The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

6. There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning all sexual processes.

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

8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that concern future generations.

To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of family needs in education will give assent. This is not the place for specific treatment of prostitution and its effect upon the home, nor is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of sex-education and of social hygiene now advocated and beginning to show encouraging results in use. The simple statement must be made that if, as Spencer has said, one test of education is its ability to make men good husbands and fathers, the element of sex-education must not be omitted from the educative process. How or where the necessary information and stimulus to truly social conduct may or should be given is matter for another statement.

Heroes Held Up for Admiration.—One point, usually wholly ignored, must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past. That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear in outline the lives of the great and good. It may be that some prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in social judgment required for full understanding of the character without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and place.

However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections of poems worthy to live and to be read, but at least we should insert some companion pieces which show wifely fidelity in a more modern form. We may well ask the child's admiration of the craftsman's passion for achievement in "Palissey the Potter," but there might be ethical significance in pointing out that nowadays we sometimes question the right of a man to sacrifice to his art not only himself but his wife, his children, and all related to him. The fact is that although we cannot make use of any cumbersome scheme of historic outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial institutions, we must somehow learn to permeate our teaching of history and of literature and our exaltation of examples of human greatness of character with the spirit of those who believe that humanity is learning, and can know how to manage social affairs better and better as the years of life-experience go on.[19]

Moral Training at the Heart of Education.—The right and helpful relation of the school to the family, then, is one that must first of all place moral character, the power to live a good and useful life in all social relations, at the centre. And it is one also that takes account particularly of the development of the family order and of what we must save and of what we may throw away in that order, if we would have a stable inner circle of human rights and duties as a pattern for all relationship in the industrial order and in the state.

Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies.—In view also of the danger of economic tragedies that affect the family,—dangers of unemployment of the father by reason of bad times beyond his control, of his disablement by industrial accident, of his too-early impairment of strength by reason of industrial misuse of his powers in ways he can not prevent,—it may be that education for every boy should include, while he is still under the legal wage-earning age, efficient drill in the simpler arts of agriculture. He who can get from the land the raw material for family comfort is alone, it would seem, able to meet all industrial catastrophes without alarm. In this country, at least, such a man, whatever his failure or misfortune in professional, in clerical, or in manual labor, may make good his father-office in basic essentials of family support. All that has been said about the need of mixing vocational training with preparation for home-making in the case of girls may be said with almost as much, force about the need of giving the average man an economic refuge in case of vocational disaster in the ability to work the land to meet essential family need. This is beginning to be understood as never before. The newest education of all, as has been said, is intent upon providing for girls and boys alike this training for economic safety in some expert use of land for self-support as well as for retranslation of older work interests. In these "schools of tomorrow" the boys as well as the girls, while still very young, are being trained to cook and to do necessary things for household comfort. This is not subversive of inherited divisions of labor in the home. This teaching only adds to the economic security of both sexes and may make the men of the future able to exist comfortably without so much personal service from their womenfolk, and, above all, may make the home a more perfectly coöperative centre of our social order.

A Graduated Scale of Virtues.—In the French Categories of "Moral and Civil Instructions," first outlined in 1882 and perfected and applied in 1900, the children of the Public Schools of that country have their attention called first to the duties related to "Home and Family," going on from that topic to "Companionship, The School, Social Life, Animal Life, Self-respect, Work, Leisure and Pleasure, Nature, Art, Citizenship and Nationality," and ending with a study of the "Past and Future." The latter topic indicates an intent to give in some fashion the idea of human progress and something of its outstanding points of interest and value. Other moral codes aim at some sublimation of history and literature as a finish to courses in ethical instruction. It is for the student of social progress to insist that such study of the past, linked to the study of the present and to some hopeful outline of the future, be not used merely as a capstone but shall be woven in, as warp and woof of all education, as it touches every side of life.

Types of Education.—Dr. Lester Ward, in his Dynamic Sociology, lists the various types of education we must cherish and realize in the common life as follows: