+essential.
+
+Natural dexterity will be attained by book-binding, turning, and other
+kinds of handwork, also by gardening and play. Such training has far
+greater educational value than the systematic types. The purposelessness
+and the uniformity of these are the terror of youth. Gymnastics should
+only be used on days when the weather makes bodily exercise in the open
+air impossible; they can certainly be made more living by being
+connected with physiology and hygiene, just as mathematics can be made
+real by being combined with handwork and drawing. But nothing can equal
+the value of movement in the open air.
+
+Besides its garden, the future school will have its hall. Outside it
+will have a playground for dancing and really free play--I mean the kind
+of play where children, after they have learnt the game, are left to
+themselves. Games constantly accompanied by a teacher make play a
+parody.
+
+The development of beauty will become the aim of physical instruction as
+it once was with the Greeks, not simply physical strength.
+
+Through different kinds of hand and garden work, the child will be
+spared from a number of requirements in mathematics and physics, because
+he will in many things make discoveries himself. In the methods of
+school drudgery the child learns that a seed grows by warmth and
+moisture. In real training, the child himself sows the seed and sees
+what happens to it; this system is followed I believe in many schools,
+but only as proofs of a given abstract statement. The mistake of the
+modern school is really just here; it illustrates its course of
+instruction by, as it were, over-charging the child's attention, instead
+of giving him time and opportunity to originate for himself.
+
+In the future school-building, there will be no class-rooms at all, but
+different halls with ample material provided for different subjects,
+and, by the side of them, rooms for work where each scholar will have a
+place assigned to him for private study. Common examinations will only
+take place when several scholars are ready and willing, anxious to be
+examined on the same subject; and each student can ask for the
+examination independent of the rest.
+
+In every room, on the outside of the building, architecture and
+decoration will form a beautiful whole; and the artistic objects,
+detached from the building, for the adornment of the school will be
+partly originals, partly casts and copies of famous originals.
+
+The sense for art will not be awakened by direct artistic instruction,
+either in the school or when visiting museums. Classes can perhaps get
+such knowledge when taken around museums; but love for art can only be
+gained when the scholar is surrounded by art; when he can absorb it in
+peace and freedom. Let this quiet progress be anticipated by
+instruction--I don't mean the admiring criticism of the teacher himself,
+which he in passing expresses without explanation or questioning--and
+the inevitable result is troubling the water of a living well.
+Interference here, as in all other cases, destroys the individual
+pleasure of discovery. Constantly being taken about really impairs the
+capacity for seeing for oneself. In art, in literature, and in religion,
+all instruction is a mistake until the young mind has chosen some part
+of it as an object to be known. Knowledge destroys, feeling creates,
+life. But the roots of feeling are easily injured.
+
+As to visits to museums under the direction of a teacher, they are only
+of use when the scholar has previously made, on his own account, his own
+discoveries. To these he should be stimulated by the teacher. When
+occupied in the study of Greek history, he will be asked for a
+description of Greek sculpture that is to be found in such and such a
+museum. When lectures are given on the Dutch War of Independence, Dutch
+pictures will be described. Only after the scholar has used his own
+eyes, and formed his own judgments, will a synthesis of his experiences
+under external guidance be of use. The same holds good of
+natural-history, historical, and ethnographical museums. Taking children
+around in herds produces very slight results unless they have been put
+in the way of noticing things by themselves.
+
+Among the books of the school, the best literature in the original and
+in good accessible translations should be found. Works should be at hand
+capable of giving aid to those who have artistic interests. There is no
+greater fault in modern education than the care spent in selecting books
+for different ages. This is essentially an individual matter, and can
+only be decided by the choice of the child himself. A general crusade
+against all children's books, and freedom for the young to read great
+literature, is essential to the sound development of the modern child.
+What is too old for him may be set aside according to the taste of the
+child himself. Suppose at the age of ten years, the child is absorbed in
+_Faust_ (I know such cases); the child then gets at this age an
+impression for life that does not prevent him receiving from the same
+poem another impression at twenty years, or again another at thirty or
+forty years. The so-called dangers in standard literature are, for the
+child, almost nil. Incidents that excite adults, his calm feelings pass
+over entirely. And even if children reach the emotional period of youth,
+only rarely does the plain downright expression of a great mind about
+natural things stain the imagination, falsify reality, and spoil taste.
+It is the modern romance, women's novels, just as much as French novels,
+that do this.
+
+Children cannot in these days, even if parents are unreasonable enough
+to wish it, be kept in ignorance. Crude or stolen impurity gets a
+greater power over a mind that has not absorbed respect for the absolute
+seriousness of natural processes. This reverence is sure to come from
+education, and through the impressions of standard literature and
+first-class art.
+
+Veiling this subject is apt to lead astray and to vulgarise. To those
+who can be harmed in this way the Bible is as suggestive as any of the
+crudities of modern literature. In the temperament which quietly accepts
+natural things as a matter of course, is laid the foundation of real
+purity, and only through real purity can life, like art and literature,
+become great and sound.
+
+In the works of great minds, one meets an infinite world in which the
+erotic element is only one factor. This gives them great repose.
+Moreover imagination must have nourishment outside of itself; otherwise
+it will live upon its own product. Its nourishment should be what is
+most readable. The child's mind should be first fed on legends and then
+on great literature. This should be all the more insisted on because
+great literature often remains unread, when modern literature in its
+varied types begins later on to be absorbing.
+
+To be able to use one's eyes in the worlds of nature, man, and art, to
+be able to read good things--these are the two great ends to which home
+and school education should direct their course. If the child has these
+capacities, he can learn almost everything else himself. I may remark in
+passing, that a sound development of the imagination has not only an
+æsthetic but an ethical significance. It is really the foundation for
+active sympathy all round. Numerous cruelties are committed now by
+people who have not sufficient imagination to see how their acts affect
+others.
+
+In my dreamed-of school, founded along these lines, there is perfect
+freedom in selecting subjects. The school offers the subjects, but it
+forces no one to take them. English, German, French, natural science,
+mathematics, history, and geography are taught. The mother tongue is
+practiced fluently in speaking, reading, and writing. But in this case
+grammar is superfluous both for general education and for using a
+language; it belongs to scientific study, not to general culture.
+Grammar should be applied in the case of foreign languages, only so far
+as it is absolutely necessary to appreciate the literature. This is the
+sole aim general culture has in view. Those who wish to speak the
+languages fluently, and write them correctly, must attain facility by
+continual study. Those who have mastered the literature very easily
+learn the rest. Those who are familiar with the literature of a foreign
+language, write it, even with the mistakes they make, better than the
+person who has put together a perfectly correct composition according to
+grammatical rules. After the child, in his language study, has made
+enough progress to understand a fairly easy book, he ought to work
+through one book after another, with the help of a dictionary and
+explain in his own language extempore what he reads. In this way is laid
+the foundation of a knowledge of literature, not the ready-made opinions
+of the histories of literature. Both in their own and in foreign
+literatures, the young must be lead to reality, not, as now, to its
+copy; to the sea, not to the water pipe. While the teacher is directing
+the study of language, he should try at the same time to help the
+scholar to a definite choice of books, and his choice should if possible
+be brought into relation with other subjects. So he will recommend
+literature connected with historical, scientific, or geographical study.
+Afterwards he will give a general analysis, and will read a passage
+aloud, or will encourage the scholar to read some favorite poem. But all
+poetry mongering--such as hacking a poem to pieces by divisions into
+strophies and sections--is to be forbidden.
+
+Since childhood is the best time for securing the familiar use of
+languages, after parents and teachers agree which scholars shall take up
+languages, children so selected will study English and French, each for
+two years successively, then let them have two years of German, or
+reverse this arrangement. In this way a language will always be studied
+with other subjects, never three languages together. It is really only
+possible to take in a language, as a possession to be kept through the
+future, and never lost, by giving to it alone two years of really
+thorough study.
+
+Scholars who want to continue their drawing or learn any kind of
+handwork, can combine it with the study of the main subjects. Chorus
+singing should be practised every day for the whole year, indoors and in
+the open air. It should be treated as a means of expressing the
+feelings, not as an introduction for developing musical capacities,
+though for that matter singing can give a lead to the discovery of
+musical talent.
+
+As to the four principal subjects, history, geography, natural science,
+and mathematics, they should not be studied at the same time. The
+shallow multiplicity of the present system is a burden to all; it works
+like the "water torture" on talented individuals. It wears out their
+desire to learn, their initiative, their individuality, their joy of
+living. Those under this torture never get a breathing spell, are never
+able to do thorough work, and so become superficial.
+
+In my ideal school, mathematics will be learnt in winter, as it is
+suitable for the cold and clear winter air. In spring and in autumn,
+nature, out of doors, in nature itself, will be studied, not each
+department of nature as a special subject. An insight into geology,
+botany, and the animal world will be attained in their close natural
+union. The scholar will learn separate objects through the actual
+observation of life. In the text-book of life they will gain in its
+broad outlines a combined sketch of what they have acquired through
+intellectual processes. On rainy days they will construct for themselves
+in writing and in drawing a general sketch of what they have seen.
