THE other system is the extreme opposite, that of bringing up children for themselves. The rôles are reversed: the parents are there for the child. No sooner is he born than he becomes the center. White-headed grandfather and stalwart father bow before these curls. His lisping is their law. A sign from him suffices. If he cries in the night, no fatigue is of account, the whole household must be roused. The new-comer is not long in discovering his omnipotence, and before he can walk he is drunken with it. As he grows older all this deepens and broadens. Parents, grandparents, servants, teachers, everybody is at his command. He accepts the homage and even the immolation of his neighbor: he treats like a rebellious subject anyone who does not step out of his path. There is only himself. He is the unique, the perfect, the infallible. Too late it is perceived that all this has been evolving a master; and what a master! forgetful of sacrifices, without respect, even pity. He no longer has any regard for those to whom he owes everything, and he goes through life without law or check.
This education, too, has its social counterpart. It flourishes wherever the past does not count, where history begins with the living, where there is no tradition, no discipline, no reverence; where those who know the least make the most noise; where those who stand for public order are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two educations—one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of the new—and I find them equally baneful. But the most disastrous of all is the combination of the two, which produces human beings half-automatons, half-despots, forever vacillating between the spirit of a sheep and the spirit of revolt or domination.
Children should be educated neither for themselves nor for their parents: for man is no more designed to be a personage than a specimen. They should be educated for life. The aim of their education is to aid them to become active members of humanity, brotherly forces, free servants of the civil organization. To follow a method of education inspired by any other principle, is to complicate life, deform it, sow the seeds of all disorders.
When we would sum up in a phrase the destiny of the child, the word future springs to our lips. The child is the future. This word says all—the sufferings of the past, the stress of to-day, hope. But when the education of the child begins, he is incapable of estimating the reach of this word; for he is held by impressions of the present. Who then shall give him the first enlightenment and put him in the way he should go? The parents, the teachers. And with very little reflection they perceive that their work does not interest simply themselves and the child, but that they represent and administer impersonal powers and interests. The child should continually appear to them as a future citizen. With this ruling idea, they will take thought for two things that complement each other—for the initial and personal force which is germinating in the child, and for the social destination of this force. At no moment of their direction over him can they forget that this little being confided to their care must become himself and a brother. These two conditions, far from excluding each other, never exist apart. It is impossible to be brotherly, to love, to give one's self, unless one is master of himself; and reciprocally, none can possess himself, comprehend his own individual being, until he has first made his way through the outward accidents of his existence, down to the profound springs of life where man feels himself one with other men in all that is most intimately his own.
To aid a child to become himself and a brother it is necessary to protect him against the violent and destructive action of the forces of disorder. These forces are exterior and interior. Every child is menaced from without not only by material dangers but by the meddlesomeness of alien wills; and from within, by an exaggerated idea of his own personality and all the fancies it breeds. There is a great outward danger which may come from the abuse of power in educators. The right of might finds itself a place in education with extreme facility. To educate another, one must have renounced this right, that is to say, made abnegation of the inferior sentiment of personal importance, which transforms us into the enemies of others, even of our own children. Our authority is beneficent only when it is inspired by one higher than our own. In this case it is not only salutary, but also indispensable, and becomes in its turn the best guarantee against the greater peril which threatens the child from within—that of exaggerating his own importance. At the beginning of life the vividness of personal impressions is so great, that to establish an equilibrium, they must be submitted to the gentle influence of a calm and superior will. The true quality of the office of educator is to represent this will to the child, in a manner as continuous and as disinterested as possible. Educators, then, stand for all that is to be respected in the world. They give to the child impressions of that which precedes it, outruns it, envelops it: but they do not crush it; on the contrary, their will and all the influence they transmit, become elements nutritive of its native energy. Such use of authority as this, cultivates that fruitful obedience out of which free souls are born. The purely personal authority of parents, masters and institutions is to the child like the brushwood beneath which the young plant withers and dies. Impersonal authority, the authority of a man who has first submitted himself to the time-honored realities before which he wishes the individual fancy of the child to bend, resembles pure and luminous air. True it has an activity, and influences us in its manner, but it nourishes our individuality and gives it firmness and stability. Without this authority there is no education. To watch, to guide, to keep a firm hand—such is the function of the educator. He should appear to the child not like a barrier of whims, which, if need be, one may clear, provided the leap be proportioned to the height of the obstacle; but like a transparent wall through which may be seen unchanging realities, laws, limits, and truths against which no action is possible. Thus arises respect, which is the faculty of conceiving something greater than ourselves—respect, which broadens us and frees us by making us more modest. This is the law of education for simplicity. It may be summed up in these words: to make free and reverential men, who shall be individual and fraternal.
LET us draw from this principle some practical applications.
From the very fact that the child is the future, he must be linked to the past by piety. We owe it to him to clothe tradition in the forms most practical and most fit to create a deep impression: whence the exceptional place that should be given in education to the ancients, to the cult of remembrance of the past, and by extension, to the history of the domestic rooftree. Above all do we fulfil a duty toward our children when we give the place of honor to the grandparents. Nothing speaks to a child with so much force, or so well develops his modesty, as to see his father and mother, on all occasions, preserve toward an old grandfather, often infirm, an attitude of respect. It is a perpetual object lesson that is irresistible. That it may have its full force, it is necessary for a tacit understanding to obtain among all the grown-up members of the family. To the child's eyes they must all be in league, held to mutual respect and understanding, under penalty of compromising their educational authority. And in their number must be counted the servants. Servants are big people, and the same sentiment of respect is injured in the child's disregard of them as in his disregard of his father or grandfather. The moment he addresses an impolite or arrogant word to a person older than himself, he strays from the path that a child ought never to quit; and if only occasionally the parents neglect to point this out, they will soon perceive by his conduct toward themselves, that the enemy has found entrance to his heart.
We mistake if we think that a child is naturally alien to respect, basing this opinion on the very numerous examples of irreverence which he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion and mutual deference, we, the grown-ups, discredit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and that of everything worthy of respect. We inoculate in him a bad spirit whose effects then turn against us.
This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more force than in the relations between masters and servants, as we have made them. Our social errors, our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back upon the heads of our children. There are certainly few people of the middle classes who understand that it is better to part with many thousands of dollars than to lead their children to lose respect for servants, who represent in our households the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strictly as you will conventions and distances,—that demarkation of social frontiers which permits each one to remain in his place and to observe the law of differences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, but on condition of never forgetting that those who serve us are men and women like ourselves. You require of your domestics certain formulas of speech and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the respect they owe you. Do you also teach your children and use yourselves manners toward your servants which show them that you respect their dignity as individuals, as you desire them to respect yours? Here we have continually in our homes an excellent ground for experiment in the practice of that mutual respect which is one of the essential conditions of social sanity. I fear we profit by it too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but we fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case that we get only hypocrisy and this supplementary result, all unexpected,—the cultivation of pride in our children. These two factors combined heap up great difficulties for that future which we ought to be safeguarding. I am right then in saying that the day when by your own practices you have brought about the lessening of respect in your children, you have suffered a sensible loss.