The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant an example as Japan, I should like to mention a fact closer to us. Our Germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. It was introduced with Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into a religious duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a part of spiritual guardianship. I once asked our great poet, Victor Rydberg, and he said that he had found no proof that corporal punishment was usual among the Germans in heathen times. I asked him whether he did not believe that the fact of its absence had encouraged the energetic individualism and manliness in the Northern peoples. He thought so, and agreed with me. Finally, I might note from our own time, that there are many families and schools, our girls' schools for example, and also boys' schools in some countries, where corporal punishment is never used. I know a family with twelve children whose activity and capacity are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of duty alone. Corporal punishment is never used in this home; a determined but mild mother has taught the children to obey voluntarily, and has known how to train their wills to self-control.

By "voluntary obedience," I do not mean that the child is bound to ask endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them before he obeys. A good teacher never gives a command without there being some good reason, but whether the child is convinced or not, he must always obey, and if he asks "why" the answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as children, must obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided. The great necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood. This can be done without harsh means by training the child, even previous to his birth, by cultivating one's self-control, and after his birth by never giving in to a child's caprices.

The rule is, in a few cases, to work in opposition to the action of the child, but in other cases work constructively; I mean provide the child with material to construct his own personality and then let him do this work of construction. This is, in brief, the art of education. The worst of all educational methods are threats. The only effective admonitions are short and infrequent ones. The greatest skill in the educator is to be silent for the moment and then so reprove the fault, indirectly, that the child is brought to correct himself or make himself the object of blame. This can be done by the instructor telling something that causes the child to compare his own conduct with the hateful or admirable types of behaviour about which he hears information. Or the educator may give an opinion which the child must take to himself although it is not applied directly to him.

On many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part of the elder person is an excellent punishment, if the indignation is reserved for the right moment. I know children to whom nothing was more frightful than their father's scorn; this was dreaded. Children who are deluged with directions and religious devotions, who receive an ounce of morality in every cup of joy, are most certain to be those who will revolt against all this. Nearly every thinking person feels that the deepest educational influences in his life have been indirect; some good advice not given to him directly; a noble deed told without any direct reference. But when people come themselves to train others they forget all their own personal experience.

The strongest constructive factor in the education of a human being is the settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its duty. Openheartedness, industry, straightforwardness at home develop goodness, desire to work, and simplicity in the child. Examples of artistic work and books in the home, its customary life on ordinary days and holidays, its occupations and its pleasures, should give to the emotions and imagination of the child, periods of movement and repose, a sure contour and a rich colour. The pure, warm, clear atmosphere in which father, mother, and children live together in freedom and confidence; where none are kept isolated from the interests of the others; but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest; where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are willing to help one another when necessary,—in this atmosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of the generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind the visible, tangible, world of sense, the more will each new generation of children show a more refined and a more consistent mental life. It is impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in future generations. This transformation can be helped by the training of the present, by casting aside the withered foliage which now covers the budding possibilities of life.

The house must once more become a home for the souls of children, not for their bodies alone. For such homes to be formed, that in their turn will mould children, the children must be given back to the home. Instead of the study preparation at home for the school taking up, as it now does, the best part of a child's life, the school must get the smaller part, the home the larger part. The home will have the responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary days as on holidays, that the children will really become a part of the home both in their work and in their pleasures. The children will be taken from the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the home. The mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life to the children. Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.

Such was the training of Old Scandanavia; the direct share of the child in the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life of our Scandanavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at twelve years of age), unity, character, and strength. Things specially made for children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings, support given to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially prepared for children,—these are the fundamental defects of our present day education. An eighteen-year-old girl said to me a short time ago, that she and other girls of the same age were so tired of the system of vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home, that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger, corporal discipline, and drudgery.

One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial environment; the environment in which children and young people of the present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for the realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and responsibility, instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the school, the object of another's care.

What is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is to be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days and holidays without oversight, in every case where the child can help himself. Instead of the modern school child having a mother and servants about him to get him ready for school and to help him to remember things, he should have time every day before school to arrange his room and brush his clothes, and there should be no effort to make him remember what is connected with the school. The home and the school should combine together systematically to let the child suffer for the results of his own negligence.

Just the reverse of this system rules to-day. Mothers learn their children's lessons, invent plays for them, read their story books to them, arrange their rooms after them, pick up what they have let fall, put in order the things they have left in confusion, and in this and in other ways, by protective pampering and attention, their desire for work, their endurance, the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return. Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in earlier generations were a beautiful custom among the young.