+General culture does not mean knowing the number of stamens or the
+number of articulations of a hundred flowers or skeletons. What educates
+and acts on the feelings and imagination, on thought and character, too,
+for that matter, is observing and combining natural phenomena; the
+ability to follow the laws of life and development in the natural world
+about us. The last member in the scheme of development is man. So the
+study of man from the standpoint of physiology and hygiene, should come
+last; consideration for the psychology of the child, urges too, that
+the foundation for the knowledge of organic nature, physics, and
+chemistry, should complete the educational structure.
+
+As in natural sciences we are beginning to give up false methods, and
+make the student return to the same subject, with a broader point of
+view, in the same way the child should at certain periods devote his
+attention to history and geography, and then leave them entirely alone.
+The endless circle, the drudgery, the repetitions, all looking to
+examinations as the end, will with the examinations be abolished. It is
+a matter of experience that the small details of all subjects slip from
+the memory two months after examinations. Most educated men have no
+recollection of the detailed knowledge they acquired in school, while
+the general impressions of that period still influence soul, heart,
+character, and will. This experience will be used, not as is done now,
+simply recognised as a common one.
+
+In my school the scholar interested in history will apply himself to it
+in the winter months; will read works about it, while others are
+devoting themselves to mathematics or geography. In spring these two
+classes of students can share in the excursions without active
+participation in the studies, while those who are inclined to natural
+science will draw, make collections, and use the microscope. One group
+can by studying geography bring themselves into contact with the life of
+nature and the life of man. So they will be led next year to study
+history in winter and to take part in science study during the spring
+and autumn. All these different combinations are to be thought out by
+parents, teachers, and scholars; they can only be indicated here. The
+final principle is that only two subjects can be studied at the same
+time. After the scholar has acquired from these all the education he can
+absorb at this stage, these subjects will be dismissed and taken up
+again by those who wish to specialise in one direction or the other.
+Instead of the separation of subjects that divides interest and strength
+in our present schools, in the new ones the chief aim will be
+concentration. In history, the space devoted to work will be limited to
+the amount demanded by present-day culture. History will then be the
+only subject suitable for general intellectual training,--the history of
+man's development. It will bring out the great principles of ethnography
+and sociology, of political economy, the lives of great men, the history
+of the church, art, and literature. In scientific study and in teaching
+mathematics, the men prominent in science and in discovery will find a
+place. Geography brings up points of view related to almost every study,
+and experience already acquired gives good reason for making this
+subject the centre of all instruction.
+
+What are the results of the present-day school? Exhausted brain power,
+weak nerves, limited originality, paralysed initiative, dulled power of
+observing surrounding facts, idealism blunted under the feverish zeal of
+getting a position in the class--a wild chase in which parents and
+children regard the loss of a year as a great misfortune. After the
+examinations have been passed and the year gone by, the best students
+realise the need of beginning their studies in a living way at almost
+every point. The majority of students are unable to read even a paper
+with any real profit, and those who are given a book in a foreign
+language to which they have devoted innumerable hours, very seldom
+understand it completely, unless the language instruction of the school
+has been supplemented at home. The incapacity to observe for one's self,
+to get at the bottom of what is observed and reflect upon it, is
+constantly more remarkable, as a result of the preparation system at
+school, even when this is aided by the mothers hearing lessons at home.
+The late Professor Key said that it was his experience, as teacher in a
+medical institution, that scholars in school were incapable of seeing,
+thinking, or working. I have heard the same observation made in
+Stockholm lately in a government office, that the young men were
+incapable of taking up practical duties in which they should have shown
+the knowledge they were supposed to have after the fine examination they
+had passed. The system then does not serve even secondary ends; to all
+the higher aims of human existence it is directly opposed.
+
+In the course of a hundred years or so, experience of this sort will
+cause the downfall of the system. Then, perhaps, these dreamed-of
+schools will arise. In them, the youth will learn first of all to
+observe and to love life, and their own powers will be consciously
+cultivated as the highest values in life. By mixing children of all
+classes together, the upper class, provided it still exists, will get
+that "colouring of earnest character which it now lacks," as Almquist
+said long ago; the lower classes will get the polish, that general
+cultivation they now lack. Through these schools, where common training
+is given to all, the natural circulation between all classes will be
+furthered. The aristocrat's son and the workingman's son will change
+places, if nature has made the first adapted for the position of the
+second, and _vice versa_. Through these schools the country child will
+always be able to grow up in the country, and need not be sent for
+educational purposes into the city, provided there are still great
+cities. Finally boys and girls will enjoy in them all the advantages of
+co-education, without the particular capacities of each being forced
+into the uniformity of a common examination system.
+
+After the children all over the country have been educated to about
+fifteen years of age, in such real common schools, some working more
+with the brain, others with their hands, the application schools will
+begin--schools for classical studies, for exact, for social or æsthetic
+sciences; for handicrafts and handwork; for different professions and
+state positions; schools with different principles and methods, schools
+which can produce manifold differing forms of training and
+individuality. Education then, instead of being as now, the creator of
+servile souls, the devotees of formalism, or of characters who hate all
+forms in a spirit of revolt, will bring fresh personal powers to
+intellectual and material culture alike, to the sciences and the
+inventive faculties, to artistic talent and to the whole art of life. It
+will awaken and encourage capacity to find out new scientific methods,
+to think youthful thoughts, to make clever discoveries. Educated human
+beings will apply to the whole sphere of culture their experience in
+their own experiments, their own activity, their own efforts; for all of
+which the school and the home will have already laid the foundation.
+
+In the school, the painful restlessness of the present "to get
+somewhere" will disappear entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere of
+my school, the young generation will be trained to believe that the most
+important thing for man is not to do something, but to be something. It
+may be harsh to say that common natures are reckoned by what they do,
+noble natures by what they are; yet it is a deep truth, forgotten in
+this century of activity, in this age of woman. But it is bound to be
+remembered in the century of contemplation, in the century of the child.
+
+These principles will be applied, too, perhaps, in the field of
+practical work. Machines and electricity accomplish work that can give
+no creative enjoyment; handwork will be again a portion of man's
+happiness; we shall live through a second Renaissance, the renewal of
+the personal joy which the man of earlier times experienced when the
+artistic moulding, when the rich, coloured tapestry, the beautiful piece
+of carving came from his own hand. The present school system leads to
+the fabrication of unnecessary articles by the dozen. It does not lead
+to a true love and appreciation of professional work, that love and
+appreciation from which, in the great period of art, artistic production
+organically arose.
+
+The present system, in all fields of study, limits the natural capacity
+of the child in the concentration, the combination, and development of
+its powers. When it produces its best results, it turns children at the
+close of their school years into pocket encyclopedias, representing
+humanity's progress and knowledge. Only when such results as these cease
+to be called a harmonious development, will it be conceded that the
+school can and should have no other meaning than to give the child a
+preparation for continuing, through his whole life, the work of training
+and education. Only then will the school become a place where
+individuals get learning to last a lifetime, not as now, even when the
+best face is put upon it--where they are impoverished for life. Through
+the victory of these convictions alone will each individual get his
+rights at school; both the person who does not want to study, as well as
+the one who does. Consideration will be given to the individual who has
+to have books as means of training and to the other case where the
+activity of the eye and hand is required as a means to the same end. It
+will be a place for the person with practical talent and for the
+theorist, for the realist as well as for the idealist. Both classes can
+freely do what they can do best; the members of each class will often
+feel tempted to test their powers by doing what the other class is able
+to do. One-sidedness will be corrected naturally, not, as it is now,
+mercilessly flattened out through the steam-roller methods of the
+"harmonious ideal of training."
+
+To supply workers in these future schools, new normal schools must be
+provided. Patented pedagogy will give place to a type of teaching which
+considers the individual. Only the person who naturally or by training
+can play with children, live with children, learn from children, is fond
+of children, will be placed in the school to develop there for himself
+his individual methods. Positions will be given only after a year's
+trial. When this period is passed the teachers will not be tested by the
+examiner alone, one who has followed the instruction given by them
+during the year, but the children themselves will also be heard from on
+this question. Of course, no absolute value can be assigned to the
+judgment of children, but nevertheless it has a really great importance.
+The instinct of the child chooses with astonishing accuracy what is
+first-class. But what, in the case of the child, has this character?
+This question has been answered by Goethe, "The greatest fortune of the
+earth's children is personality alone."
+
+At the present time objectivity in instruction is exalted, but every
+great educator has achieved success by being entirely subjective. The
+teacher should be a lover of truth. Therefore he should never force a
+resisting object to serve his own views. As a result of this attitude,
+the more subjective he is, the better. The fuller and richer he
+communicates to the children the essence and power of his own view of
+life and his own character, so much the more will he forward their real
+development, provided, however, that he does not force upon them his
+opinions with the claim of infallibility. In this as in all other
+matters, the young should be allowed to exercise free choice.
