The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

The elementary school beginning with the age of nine to ten years, I regard as the real general school. The system of instruction must assume that the children have breadth, repose, comprehensiveness, and capacity for individual action. All these qualities are destroyed by the present "hare and hound" system and by its endless abstractions. Such are the results of course readings, multiplicity of subjects, and formalism, all defects that have passed from the boys' schools into the girls' schools, from the elementary schools into the people's schools. They too are burdened by all these faults, which, though deplored by most people, can only be cured by radical reform.

The instruction must be arranged in groups, certain subjects placed among the earlier stages of study while others are put aside for a later period. And in this connection it is not sufficient to consider the psychological development of the child. Certain subjects must be assigned to certain times of the year.

The courses in these schools must come to an end at about the age of fifteen or sixteen. From them our young people can pass either into practical life, or go on to schools of continuation and application. It would be desirable to adopt the plan recommended by Grundtvig, that one or more vacation years should follow, before studies are taken up again. Girls, especially, would then come back to their studies with strengthened bodily powers and an increased desire for knowledge. It is now a common experience that the desire to learn, even in the case of talented young people, becomes quiescent, if they go on continuously with their studies, as they often do, from the sixth to the twentieth year and longer.

To mark out the courses of such a school would offer tremendous difficulties. But these difficulties will not be found insuperable, after people have agreed that the souls of children require more consideration than a school programme.

Among objections coming from parents, may be heard the following: That while the state refuses to take initiative in school reform, no one would dare to embark on a road which makes the future of their children so uncertain. In the meantime children must be allowed to learn what all others learn. When the state has taken the first step, the parents would be willing they say to follow with remarkable eagerness.

What, I ask, has been always the right way to carry out reforms? There must be first an active revolt against existing evils. This particular revolt is yet not sufficiently supported, especially on the part of parents. The children themselves have begun to feel the need of protest, and, if not earlier, I hope that when the present generation of school children become fathers, mothers, and teachers, a reform will come about.

No one can expect a system to be changed, until those who disapprove of it show that they are in earnest, show that they are taking upon themselves the sacrifices necessary to protect themselves from the unhappy results of the system. Families complain of the excessive aggregation of subjects, and yet they constantly burden the school with new subjects, even when these subjects are things the family can undertake itself. While families complain of overstrain, but make no use of the elective system in schools, where it has been introduced, while parents are willing to risk nothing to realise their principles, we cannot wonder that the state does not embark on reforms of any kind.

There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school." While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the training for their future life is a bad one—a life in which the common work and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school for a special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in the high sense of the word, and besides no school in which people learn for life.

I have therefore always warmly held that the school should be no boys', no girls' school, no elementary and no people's school, but should be a real general or public school as in America, where both sexes, the children of all grades of society, will learn that mutual confidence, respect, understanding, by which their efficient co-operation in the family and state may be made possible. The common school, so arranged, is perhaps the most important means to solve definitely the problem of morality, the woman question, the marriage question, the labour question, in less one-sided and more human ways. From this point of view the establishment of the common school is much more than a pedagogical question; it is the vital question of our social order.

Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be done is to break the wall down. The school, as described above, is the first breach in this wall.