The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.

Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."—George Albert Coe.

"The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.' But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself."—Emerson.

"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. It depends upon us to make the effort."—Tolstoi.

New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.—When the power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal service from each class to each class above to the tax system of modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.

When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in doing.

The connection between these movements in education and the family well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.

Education a Social Process.—These elements are attempts to socialize education. We say that education is a process in the development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.

Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency.

The Three Learned Professions.—When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.