+
+The teachers of both sexes in my school will have short hours of work, a
+long time to rest, and a large salary; that is, they will have the
+possibility of a continuous development. The limit of their service will
+be twenty years. After this period, they will become members of a school
+jury composed of parents and teachers, or they will assist in final
+examinations, as censors. These will be conducted as indicated above, in
+such a way that each censor shall pass a summer either at home or
+abroad, in company with young people, not more than five in number. By
+living with them the censor will be able to measure their capacity for
+absorbing an education; he can direct them in the choice of a
+profession. By a "Socratic" communication of practical wisdom, he will
+supply a substitute for the Confirmation Instruction which will no
+longer be given. The psychological value of this instruction is not to
+be actually found in what one learns from it, but in the direction of
+the mind to the serious questions and pursuits of life, in the awakening
+of ethical self-development, which is the factor of supreme importance
+in passing from childhood to youth. In this way the young will be
+initiated into the art of life. I mean by this the art of making one's
+own personality, one's own existence, an object of artistic interest and
+pursuit. The initiation will be conducted by a wise man, or by a woman
+who has kept her youthfulness, so that she understands the joys and
+pains of the young, their play and their seriousness, their dreams and
+aspirations, their faults and their dangers--leaders who can give
+indirect suggestions how young people should play their own melodies in
+the orchestra of life.
+
+My school will not come into existence while governments make their
+greatest sacrifices for militarism. Only when this tendency is overcome,
+a point in development will be reached, where one can see that the
+dearest school programme is also the cheapest. People will realise that
+strong manly brains and heart have the greatest social value. I have
+already said that this is no reform plan for the present that I am
+outlining here, only a dream for the future. But in our wonderful
+existence dreams are becoming at last actual realities.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Since I wrote the above, there have been founded in
+England, France, also in Norway, reformed schools, working more or less
+in the direction I have outlined.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
+
+
+At the present moment the most demoralising factor in education is
+Christian religious instruction. What I mean by this is principally
+catechism, Scripture history, theology, and church history. Even earnest
+Christians have said, regarding the ordinary instruction in these
+subjects, that nothing shows better how deeply religion is rooted in
+man's nature than the fact that "religious education" is not able to
+destroy religion.
+
+But beside this, I believe that even a more living, a more actual
+instruction in Christianity injures the child. Children should bring
+themselves by themselves to live in the patriarchal world of the Old
+Testament; indeed, in the world of the New Testament as well. This can
+be done best in the form of children's Bibles. These works will be
+treasured by children; they will find in them infinite material for
+nourishing the imagination and the emotions. But this can only be done
+by allowing children to read the Bible undisturbed, without the need of
+pedagogical or dogmatic explanation. At home this book, like other
+children's books, should be only talked about and explained when the
+child requests it. It should never be treated as a school book or appear
+on the school desk. If the child gets impressions in this way from the
+Bible, freed from all other authority, apart from the subjective one of
+the impressions themselves, the myths of the Bible will no more
+contradict the rest of his instruction, than the Scandinavian story of
+creation or the Greek legends of the gods.
+
+But the most dangerous of all educational mistakes in influencing
+humanity, is due to the fact, that children are now taught the Old
+Testament account of the world as absolute truth, although it wholly
+contradicts their physical and historical instruction. Besides children
+learn to regard the morality of the New Testament as absolutely binding,
+while its commands are everywhere seen to be transgressed by the child,
+the moment he takes his first step into life. Our whole industrial and
+capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of the Christian command
+to love one's neighbour as one's self. The capitalistic axiom is that
+every man is nearest neighbour to himself.
+
+The eyes of children are here and in similar cases, clear-sighted in
+their simplicity. At a tender age they are able to observe whether their
+surroundings are in living accord with Christian teaching. From a
+four-year-old child, with whom I was talking about Jesus' commandment to
+love one another, I received the reply, "If Jesus really said so, Papa
+is no Christian." Before long the child gets into conflict with his
+instructors and with the commands of Christianity. A small child in a
+Swedish city took the word of Jesus about charity to heart. Not only his
+playthings, but his clothes he gave to the poor; his parents cured, by
+corporal punishment, this practical type of Christianity. A teacher who
+was impressing on a small girl in a Finnish city the commandment to love
+one's enemies, received as an answer that this was impossible, for no
+one in Finland could love Bobrikoff.
+
+I know the sophism used in both cases to overcome the invulnerable logic
+of the child; but I also know how these sophisms make hypocrisy so
+natural among Christians, that it is now unconscious. It would take a
+new Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences. Everywhere Rousseau's words
+hold true, "The child gets high principles to direct him, but he is
+forced by his surroundings to act according to petty principles, every
+time he wishes to put the high ones into practice." He goes on to say
+people have innumerable "ifs" and "buts," by which the child has to
+learn that great principles are only words, that the reality of life is
+something quite different.
+
+The dangerous thing is not that the ideal of Christianity is high; it
+comes from the fact that every ideal in its essence is unattainable. The
+nearer we get to it the more lofty it is. This is the characteristic of
+every ideal. But the demoralising feature in Christianity as an ideal
+is, that it is presented as absolute, while man as a social being is
+obliged to transgress it every day. Besides he is taught in his
+religious instruction, that as a fallen being he cannot in any case
+attain the ideal, although the only possibility of his living
+righteously in temporal things, and happily in the world to come,
+depends on his capacity for realising it.
+
+In this net of unsolvable contradictions, generation after generation
+has seen its ideal of belief obscured. Gradually each new generation has
+learned not to take its new ideal seriously. As to the cowardly or
+braggart concessions to the idiocies of fashion, and the follies by
+which people are ruined in order to live according to their position,
+among other psychological grounds for man's lack of steadiness must be
+placed, as its ultimate cause, the following: The child, along with
+religion, has breathed in the conviction that opinions are one thing,
+actions another. This experience goes through the whole of life, even in
+the case of those who have lost the conviction that the Christian
+religion is absolute. The free-thinker is married, has his children
+baptised, and allows them to be confirmed, without considering whether
+he is forced to it by his own wish, or the wish of doing like other
+people. The republican sings the royal hymn, sends loyal salutations by
+telegraph, accepts decorations,--but I must break off, otherwise I
+should have to enumerate all the small acts of insincerity to one's
+self, of which the daily life of most people consists, and which are
+defended under the name of non-essentials; I could never get to the end.
+This is not the way the Christian martyrs thought who might have freed
+themselves from death by casting a few grains of incense on the
+emperor's altar. Two grains of incense,--what an unimportant matter,
+thinks the modern man, and with quiet conscience he daily sacrifices to
+many gods in whom he does not believe.
+
+How illogical Protestantism is too, and yet for so long it possessed a
+spiritually educative power, while its dualism was unsuspected, while
+one with full sincerity gave to holiday and work day its due share. But
+now that a new Protestantism is come to life within the fold of
+Protestantism, this method of speaking in two voices is deeply
+demoralising.
+
+Piece by piece has been torn down that system of teaching which the
+Catholic church built up, so wonderfully adapted to the psychological
+needs of the majority of people. It formed its fundamental creeds, just
+as they still remain, on the deepest experiences of mankind. But
+Protestantism is ever looking back from the results of its own
+handiwork.
+
+In home, in the school, in the high school, during military service, in
+office work, everywhere passive dependence is insisted on under the name
+of discipline, discretion, faithfulness to duty. And like all the fine
+words, by which the living souls of men are turned into the slaves of
+discipline, these terms exalt _esprit de corps_, and pass over really
+serious faults. Discipline means subordinating one's self to every crude
+force. Only when all Protestants really become actual Protestants, and
+refuse to receive the greatest good of life, their religion, through
+authority, will they begin even in social and political questions to
+attain an independent opinion of their own. As teachers and leaders,
+they will secure for school children, and for students, for officers and
+for officials, the freedom in word and deed that is the right of the
+citizen and the man. Men and women, who in their private life are
+strictly honourable, have learnt, in general questions, to put their
+thoughts, their acts, under the command of a leader, and above all they
+have learnt to do this in the name of religious belief.
+
+The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the
+essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the
+power to express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these
+give man a new share of civilisation and culture. As long as education
+and social life do not consciously forward this kind of courage, power,
+and will, the world will remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity,
+crudeness, force, and selfishness, no matter whether radicals or
+conservatives, the democratic or aristocratic elements, have the upper
+hand.
+
+The most demoralising of all principles of belief was the discouraging
+teaching that human nature was fallen and incapable of reaching holiness
+by its own effort--the teaching that one could only come through grace
+and forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with temporal and eternal
+things. For those below the ordinary level, this position of grace
+produced spiritual stagnation, not to speak of the business people, who
+daily allowed the blood of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in the
+score of morality. Only those who were naturally superior increased in
+holiness on being convinced that they were children of God in Christ.
