The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Individual Sharing in the Social Inheritance.—For the last point of our list, namely, the right of every child to be made a conscious heir to the social inheritance of his time and place in the world, little need be said. The tendencies in American life which give thoughtful people the most satisfaction are the tendencies toward extension of culture privileges in public libraries, lectures, tax-supported and educationally supervised playgrounds, in young people's organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, in summer camps (not all for the rich), in vacation houses full of the flavor of the best of life, in the varied clubs and classes of the settlements, in the pageants and other forms of pictured world-life—all these, and more that might be named, show an exuberance of effort to share with utmost speed and fullest generosity the things that seem to the privileged few the most precious heritage of our race.

Yet, with all our effort so much more needs doing that multitudes live and die wholly ignorant of the world they have come to or of the race-life of which they are a part. Doctor Du Bois, in his classic appeal for human comradeship for all, The Soul of Black Folks, has shown what suffering comes to the cultured black man who finds all cultured men and women of white races forcing him to be an alien because of his skin. There is a sadder and more terrible, because unconscious, deprivation; it is that of any one, white or black, rich or poor, who loses the chance to partake of the culture of the past. The man or woman, whether able to accomplish much or little on the practical side of vocational service, whose outlook is bounded by the narrow, the superficial, the personal, the ephemeral, is missing the best part of his social inheritance, the capacity to "look before and after and pine for what is not."

Such a little time we are here! Even a Methuselah might wish to have in his mental furnishings the glory of the past and the prophetic hope of the future. All children, not merely a fortunate few, should have this sense of a group-life of which each is a part, should be able to see life and see it whole in the social inheritance that belongs alike to each one of us. Children make a large order upon each generation as they come into a vast group of all that have been and reach consciously toward the expanding life of the coming time.

The family must begin that culture by which the order shall be filled, but no family can answer even the least of the social demands by itself. "Culture," says Emerson, "shall yet absorb chaos itself," Every child has a rightful citizenship in that order-giving world of thought, of history, of poetry, of art, of science, and of religion.

What a nation we might become if only every child had this, its right, recognized and fulfilled!

QUESTIONS ON THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY

1. The eighteenth century was called the century of man, the nineteenth century, of women, and the twentieth, that of the child. What facts justify this statement?

2. What are the main elements in the modern standard of child-care, child-protection, and child-nurture?

3. What of these elements can and should the private home supply, and what must be the community provision and control?

4. In trying to effect both private and public conditions favorable to the best development of child-life, what should be the scale of values used, or what should be the order of effort?