The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

But beside this, I believe that even a more living, a more actual instruction in Christianity injures the child. Children should bring themselves by themselves to live in the patriarchal world of the Old Testament; indeed, in the world of the New Testament as well. This can be done best in the form of children's Bibles. These works will be treasured by children; they will find in them infinite material for nourishing the imagination and the emotions. But this can only be done by allowing children to read the Bible undisturbed, without the need of pedagogical or dogmatic explanation. At home this book, like other children's books, should be only talked about and explained when the child requests it. It should never be treated as a school book or appear on the school desk. If the child gets impressions in this way from the Bible, freed from all other authority, apart from the subjective one of the impressions themselves, the myths of the Bible will no more contradict the rest of his instruction, than the Scandinavian story of creation or the Greek legends of the gods.

But the most dangerous of all educational mistakes in influencing humanity, is due to the fact, that children are now taught the Old Testament account of the world as absolute truth, although it wholly contradicts their physical and historical instruction. Besides children learn to regard the morality of the New Testament as absolutely binding, while its commands are everywhere seen to be transgressed by the child, the moment he takes his first step into life. Our whole industrial and capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of the Christian command to love one's neighbour as one's self. The capitalistic axiom is that every man is nearest neighbour to himself.

The eyes of children are here and in similar cases, clear-sighted in their simplicity. At a tender age they are able to observe whether their surroundings are in living accord with Christian teaching. From a four-year-old child, with whom I was talking about Jesus' commandment to love one another, I received the reply, "If Jesus really said so, Papa is no Christian." Before long the child gets into conflict with his instructors and with the commands of Christianity. A small child in a Swedish city took the word of Jesus about charity to heart. Not only his playthings, but his clothes he gave to the poor; his parents cured, by corporal punishment, this practical type of Christianity. A teacher who was impressing on a small girl in a Finnish city the commandment to love one's enemies, received as an answer that this was impossible, for no one in Finland could love Bobrikoff.

I know the sophism used in both cases to overcome the invulnerable logic of the child; but I also know how these sophisms make hypocrisy so natural among Christians, that it is now unconscious. It would take a new Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences. Everywhere Rousseau's words hold true, "The child gets high principles to direct him, but he is forced by his surroundings to act according to petty principles, every time he wishes to put the high ones into practice." He goes on to say people have innumerable "ifs" and "buts," by which the child has to learn that great principles are only words, that the reality of life is something quite different.

The dangerous thing is not that the ideal of Christianity is high; it comes from the fact that every ideal in its essence is unattainable. The nearer we get to it the more lofty it is. This is the characteristic of every ideal. But the demoralising feature in Christianity as an ideal is, that it is presented as absolute, while man as a social being is obliged to transgress it every day. Besides he is taught in his religious instruction, that as a fallen being he cannot in any case attain the ideal, although the only possibility of his living righteously in temporal things, and happily in the world to come, depends on his capacity for realising it.

In this net of unsolvable contradictions, generation after generation has seen its ideal of belief obscured. Gradually each new generation has learned not to take its new ideal seriously. As to the cowardly or braggart concessions to the idiocies of fashion, and the follies by which people are ruined in order to live according to their position, among other psychological grounds for man's lack of steadiness must be placed, as its ultimate cause, the following: The child, along with religion, has breathed in the conviction that opinions are one thing, actions another. This experience goes through the whole of life, even in the case of those who have lost the conviction that the Christian religion is absolute. The free-thinker is married, has his children baptised, and allows them to be confirmed, without considering whether he is forced to it by his own wish, or the wish of doing like other people. The republican sings the royal hymn, sends loyal salutations by telegraph, accepts decorations,—but I must break off, otherwise I should have to enumerate all the small acts of insincerity to one's self, of which the daily life of most people consists, and which are defended under the name of non-essentials; I could never get to the end. This is not the way the Christian martyrs thought who might have freed themselves from death by casting a few grains of incense on the emperor's altar. Two grains of incense,—what an unimportant matter, thinks the modern man, and with quiet conscience he daily sacrifices to many gods in whom he does not believe.

How illogical Protestantism is too, and yet for so long it possessed a spiritually educative power, while its dualism was unsuspected, while one with full sincerity gave to holiday and work day its due share. But now that a new Protestantism is come to life within the fold of Protestantism, this method of speaking in two voices is deeply demoralising.

Piece by piece has been torn down that system of teaching which the Catholic church built up, so wonderfully adapted to the psychological needs of the majority of people. It formed its fundamental creeds, just as they still remain, on the deepest experiences of mankind. But Protestantism is ever looking back from the results of its own handiwork.

In home, in the school, in the high school, during military service, in office work, everywhere passive dependence is insisted on under the name of discipline, discretion, faithfulness to duty. And like all the fine words, by which the living souls of men are turned into the slaves of discipline, these terms exalt esprit de corps, and pass over really serious faults. Discipline means subordinating one's self to every crude force. Only when all Protestants really become actual Protestants, and refuse to receive the greatest good of life, their religion, through authority, will they begin even in social and political questions to attain an independent opinion of their own. As teachers and leaders, they will secure for school children, and for students, for officers and for officials, the freedom in word and deed that is the right of the citizen and the man. Men and women, who in their private life are strictly honourable, have learnt, in general questions, to put their thoughts, their acts, under the command of a leader, and above all they have learnt to do this in the name of religious belief.

The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the power to express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these give man a new share of civilisation and culture. As long as education and social life do not consciously forward this kind of courage, power, and will, the world will remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity, crudeness, force, and selfishness, no matter whether radicals or conservatives, the democratic or aristocratic elements, have the upper hand.