+Mankind, on the whole, showed the deep demoralisation of a double
+morality. This dualism commenced as soon as the first Christians ceased
+to expect the return of Jesus,--an expectation which brought their life
+into real unity with his teaching. But this double morality has for
+nineteen hundred years retained man's soul and the social order in
+practical heathenism. Although some pure and great spirits really
+received aid from Christianity in their longings for infinity, and
+although in the Middle Ages many strong hearts tried seriously to
+realise its teaching, yet the majority of mankind lived and lives still
+in wavering irresolution. This is the result of having no place to
+anchor to while the citizens of antiquity had an ethic, which could be
+translated into reality and could turn them into sincere, steadfast
+personalities.
+
+Since nineteen hundred years have proved that there is no possibility,
+in a humanly constructed society, of living according to the teaching of
+Jesus, as a practical, infallible rule of holiness, man can escape this
+immoral duplicity only in one way: the way already travelled over by
+many separate individuals, who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou not,
+thyself, completed all, O holy glowing heart!" In other words, these
+individuals have become convinced that Christianity is the product of
+humanity. Just as little as any other product of humanity does it
+exhaust absolute and eternal truth.
+
+When men cease to teach their children belief in an eternal providence,
+without whose will no sparrow falls from the roof, they will be able,
+instead of this, to imprint on the minds of children the new religious
+conception of the divinity of a world, proceeding according to law. The
+new morality will be built on this new religious idea. It will be filled
+with reverence for the absolute conjunction of cause and effect--a
+connection which no grace can remove. Man's actions will really be
+directed by this certainty. He will not rock himself to sleep in any
+sort of hope, based on providence or a reconciliation, able to defer
+surely fixed effects. This new morality, strengthened by the realities
+of life, admits of logical consequences. No single command of this
+teaching needs to remain an empty phrase. In its system, too, there will
+be a place to apply all the eternal profound words uttered by Jesus or
+by other great human souls. These words will ever furnish further
+material for application, which is the same as saying material for
+self-application. Yet the application will be worked out in complete
+freedom. Each word will be used as furnishing the material just suited
+to that style which men wish to apply to the architecture of their
+personality. Yet neither the words nor the examples of one or the other
+teacher will be taught as absolutely binding.
+
+The soul of the child will not be stained by tears of repentance for
+sins nor by the fear of hell. It will not be stained by a realism
+without ideas and without ideals, by the contemptuous mistrust, which
+the mouldering effects of fine words leave behind, like cold damp
+spots. The weak, as well as the strong, will progress in the happy and
+responsible belief in their own personality, as their only source of
+help. The pulse of their purpose will be strong and warm with red blood.
+They will not be forced to humility; they will not accept even equality
+with all others, or with any other one. On the contrary they will be
+strengthened in their right, to give their own individual stamp to their
+joys, their sufferings, and their works. They will be warned to do their
+best because it is their own; to seek their highest good, by drawing
+their own boundaries at the place where the rights of others begin.
+
+While the home and the school make compromises between two opposed views
+of life, people obtain from neither of them any real good for the
+education of children. I have already shown how in one and the same
+school religious instruction and a certain amount of knowledge and love
+for nature as well as history can be communicated. In one and the same
+school the course of natural development and history can be taught in
+connection with instruction in religious history. In this instruction
+Judaism and Christianity will receive the first place. So the reverence
+and love children were wont to acquire for the personality and morality
+of Jesus, previously obtained in the Bible, can be increased. Guided by
+sincere and serious purposes one can select either plan. But, during
+religious instruction, to make Moses and Christ the absolute teachers of
+truth, and in the hours devoted to natural history, to expound
+Darwinism, cause more than anything else that want of logic, that moral
+laxity and flaccidity that can effect nothing and want nothing.
+Everything I have learnt, since these words were written, has
+strengthened a hundred fold my previous convictions that the most
+essential thing is not, what kind of view of life we have--this may be
+important enough too--but that we have enough capacity of faith to
+appropriate for ourselves some view of life, enough force to bring it to
+reality in life. But nothing works more depressingly on the ethical
+energy of growing generations than the dualistic view of life, received
+at the present time at school. The school too must exercise its choice;
+there must be no compromise between two schemes of education and two
+views of life, if the strength of will and the power of faith in young
+people is not to be broken. The question of a compromise is in this
+case not a question of application; it is a most important question of
+principle in education.
+
+Since I set down these words, many points of view have been brought out
+in this connection. One which made a sensation when it was published, in
+1890, was Professor Dodel's book, _Moses or Darwin?_ The author showed
+how deeply Darwinism was implanted in science and in civilisation; how
+popular education was restricted, because it was kept remote from the
+scientific views of the present day and forced into the circle of
+ecclesiastical ideas. Religious instruction is simply a crime against
+the psychological law of development. For children are taught by a
+theological system to think about abstract conceptions, while they are
+in no condition to do it. The worst is, he said, that in high schools
+the theory of development is now taught as scientific truth, while in
+the common schools, built and maintained by the same government, the
+myth of the Mosaic story of creation continues to be taught, in the
+sharpest contrast with what science and living nature teach the child.
+This is an immoral and dishonest state of affairs that must be brought
+to an end.
+
+It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional
+element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his
+own personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to
+sacrifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to
+the acts we hold as ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon the
+soul and can no longer be the connecting link of all factors in our
+conduct, earnest men are abandoning it more and more, influenced by
+purely religious reasons. Such men should not have their children
+brought up as Christians, under the excuse that the child requires
+Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in which adults are not agreed
+about what the child needs, we should try to get, not from adults but
+from children themselves, some information about their real needs. In
+this way we can learn that the child himself begins at a very early
+period to be concerned with the eternal riddles of mankind, to be
+troubled with the questions of whence and whither. At the same time one
+discovers that the sincere and honest childish nature is opposed to the
+Christian explanation of the world, until the child's sincerity is
+dulled and he either takes without question what is taught, or in his
+own soul denies what his lips must repeat, or finally allows his heart
+to be possessed by the only nourishment offered to his religious needs.
+
+My own recollections of childhood caused me to make observations of the
+religious ideas of children at an early period. I have now before me
+comprehensive accounts of this investigation, going back twenty-five
+years. I recollect my own fierce hate against God, when I, at the age of
+six years, heard of the death of Jesus being caused by God's demand for
+an atonement, and at ten years I recall my denial of God's providence,
+when a young workman died far away from his wife and his five children,
+to whom his existence was so necessary. My brooding about the existence
+of God took on this occasion the form of a challenge. I wrote in the
+sand, "God is dead." In doing so I thought, If there is a God, he will
+kill me now with a thunderbolt. But since the sun continued to shine,
+the question was answered for the time being; but it soon turned up
+again. I had no other religious instruction than reading the Bible on
+Sunday, preaching on Sunday, and reading from the catechism, which, by
+the way, was never explained. Yet the New Testament belonged to my play
+books; I learnt in it to love Jesus as profoundly as other great
+personalities of whom I read. But during the confirmation period, I
+received explanations of the Bible; in them every point, every name in
+the Gospel was explained, every sentence made the basis of
+hair-splitting distinctions, to show the fulfilment of prophecies and
+the edifying hidden meaning of every word, that formerly seemed so
+simple. The dogma of the Trinity for example was shown to be contained
+in the second verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad discovery for
+me, that the living book of my childish heart and my childish
+imagination could be so stone dead. That religious indifference is a
+frequent result of religious instruction, that spiritual maladies come
+from the desire to convert the souls of children, numerous proofs can be
+given. I have heard children of six years speak with holy horror of
+their four-year-old brother who dug with a spade on Sunday. On the other
+hand I have heard a six-year-old child who was dragged in one day to
+three church services ask after reflection whether it was not more
+tolerable to go to hell immediately.
+
+The Judaic Christian conception of a creative and sustaining providence,
+which gives the fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely
+opposed to all that experience and evolution teaches us about existence,
+that one cannot even conceive of the possibility of holding both ideas
+theoretically at the same time. Much less can one practically unite them
+by the paste of compromise. The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does
+not allow himself to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth
+then let us not speak to children about life at all--life in its unity
+and diversity, its manifold creative acts, its process of continuous
+creation, its eternal divine subjection to law.
+
+But this means that it is impossible to save the Christian God for
+children, after the child begins to think about this God, in whom he is
+taught blind confidence. Nor can the child be prepared in this way for
+the new conception of God with its religious, its uniting and elevating
+power, I mean for the conception of a God whose revealed book is the
+starry heavens, and whose prophetic sight is in the unfathomable sea,
+and in the deeps of man's heart, the God who is in life and is life.
+Nothing shows better how imperfect is the real belief of modern
+thinkers, than the fact that they always teach their children a system
+which they do not wish to live by spiritually themselves, but which
+they hold as indispensable for the moral and social future of the child.
+
+When we pass from the conception of providence to the conception of sin,
+we find in children the same natural logic. A small girl, an only child,
+asked: "How could God allow his only child to be killed? You could not
+have done it to me!" And a small boy said, "It is a very good thing for
+us that the Jews crucified Christ, so that nothing happened to us."
+These are both poles of an emotional and a practical way of looking at
+the Atonement. Within them all similar circumferences are drawn. To a
+more comic and naïve sphere of ideas belongs the proposal of a small
+girl to call the Virgin Mary God's wife. Also there is the story of a
+boy who spoke in school of Our Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the
+Trinity.
