LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that, first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of things, of materialism.
§ 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER
The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary, culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire, turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and start out from for real living. They are private hotels.
If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life. More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in school and church and home count first of all for character. And that broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his fellows, and to the making of a new world.
We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater purposes than garish social display.
§ 2. THE CHURCH AIDING
Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not directly instructed in the duties of that life.
It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it, of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it. In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction; what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other persons whose religion differs from the brand carried in that institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens, facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us? Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?
If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources of human affairs.
§ 3. IDEALS AND METHODS
No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth will still need training for family living given under religious auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may give courses in domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.
This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion for worthy ideals.
From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new evaluation of its worth. That can come in part by the prophetic message from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the details.
We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family," "Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems which arise in family living.
All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family as a religious institution for the development of the lives of religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five. They should be among the electives offered in the church school.
The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.[51] Work on "Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides opportunity for parents to study their work of character development through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this opportunity.
The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the public schools.[52] Here all the parents of the community meet in the school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and the school for the betterment of the child.
I. References for Study
Articles in Religious Education, April, 1911, VI, 1-77.
Helen C. Putnam in Religious Education, June, 1911, VI, 159-66.
George W. Dawson in Religious Education, June, 1911, VI, 167-74.
Cabot, Volunteer Help in the Schools, chap. vii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.
II. Further Reading
Forsyth, Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion. Hodder & Stoughton, $1.25.
Lovejoy, Self-Training for Motherhood. American Unitarian Association, $1.00.
Pomeroy, Ethics of Marriage. Funk & Wagnalls, $1.50.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. In how far are home problems due to the ignorance of parents?
2. What do you regard as the essentials in the training of parents?
3. Where can the necessary subjects best be taught?
4. What are the difficulties in the way of teaching these subjects to young people?
5. In how far can we direct the reading of young people toward sane and helpful knowledge of family life and duties?
[51] Pamphlets on plans for parents' classes: The Home and the Sunday School, Pilgrim Press; Plans for Mothers' and Parents' Meetings, Sunday School Times Co.; How to Start a Mothers' Department, David C. Cook Co.; The Parents' Department of the Sunday School, Connecticut Sunday School Association, Hartford, Conn.
[52] See pamphlet published by the National Congress of Mothers: How to Organize Parents' Associations and Mothers' Circles in Public Schools.