Euthenics, the science of controllable environment / A plea for better living conditions as a first step toward higher human efficiency

by Ellen H. Richards

Since industry has taken woman’s work from her, and she has to follow it out into the world, the means of education for the child has gone from the home. Its atmosphere is artificial, if the attempt is made.

To work exclusively on the family, for the sake of the child, is a very slow process. As in all American life, the quicker method appeals most strongly. The school is today the quickest means of reaching both child and home; the present home through the child, and the future homes through the children when they grow up.

And time presses! A whole generation has been lost because the machine ran wild without guidance, and all attempt at improvement was met by futile resistance.

It is very difficult to present the socionomist’s view of the child in the home so that it may appeal to the two extremes of opinion. There are those who still apply mediæval rules to twentieth century living; those who believe, honestly, that the ideal life was found in the days when the mother was the manufacturer in her own home and the children were her helpers in all the varied processes. “There was never any artificial teaching devised so good for children as the daily helping in the household tasks.” The inference is made that therefore the same restriction for the mother and the children leads to an ideal life today. Such persons fail to realize that the twentieth century is practically a new world. The old rules which related to material things hardly hold more closely than they would on the planet Mars. The fundamental moral principles of reverence, obedience, love, and unselfish sacrifice must be worked in on a new background.

To keep the eighteenth century habit, so carefully taught the girl, of courtesying as she stepped aside to allow the rider or the ox cart to pass, in these days of the swift automobile, which would be out of sight before the knee could bend, is no more ridiculous than to expect the average young mother to follow the methods of her grandmother. Her mother’s ways are now pronounced all wrong, not necessarily because they were wrong then, but because conditions have changed, knowledge has been gained, and it is clearly a waste of human life, of money, of physical and mental power for people to be sick and die because the caretaker does not use the knowledge in circulation.

If the young mother can learn how better to fulfill her duties by going out of the house to lectures or classes, why not?

Tracts are not always successful as an incentive to conduct. It is obviously impossible to pass a blue law compelling parents to conform to—what ideal? The school is fast taking the place of the home, not because it wishes to do so, but because the home does not fulfill its function, and so far has not been made to, and the lack must be supplied. The personal point of view, inculcated now by modern conditions of strife for money, just as surely as it must have been by barbarian struggle in pre-civilized days, must be supplanted by the broad view of majority welfare. The extreme of the personal point of view, expressed in such phrases as “The world owes me a living;” “My child is mine to treat as I please;” “It is nobody’s business how I spend my money;” “I have a right to all the pleasure I can get out of life,” is well shown in Mr. H. G. Wells’s analogy[12]: “A cat’s standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable, and interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and pursues delights. Life is to her quite clearly and simply a succession of pleasures, sensations, and interests, among which interests there happen to be—kittens.”

This unsuspicious ignorance of the real nature of life is by no means confined to animals and savages; it would seem to be the common view of many young people today. At least they take as little care of the homes to which they bring children, and they follow the cat’s example in boxing the children’s ears and turning them out to fend for themselves.

The last generation seemed to become disciples of Schopenhauer in his passionate rebellion against the fate that deferred all the pleasure of the present to the needs of the future generation. Evolution has revealed the necessity for this subordination of the individual lot to the destiny of the race, if progress is to be made. The man who asserts himself as free from race trammels is snuffed out as a factor—a blighted blossom fallen to earth and trodden under foot. To the student of biological evolution, the individual is as a mere pin point on the chart of community advance, for surely society grows according to evolutionary law. “As certainly as Nature gives the poor child its chance of a good life, so certainly do the circumstances of slum environment rob it forthwith of its birthright—it is not uncommon to find more than half the children of three years of age hanging on to life with marks of disease and undergrowth firmly implanted on their tender frames. Yet, practically, none of this is inherited in the true sense; it is the victory of evil human devices in their endeavor to cheat Nature of her own. If ever there was a mission in the world worthy of the most strenuous service, it is to wrest back this victory, be it out of pity for suffering children or for the very welfare and existence of the nation.

“The schools have made their beginning; the homes have not yet started; they wait the impulse from without. It is for voluntary, intelligent opinion to get to work on the home, and never to relax until a race of parents has arisen which knows no other duty to the state than to rear with heart and brain the children which have been given to them. Then we shall hear no more about physical degeneracy.”[13]