+
+From the classes in Bible history and catechism, there are innumerable
+examples of children reading the words incorrectly, and misunderstanding
+the ideas they stand for. A boy, warned to keep the lamps burning,
+answered contentedly, "We have petroleum gratis." Another, asked whether
+he would like to be born again, said, "No, I might be turned into a
+girl." These are typical examples. There is an anecdote of a child,
+who, on being consoled with the statement that God was in the dark near
+her, asked her mother to put God out and light the lamp. Another child,
+seeing the pictures of the Christian martyrs in the arena, cried out
+sympathetically, "Look at that poor tiger; he hasn't got a Christian."
+These are a few out of a mass of examples, typical of the explanation
+given by children to the religious ideas they receive, notions forcing
+them into a world of ideas which they either accept in a material sense,
+or by which they are absolutely nonplussed.
+
+The childish circle of ideas is revealed by anecdotes of this kind, or
+by the comment of a small girl who asked when she heard that she had
+been born about eleven o'clock at night, "How could I have remained out
+so late?" These examples show that such conceptions as original sin, the
+fall of man, regeneration and salvation, are first necessarily
+meaningless words, and afterwards terribly difficult words. In my whole
+life fear of hell never absorbed my attention for five minutes, but I
+know children and grown people who are martyrs to this terror. I know
+children too who, when belief in hell was presented to them in school as
+absolutely necessary, bewailed that their mother had said she did not
+believe in hell, and therefore thought she must be very wicked.
+
+We are certainly a long way off from those times when, to use the
+picturesque expression of an historian of civilisation, "The fear of the
+devil constantly darkened the life of men, as the shadow of the sails of
+a windmill darkens the windows of the miller"; far from the times, too,
+when divine persons constantly revealed themselves to the believer, and
+when miracles belonged just as really to the daily habits of thought as
+to-day they are disregarded even by the believer. But so long as belief
+in the devil, providence and miracles is upheld in religious
+instruction, it will be impossible for the sunshine of the civilised
+view, which is the scientific as opposed to the superstitious view, to
+penetrate the darkness where the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are
+nurtured.
+
+The ideas children form of heaven are generally fine examples of
+childish realism. A child thought his brother could not be in heaven,
+because he would have to climb a ladder, and so would be disobedient,
+for he had been forbidden to climb one. A girl asked, when she heard
+that her grandmother was in heaven, whether God was sitting there and
+holding her from falling out. These are a few of the many proofs of the
+child's sense of reality, that leads to mistaken answers here, as in so
+many other instances. If it is said by way of protest that the childish
+imagination needs myths and symbolism, the answer is an easy one. We
+cannot and should not rob the child of the play of imagination, but play
+should not be taken in earnest. It is not to be wondered at that
+children construct for themselves realistic ideas about spiritual
+things. This practice is no more to be opposed, than any of the other
+expressions of the life of the child's soul. But when these false ideas
+are presented as the highest truth of life, they must disturb the sacred
+simplicity of the child.
+
+I know children in whom the origin of unbelief is to be traced to the
+words of Jesus, that everything asked for by the believing heart will be
+received. A small child, locked up in a dark room, prayed that God might
+show people how badly he was being treated, by causing a lamp of
+precious stones to be lit in the dark. Another asked to have a sick
+mother saved; another prayed by the side of a dead companion that she
+might rise again. For all these three, the experience of having their
+most believing, most fervent prayer unanswered, was the great turning
+point in their spiritual life. I can authenticate from my own experience
+and the experiences of others the ethical revolt which the cases of
+injustice in the Old Testament--for example God's preference of Jacob
+over Esau--occasion in a healthy child. The explanations offered in this
+case and in others like it fill the child with silent contempt. When the
+child ends in finding that adults themselves do not believe the religion
+they teach, the childish instinct for belief and for reverence, that
+capacity which is the real ground for all religious feeling, is injured
+for life.
+
+I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines of the pious literature
+written for children, with their stories of conversion and holiness.
+Parents are able to protect their children from them. I speak here only
+of that way of looking at the world, which is forced on children with or
+against the will of their parents. This degrades their conceptions of
+God, of Jesus, of nature. These conceptions, the child if left to
+himself can develop simply or powerfully. It is this way of looking at
+the world that causes unnecessary suffering and dangerous prejudices.
+The inclination of the child to deep religious feeling, sound faith,
+and ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened by an ability to draw
+the standards of life as freely from the Bible as from the world's
+literature. The same result will be produced by books on other
+religions, like Buddhism, from the great religious personalities who
+illustrate the struggle for an ideal, and from such children's books as
+show like efforts in a healthy form. No child has the slightest need of
+the catechism or theology for his religion or for his training; no other
+church history is needed than that connected with the general history of
+the world. In this last study the chief stress should be laid in
+teaching on the errors, in order to impress on the young the conviction,
+that all new truths are called by their contemporaries "errors." In
+other words these "errors" are the best negative material man has for
+discovering the truth.
+
+Working over and explaining the contradictions met with by the child in
+such religious instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to the
+preparation for a true life, in which people have to put up with
+innumerable contradictions. But this personal work injures neither the
+piety nor the soundness of the child's soul. Such injuries come rather
+from irritating pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual fanaticism,
+from deceits of the reason, barrenness of soul, or perverted feeling of
+right, all of which are the notorious results of Christian training and
+Christian instruction, given according to the usual methods of the
+present day. For the present as well as for the future, a child will be
+able to solve more easily these spiritual problems if his fine feeling
+for right and his quick logic have not been dulled by the dogmatic
+answers to those eternal problems, that place him in as much difficulty
+as the thinker.
+
+Kant exposed long ago the most serious injuries of the kind of religious
+instruction which still prevails. He showed that by making the church's
+teaching the basis of morality, improper motives were assigned to
+action. A thing must be avoided, not because God has forbidden it, but
+because it is in and for itself wrong. Man must aim at good, not because
+heaven or hell awaits the good or the bad, but because good has a higher
+value than evil. To this point of view of Kant there must be added the
+truth, that a position is ethically weakening, when man is presented as
+incapable of doing good by his own power. So he is told in this as in
+all other cases, he must be humble and trust in God's help. Confidence
+in our strength and the feeling of our own responsibility have a strong
+moral influence. The belief that man is sin-laden, without chance of
+change, has led him to remain where he is.
+
+If the future generation is to grow up with upright souls, the first
+condition of such growth is to obliterate from the existence of children
+and young people, by a mighty scratch of the pen, the catechism, Bible
+history, theology and church history.
+
+We must bow down before the infinities and mysteries of our earthly
+existence and of the world beyond. We must distinguish between and
+select real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of
+mankind, of man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the
+whole race a rich and strong personality. We must look to great models.
+We must reverence the divine and the regular in the course of the world,
+in the processes of development of man's mind. These are the new lines
+of meditation, the new religious feelings of reverence and love, that
+will make the children of the new century strong, sound, and beautiful.
+
+These changes will destroy that idea of God that combines "God help us"
+with our victories, that has increased the national lust for conquest,
+the passion for mastery, the instinct of gain. It will be felt that
+mixing up God in the standards of human passions is blasphemous. People
+will see, that patriotism, nourished on egoism and ambition, is the most
+godless thing because the most inhuman of all the life-perverting sins
+with which man outrages the holiness of life.
+
+Intellects which can now pass over the contradiction between
+Christianity and war, which can even derive strength and consolation
+from them, have been depraved by the ideas forced upon mankind through
+thousands of years. Nothing more can be expected from men of such
+brains, than that they should die in the wilderness, without ever
+obtaining a sight of the promised land.
+
+But the brains of children can be protected from the most unholy of all
+mental misconceptions, from the superstition that the patriotism, and
+the nationalism, which injures the rights of others, have something in
+common with ideas about God.
+
+Let children be taught that national characteristics, the use of force,
+the right of independent action, is as essential for a people as for an
+individual, that it is worth every sacrifice. Let them be taught that,
+on their appreciation of the nature of their country, of its life in
+the past and in the present, depends their own development. Let them be
+taught to dream beautiful inspiring dreams of the future of their
+country, of their own work, as the necessary foundation of this future.
+
+They should be taught at an early age to understand the deep gulf
+between patriotic feeling and the egoism which is called patriotism.
+This is the patriotism in whose name small countries are oppressed by
+great countries, in whose name nineteenth-century Europe has armed
+itself under the stimulus of revenge, in whose name the close of the
+century witnessed the extension of violence in north and south, in west
+and east.
+
+Militarism and clericalism, both principles presenting authority as
+opposed to individual standards of right, are ever closely combined; but
+they are not what they are called. They are not patriotism and religion.
+These two words involve a sense of common citizenship, of freedom, of
+justice, exalted above the narrow sphere of the individual, of the
+interests of class, of the interests of one's own country. Such are the
+principles which unite different groups within a land in great interests
+common to all, just as they unite different peoples in great vital
+questions common to all. But militarism and clericalism oppress freedom
+by the principles of authority, oppress the idea of individual
+development, by that of discipline, oppress the feeling of common weal
+by the desire for glory and war, oppress the feeling for right by the
+feeling for military honour. In Germany under the badge of Christianity
+and militarism, the civil rights of the citizen, his claims for social
+freedom, have been seriously menaced. Hypnotised by these principles
+many members of the Russian, French, and English nations, respectable as
+they are individually, have gloated over the deeds of unrighteousness
+committed by their respective governments.
+
+All this will go on; people will continue to be burdened to the ground
+by ever increasing military preparations. The rights of the small
+nations will be constantly encroached upon by the larger ones, even
+after the present world powers, like those that have preceded them, have
+broken down under the burden of their own expansion. It will continue to
+be so, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the feeling
+for humanity before the feeling for their country; until they strive to
+expand the sympathies of their children to embrace all living things,
+plants, animals, and men; until they teach them to see, that sympathy
+involves not only suffering with others but rejoicing with others, and
+that the individual increases his own emotional capacity, when he learns
+to feel with other individuals and with other peoples. It will go on, as
+it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the
+certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national interests,
+treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned. The
+moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony
+between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in
+the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of
+God is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the
+idea of the soldier will be ennobled. It will no longer be identified
+with blind obedience and limited class courage. The word will come to
+mean a man and a fellow-citizen with the same civilised interests, the
+same conception of law, the same need of freedom, the same feeling for
+honour, as all other fellow-citizens. The soldier will be a defender of
+his fatherland, whose character will have no other warlike traits, than
+those called forth for the protection of sacred human and civil rights.
+
+Self-defense, personal or national, will be imprinted on the child as
+the first of duties, not as it is represented in the commands of
+Christianity. Or to speak more accurately the child has this instinctive
+feeling; all that need be done is not to confuse this instinct. The
+child understands quite well, that evil men, when not resisted, become
+lords over the property of others. He knows that the low and the
+unrighteous get the victory, and that right-thinking and high-minded
+people are sacrificed by unrighteous and low-thinking people. The
+impulse to resistance is the first germ of the social feeling for
+righteousness, and by this feeling will the unreflecting judgment of the
+child be led also in the study of history. The child never doubts that
+William Tell was right, even when, in his instruction in religion, he
+has been definitely taught obedience to the powers that be, that come
+from God. Every straight childish soul applauds Andreas Hofer, despite
+his uncompromising conflict with lawful authority. With his natural
+directness the child cuts off all sophisms; at least all children do who
+are not irrevocably stupefied by Christian principles.
+
+To conclude what I have said against religious instruction, I will add a
+statement of a ten-year-old child, made after three years struggling
+with the catechism and biblical history: "I do not believe any of this,
+but I hope, when men are some day wise enough, each person may have his
+own belief, just as each one has his own face."
+
+This small philosopher in these words hit unconsciously upon the most
+serious spiritual injury done by religious instruction. It forces on
+man's mind a special view of the world, like a conventional mask on a
+man's face. But freedom and the rights of the soul's life can only be
+secured by its own reflections. The soul itself must work out that
+assurance of belief in which man can live and die. For generations the
+great spiritual dangers of mankind have been caused by looking backwards
+to find the ideal and the truth, by regarding both as once for all
+given, as absolutely limited.
+
+As soon as a child becomes conscious of himself he should feel that he
+is a discoverer with infinities before him. The king's son, in the realm
+of life, will no longer do menial service as a prodigal son in a foreign
+land. With the whole power of his will, he can repeat those old words,
+"I will arise and go to my father."
+
+When Jaquino di Fiori in the Middle Ages preached of the Kingdom of the
+Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, till his hair became as silvery
+grey as the leaves of the olive tree, he compared these three realms
+with the nettle, the rose, and the lily, the light of the stars, the
+sunlight, and the sun.
+
+In all the ends of the world this preaching is being heard now. But that
+dream of a Third Kingdom, pure as the lily, warm as the sun, can only be
+realised in the temper of the child who looks for life and happiness,
+who brushes away joyously and frankly the clouds of man's fall and man's
+humiliation.
+
+Without becoming as little children, men cannot enter into the Third
+Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, the Kingdom of the human
+spirit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+CHILD LABOUR AND THE CRIMES OF CHILDREN
+
+
+Leaving aside questions of heredity and kindred topics, and considering
+only the conditions under which the child is born, developed, and
+reared, it is terrible to contemplate the misfortunes which happen to
+children through lack of insight on the part of their mothers. Doctors
+are never tired of telling what malformations tight-lacing causes. How
+many children in the first year of their life become blind through
+neglect. We only mention here some of the troubles which crude ignorance
+or lack of conscience on the part of the mothers inflict on themselves
+or on their children. There must be noticed too the uncertainty and the
+want of system in the care of children that come from such ignorance. A
+thorough improvement in all these things is not to be expected until
+women have secured universal suffrage, and until they, at the same age
+in which men serve their years of military service, are legally obliged
+to pass through a period of training lasting just as long, devoting
+themselves to the care of children, hygiene, and sick nursing. No other
+exceptions must be made, except those which exempt a man from military
+service. Such duties done for one's country would come for many women
+just at the time in which their interest in the subject is awakened by
+marrying or the thought of marrying. This training would give a
+profounder meaning to their thoughts on this subject. But even women who
+never become mothers themselves would in this way learn certain general
+principles of psychology, hygiene, and care of the sick, that they might
+make use of afterwards in every station of life. Further, I look for
+increasing limitations of the right of parents over children. Such
+limitations I mean as those which have forbidden the exposure of
+children, have imposed penalties for child murder, for cruelty towards
+children, and the laws which have enforced obligatory attendance at
+school. In England there are organisations which investigate the
+treatment of children at home and which prevent cruelties against them.
+Mothers who forget their duties can be reported and punished with
+imprisonment; neglectful fathers can be made to support their children,
+etc.; and where parents show themselves hopelessly incompetent children
+can be taken from them by law. In the different states of Germany there
+are also laws which allow children to be taken from parents who, through
+misuse of that relationship, injure the child's spiritual or bodily
+welfare. Children receive this so-called compulsory training in cases,
+too, where it is necessary to preserve them from moral destruction. The
+compulsory training may be carried out either in a suitable family or in
+institutions; it continues up to the eighteenth year. A notable
+provision is that which places the supervision over such children, in
+the hands of women.
+
+An increased extension of the right of society in this direction is one
+of its most important provisions for self-protection, and is just as
+legitimate a limitation of individual freedom, as the laws to prevent
+the extension of contagious diseases. Unfortunately such regulations are
+often made ineffective by red tape. The parents or guardians of the
+neglected child must be admonished; the unruly child must be warned, and
+if this is not sufficient, the law provides that it must be disciplined.
+All of these provisos are absolutely senseless in such cases. By such
+warnings bad parents are not instructed in the art of training their
+children, nor is an incorrigible child to be led by admonitions to
+change its character, if he is left in the surroundings which have
+caused his degeneration. By corporal punishment administered in the
+presence of witnesses, a child already accustomed to cuffs and blows is
+made more hardened and shameless. A person with only a superficial
+knowledge of the subject, enough to understand the causes which produce
+such parents and such children, soon realises that he is concerned in
+each detail with the infinite horizon of the social question. It is
+clear for example that low wages, combined with the work of women and
+children, are the main factors in poor dwellings, insufficient food, and
+bad clothing. The fact that the wife works out of the house causes the
+neglect of the children and the home. The lodging-house system is the
+result of the lack of dwellings; want of comfort at home causes the
+husband to frequent saloons and public houses. All these factors, taken
+together, cause immorality and intemperance; these last again produce
+those physical and mental diseases to which children are often heirs at
+their birth.
+
+Leaving out of discussion the notion that by God's help the
+battlefields are covered with torn, maimed beings, with whose destroyed
+brains innumerable thoughts and feelings are extinguished which could
+have enriched humanity, I know no more abnormal idea than the custom of
+people speaking of a guardian angel when a chance has kept two children
+from an accident. Where is this guardian angel in the innumerable other
+cases of misfortune: when children remain alone because their mother
+must go to work and they fall out of the window or into the fire? When
+they lose their eyesight in dark cellars? When they are pressed to death
+because in miserable lodgings they have to share a bed with their
+parents? When the parents are drunk and the children lose their lives?
+Where is this guardian angel when parents murder their children, from
+religious fanaticism or disgust of life: when the children themselves,
+tired of life or through fear of parental cruelty, take their own lives?
+Where are these protective angels on the occasions when they are most
+wanted?--in the narrow streets of great cities, in the great industrial
+centres where lack of sunlight, of pure air, and of all the other
+primary conditions for the development of soul and body, undermines the
+bodily strength and efficiency of children before their birth?
+
+To see the hand of Providence in an accidental case of preservation,
+while the same Providence is released from all share in natural
+occurrences, from all part in the terrible phenomena of society, that
+fill every second of the earth's existence with terror, is a relic of
+superstition to be overcome if man is to be filled with a sense of
+obligation to conditions he must master and mould. Modern man is ever
+becoming more and more his own Providence; he has already protected
+himself against fire by fire engines and fire insurance; against the sea
+by life-saving stations; against smallpox and cholera, diphtheria and
+tuberculosis, he has found other means of defence. The blind belief that
+death is dependent on God's will man is losing by the witness of
+statistics which declare that duration of life increases with improved
+sanitary condition; which show that when disease or summer heat mows
+down the children of the poor in dark tenements the rich man can
+preserve his own children in his healthy, light dwelling.
+
+Every man who has his heart in the right spot does not wait for an
+angel, but rushes to save a child from danger. But the superstitious
+belief of the majority of people in God's Providence perhaps will cause
+the same man to regard with complete apathy conditions by which millions
+and millions of children are yearly sacrificed. Doctors know that the
+destruction caused by bacteria is insignificant, as compared with
+pauperism as a cause of disease. Mothers who have over-exerted
+themselves, drunken fathers, bad dwellings, like those where the poor
+dry out newly built houses for the rich, induced by the low rate of
+rents, insufficient nourishment, inherited diseases, especially
+syphilis, too early work,--all this shows its result in the emaciated,
+shrivelled, ulcerated bodies of children who occasionally are cured of
+their momentary disease in hospitals, but cannot be freed from the
+results of the conditions of life under which they were born and brought
+up. The efforts of doctors will be in vain while they, like the other
+factors in society, do not devote their whole energy to avoiding
+diseases, instead of healing them. What they can now do in the way of
+prevention is but a palliative in comparison with the incurable evil
+which flourishes in abundance. The situation will remain as it is so
+long as hygiene does not receive the same attention in society as the
+soul. This solicitude may take the form of religious edification, or
+intellectual enlightenment, but it remains nothing but a cut flower,
+stuck in a dust heap.
+
+It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to show from criminal
+statistics that degenerate children are the creation of society itself.
+By allowing them to be forced into "the path of virtue," by punishment,
+society behaves like a tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then
+beats him because he cannot by himself find his road.
+
+The categorical imperative for the social consciousness at the present
+moment, is an effective legislation for the protection of children and
+women.
+
+Wherever industry is developed, the woman is taken away from the home,
+the child from play and school. In the period of guilds, women and
+children worked in the house, and in the workshop of the husband. But
+since the factory system has constantly restricted the household work of
+woman, industrial occupations on the scale of modern capitalism can
+satisfy its needs for cheaper work by woman's work. This like children's
+work has forced down in many places the pay of adult workmen. The pay
+with which a married man can care for his family by his work is now
+divided among several members of the family. As long as special work
+required great personal bodily strength or developed manual dexterity,
+it fell as a rule to the men, not to women or children. But the natural
+protection of women and children disappeared with the introduction of
+machinery. In many cases working a machine required neither strength nor
+dexterity. In other cases, like cotton spinning or mining, delicate
+fingers were more valued because they were more adaptable, tender bodies
+more desirable because they were smaller.
+
+In England the work of women and children first reached its highest
+point. The poorhouses sent crowds of children to the wool weaving
+industry in Lancashire, children who worked in shifts at the same
+machine and slept in the same dirty beds. The population in the
+industrial districts pined away, as the result; diseases unknown before
+came into existence; ignorance and roughness increased. Women and
+children from four to five years old worked fourteen to eighteen hours.
+The report of the investigations made on this subject caused Elizabeth
+Barrett to write her poem, "The Cry of the Children" that made the
+employers of children so indignant, but which helped to produce the Ten
+Hour bill. This bill laid down that women, children, and young persons
+should not work more than ten hours a day in textile factories. This law
+was succeeded by others of the same type. Similar conditions in other
+lands have produced similar legislation. In Saxony, Belgium, Alsace, and
+the Rhine Provinces the results of the system seemed to be just as
+frightful as in England. On the Rhine, as early as the year 1838, a
+Prussian army officer noticed that the number of those able to bear arms
+had diminished as a result of the degenerating influence of woman and
+child labour. But notwithstanding the introduction of this legislation
+generally, the labour of women and children continues. It takes the most
+destructive forms in those occupations which lie outside of the sphere
+of legislation. There are places in which child labour is as shocking as
+it was in England in 1848. In Russia, in the Bastmat weaving industry,
+children of three or four years have been found at work; and masses of
+children under ten working as much as eighteen hours a day. In Germany
+the toy industry can show as cruel figures in connection with children's
+work, all the more cruel because in order to provide enjoyment for happy
+children the living energy of others is forced out of existence.
+Industrial work at home is done by children four to five years old,
+while the age limit for child labour in factories, both in Germany and
+in Switzerland, is fourteen years. The government of Denmark has
+proposed the same limit of age. In Italy most of the crippled young
+children were brought up in the sulphur districts of Sicily, crowded
+together in low galleries, burdened with heavy sacks at an age at which
+their tender limbs under such conditions must inevitably and incurably
+be contorted. As early as twelve and thirteen years old many of them are
+incapable of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain, quantities of
+children six to eight years old are kept at work; through the poisonous
+odours they fall victims to severe diseases. Other children carrying
+heavy pitchers on their head are employed to water dry places. The child
+is a cheaper means of transportation than the ass.
+
+Despite protective legislation the average of height and weight in the
+Lancashire children is and continues to be lower than anywhere else. Of
+the two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred
+and fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight
+were seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of
+good health. All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in
+the morning till five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the
+hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy.
+This degeneration of the population in industrial districts is becoming
+a serious danger for England's future.
+
+After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to
+this same danger, industrial and street work of children will be
+everywhere forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child
+protection, which, in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at
+first on both economic and industrial grounds. Among these was the
+uncontested right of fathers to decide on the work of their children.
+
+It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low
+standpoint taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved
+also by the introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is
+as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is
+ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other
+effect than a hardening one, when the blow is delivered in cold blood
+long after the act occasioning it has been done. Most of the victims
+are so accustomed to blows already that the physical effect is little or
+nothing, but they awaken feelings of detestation against a society which
+so avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child is sensitive,
+corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual torment, as was the case
+with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some years ago met his death by
+drowning. Everybody knows his story from the fine account of him by the
+Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood, had taken a plank, a
+piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was condemned to be
+punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever present with
+him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment--a
+punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character.
+
+The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose
+poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their
+faults. The victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame
+or terror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of
+moral shame.
+
+If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined
+were revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return
+to, a home where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is
+hindered from caring for her children. They have suffered from the
+custom of sleeping together, the result of overcrowded dwellings, with
+its demoralising influence. It may be the child has commenced to make
+his living on the street as messenger, cigar picker, or newspaper boy,
+or has been engaged in such like occupations, and so in his immediate
+neighbourhood has seen the luxurious living of the upper classes, which
+he strives to imitate. Hardly a week passes that the street youngster
+does not read about the embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the
+capitalistic classes, frequently committed by grey-headed men, whose
+childish impressions go back to the good old time, on whom the lax
+education of the present could not have any influence. No day passes in
+which he does not see how the representatives of the upper classes, old
+and young alike, satisfy their desires for pleasure. But from the child
+of the tenement and the street, people expect Spartan virtue or try to
+thrash it into him. It is hard to say which is greater here, stupidity
+or savagery.
+
+While the upper classes show that they are crude, immoderate, lazy,
+devoted to enjoying themselves; while the majority are aiming at
+getting and spending money; while so many are able to eat without
+working, and so few can find work who look for it; while careless luxury
+lives side by side with careless necessity, the upper class has not the
+shadow of right to expect an improved lower class. The society of the
+present day creates and maintains a social system whose effects are
+notorious in the economic crimes of the upper and lower class alike. It
+is not surprising that great cities are full of tramps and street
+urchins, like a spoilt cheese full of maggots.
+
+A destroyed home life, an idiotic school system, premature work in the
+factory, stupefying life in the streets, these are what the great city
+gives to the children of the under classes. It is more astonishing that
+the better instincts of human nature generally are victorious in the
+lower class, than the fact that this result is occasionally reversed.
+
+There is another argument against child labour, to be found in its
+immediate effect on industry itself.
+
+Working men trained in the schools are everywhere notoriously most
+efficient; even in Russia, where popular education is still so
+defective, this experience has been noted. The working man able to read
+and to write receives without exception on that account a higher pay
+than the illiterate ones who can be only used for the coarsest kind of
+work. The present development of German industry, as compared with
+English, is to be ascribed among other things to the superior
+educational training of the German people. The intensive and intelligent
+work of the American working man has apparently the same cause. But when
+children made sleepy by work in the factory enter evening schools, or
+when children are taken too early from school, they lose under
+continuous hard work the desire and possibility of adapting themselves
+to a higher education; they become organic machines which feed the
+inorganic ones. This must cause the value of their work to decline.
+These organic machines are passive, they do not try to improve their
+condition of life, as do the higher workmen. Besides living machines
+cannot increase the product of labour. Intelligent working men who watch
+over their own rights and increase them are also those who learn easiest
+new methods of work, discover new inventions which are of advantage to
+their line of work, and so increase the value of their product. It is
+only by the growth of this class of workmen, that any country to-day
+can stand the pressure of foreign competition. But the chief condition
+of this growth is that the bodily and mental powers of the child shall
+be used for his own development in school games and play; at the same
+time his capacity for work must be trained by occupation at home and in
+the technical school, not by work in a factory.
+
+Some years ago, a poem created a furore over the whole civilised world,
+from Canada to the islands of Polynesia. The author of this poem, Edwin
+Markham, was inspired by Millet's simple and wonderful picture, _The Man
+with the Hoe_. An agricultural labourer with bowed back stands there,
+one hand folded on the other, supported on the handle of the hoe. Millet
+in him has eternalised the expression so often observed in old workmen,
+especially in those who are worn out by day labour. The man's face is
+empty, says nothing, every human aspect has disappeared; we only see in
+his face the look of the patient beast of burden. For while moderate
+work ennobles the animal in man, immoderate work kills humanity in the
+beast.
+
+Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once himself a slave to bodily
+labor, a revelation, the eternal artistic type of the generation of man
+bowed down from childhood under the yoke of labour. In one strophe after
+another of that finely conceived poem he pictures this being that does
+not sorrow, and never hopes, his destroyed soul for which Plato and the
+Pleiades, the sunrise and the rose, all the treasures of mind and
+nature, are nothing. The poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors
+how they will restore to this thing a soul, how they will give it music
+and dreams. What, he asks, will become of the people who have made this
+being what it is now; when after a thousand years' silence God's
+terrible question is answered,--What has become of his soul.
+
+Many such employers of labour go to church, they hear explanations of
+texts like these, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto ... even the least of
+these, ... ye did it unto me. All that ye wish others should do to you,
+that do to them." It does not occur to them to think how Jesus, the most
+inconsiderate of men, at the right place, would have characterised their
+demands to have small children employed in glass works at ten years of
+age. It never occurs to them to ask whether they would like to see their
+own children in these factories or others like them.
+
+This complete dualism between life and teaching in our present-day
+society will continue to exist until people realise that the opinions
+about life which are expressed by the lips, but are denied by deeds,
+should no longer be proclaimed as an absolute explanation of life and
+rule of life. The permanent element in Christianity can only be realised
+through the conviction that mankind is master of Christianity just as it
+is over all its other creations. The ardent idea of the Galilean
+carpenter, fraternity among men, will give man no rest until man has
+wiped out the last trace of injustice in his social relations. But the
+thought will not be realised by those ideals regarded by Jesus as
+absolute. This is the point of view which has crippled man's conscience
+and it applies equally to the realisation of this and all other ideals.
+An ideal impossible to carry out under the ordinary assumptions of human
+life, yet to which men have given the authority of a divine revelation,
+and which they conceive of as absolute, this is the main cause for the
+demoralisation which has gone on for nineteen hundred years. The history
+of humanity has really revealed to men how this absolute ideal of theirs
+has been betrayed. The cause of this demoralisation must cease before
+existence can be remodelled seriously by those who are convinced that
+ideals can really be binding.
+
+People will then not do as they do now, misuse the name of the Father,
+whom Jesus has taught men to proclaim with their lips, will not murder
+one another _en masse_ on the battlefield, to solve political and
+economic questions of supremacy. A society which calls itself Christian
+will no longer tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange
+gambling, and child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on
+their mother's breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then
+tread in the footsteps of their fathers, trampling one another down in
+the struggle for bread.
+
+Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise
+existence by humanising the human race.
+
+The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the
+Christian circles of ideals into another circle. The successful method
+would be to face immediately new purposes and aims that are really
+believed, and for which men wish to live. But many of our young
+generation know of no new purposes and aims in which they can believe.
+Hence comes that spiritual apathy which has mastered a great part of
+the young generation. Without undervaluing the influences of
+environment, I still believe that young people who have lost their
+ideals without getting new ones in their place are to be pitied. The
+young who are not making ideals out of their own souls will have no
+other time than this to find ideals. A generation of young men of this
+type laughed at Socrates. They would have nailed Jesus of Nazareth to
+the Cross, with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have become,
+undoubtedly, in 1789, _emigrés_ with the Bourbons.
+
+When the youth of any period remains without ideals, we pass through a
+_fin de siècle_ period no matter what the exact date may be. But when
+the young generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts
+to do, a new century begins. It is always the fortunate right of young
+people to stimulate individualism before everything else. This is done
+every time a young person full of sound egoism develops his own
+personality completely and powerfully, throws himself keenly into the
+struggle for his own fortune. Any one who takes his individual
+development seriously will find that it is hard to become an
+independent, noble, and exalted personality by treading underfoot other
+individuals. He will moreover see that it makes more demands on his
+personal powers to try to create new values by new means, to devote his
+youthful energy to new tasks, than to look back to ideas that are
+already exhausted. There is another truth the young man will soon find
+to be valid. If an individual throws himself into the struggle of life
+without consideration for any one else, he is all the more likely to get
+hurt in the struggle. The more developed, too, an individual is, the
+more assailable points there are about him to be wounded. Great pain, as
+well as great happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life.
+Failures of a personality are often better proofs that it is above the
+average than its victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave
+our innermost personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt
+that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean,
+that we lay on the wounds of others.
+
+No real man needs to wait until life has taught him, to sympathise with
+others. The inspiring age of youth may experience this, as well as the
+strong individual feeling of power. In this sense, many remain ever
+young, always able to pass through inspired moments, such moments when
+a great action, a great truth, a great and beautiful thing, or great
+good fortune, absorbs our whole existence; moments when our eyes fill
+with tears, when our arms stretch out to embrace the world and the
+thoughts which it contains. Such moments include the most intensive
+emotion of our own personality; at the same time they bring the fullest
+absorption in the common feeling of existence as a whole. A great life
+means giving continuity of action to such inspired moments.
+
+There are young people who can look back on no such moments, who
+arrogantly look down on the problems of their times from the height of
+their "superman" theories or from their superior learning; who measure
+them by the iron law of historical development. At all times there have
+been such people. There is no question in which it is more fatal for
+young people to isolate themselves, than that which deals with social
+conflicts. This age requires the young above all others to test this
+question from all points of view, to investigate all other ideas in
+connection with it. Every reform plan must be investigated in connection
+with its influence on the problems of individualism and socialism. From
+youth we have a right to expect something for the future. This hope
+implies that youth, in approaching it, in thinking and acting for the
+many whose lot it is the immediate task of the future to improve, adopt
+as their own the words of Walt Whitman, "I do not ask whether my wounded
+brother suffers; I will myself be this wounded brother."
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+
+_A Selection from the Catalogue of_
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+Complete Catalogues sent on application
+
+
+_Clever, original, and fascinating_
+
+
+The Lost Art of Reading
+
+_Mount Tom Edition_
+
+New Edition in Two Volumes
+
+I. The Child and the Book
+
+A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in
+Schools and Colleges
+
+II. The Lost Art of Reading
+
+or, The Man and The Book
+
+_Two Volumes, Crown 8vo. Sold separately._
+
+_Each net, $1.50_
+
+By Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm
+I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most
+brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were
+laid aside. The title does not hint at any more than a fraction of the
+contents. It is a highly original critique of philistinism and
+gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life
+in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form
+and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a
+thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if
+furnished with long antennæ of suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee
+is, but I know this--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no
+longer whine that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical
+writers of New England.
+
+"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It
+is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes me
+believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in
+authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can
+conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the
+date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long
+been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in _Boston Transcript_.
+
+New York--G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS--London
+
+
+_A Book for Parents and Teachers_
+
+
+Up Through Childhood
+
+A Study of Some Principles of Education in
+Relation to Faith and Conduct
+
+By
+
+George Allen Hubbell, Ph.D. (Columbia)
+
+Vice-President of Berea College
+
+With Introduction by
+
+Dr. Frank M. McMurray
+
+Teachers College, N. Y.
+
+_12mo. $1.25 net. By mail, $1.40_
+
+The book is divided into four parts: Part I., dealing with the School of
+Life, in which are discussed (1) life as opportunity, (2) that aim of
+education which will make it possible to use this opportunity aright,
+and (3) the institutions of education which, as environment, contribute
+to the unfolding and instruction of the child. Part II. deals with the
+teacher in relation to his work as a quickener, and then passes to the
+teacher's preparation, his relation to the Bible, and last and best his
+relation to the child. Part III. deals with the young being in all
+stages of his growth from birth to adult life, first taking up the broad
+question of man's place in nature, and dealing with that as fundamental
+to all further interpretation. The other topics concern themselves with
+man's reaction on environment, with the development of the mental powers
+and the placing of these in due relation to each other, with the
+training of the child's faith, with the specific consideration of the
+boy's and girl's experiences to adult life, and with the rounded life.
+
+New York--G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS--London
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Century of the Child, by 
+Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 57283 ***