The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

We must bow down before the infinities and mysteries of our earthly existence and of the world beyond. We must distinguish between and select real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of mankind, of man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the whole race a rich and strong personality. We must look to great models. We must reverence the divine and the regular in the course of the world, in the processes of development of man's mind. These are the new lines of meditation, the new religious feelings of reverence and love, that will make the children of the new century strong, sound, and beautiful.

These changes will destroy that idea of God that combines "God help us" with our victories, that has increased the national lust for conquest, the passion for mastery, the instinct of gain. It will be felt that mixing up God in the standards of human passions is blasphemous. People will see, that patriotism, nourished on egoism and ambition, is the most godless thing because the most inhuman of all the life-perverting sins with which man outrages the holiness of life.

Intellects which can now pass over the contradiction between Christianity and war, which can even derive strength and consolation from them, have been depraved by the ideas forced upon mankind through thousands of years. Nothing more can be expected from men of such brains, than that they should die in the wilderness, without ever obtaining a sight of the promised land.

But the brains of children can be protected from the most unholy of all mental misconceptions, from the superstition that the patriotism, and the nationalism, which injures the rights of others, have something in common with ideas about God.

Let children be taught that national characteristics, the use of force, the right of independent action, is as essential for a people as for an individual, that it is worth every sacrifice. Let them be taught that, on their appreciation of the nature of their country, of its life in the past and in the present, depends their own development. Let them be taught to dream beautiful inspiring dreams of the future of their country, of their own work, as the necessary foundation of this future.

They should be taught at an early age to understand the deep gulf between patriotic feeling and the egoism which is called patriotism. This is the patriotism in whose name small countries are oppressed by great countries, in whose name nineteenth-century Europe has armed itself under the stimulus of revenge, in whose name the close of the century witnessed the extension of violence in north and south, in west and east.

Militarism and clericalism, both principles presenting authority as opposed to individual standards of right, are ever closely combined; but they are not what they are called. They are not patriotism and religion. These two words involve a sense of common citizenship, of freedom, of justice, exalted above the narrow sphere of the individual, of the interests of class, of the interests of one's own country. Such are the principles which unite different groups within a land in great interests common to all, just as they unite different peoples in great vital questions common to all. But militarism and clericalism oppress freedom by the principles of authority, oppress the idea of individual development, by that of discipline, oppress the feeling of common weal by the desire for glory and war, oppress the feeling for right by the feeling for military honour. In Germany under the badge of Christianity and militarism, the civil rights of the citizen, his claims for social freedom, have been seriously menaced. Hypnotised by these principles many members of the Russian, French, and English nations, respectable as they are individually, have gloated over the deeds of unrighteousness committed by their respective governments.

All this will go on; people will continue to be burdened to the ground by ever increasing military preparations. The rights of the small nations will be constantly encroached upon by the larger ones, even after the present world powers, like those that have preceded them, have broken down under the burden of their own expansion. It will continue to be so, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the feeling for humanity before the feeling for their country; until they strive to expand the sympathies of their children to embrace all living things, plants, animals, and men; until they teach them to see, that sympathy involves not only suffering with others but rejoicing with others, and that the individual increases his own emotional capacity, when he learns to feel with other individuals and with other peoples. It will go on, as it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national interests, treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned. The moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of God is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the idea of the soldier will be ennobled. It will no longer be identified with blind obedience and limited class courage. The word will come to mean a man and a fellow-citizen with the same civilised interests, the same conception of law, the same need of freedom, the same feeling for honour, as all other fellow-citizens. The soldier will be a defender of his fatherland, whose character will have no other warlike traits, than those called forth for the protection of sacred human and civil rights.

Self-defense, personal or national, will be imprinted on the child as the first of duties, not as it is represented in the commands of Christianity. Or to speak more accurately the child has this instinctive feeling; all that need be done is not to confuse this instinct. The child understands quite well, that evil men, when not resisted, become lords over the property of others. He knows that the low and the unrighteous get the victory, and that right-thinking and high-minded people are sacrificed by unrighteous and low-thinking people. The impulse to resistance is the first germ of the social feeling for righteousness, and by this feeling will the unreflecting judgment of the child be led also in the study of history. The child never doubts that William Tell was right, even when, in his instruction in religion, he has been definitely taught obedience to the powers that be, that come from God. Every straight childish soul applauds Andreas Hofer, despite his uncompromising conflict with lawful authority. With his natural directness the child cuts off all sophisms; at least all children do who are not irrevocably stupefied by Christian principles.

To conclude what I have said against religious instruction, I will add a statement of a ten-year-old child, made after three years struggling with the catechism and biblical history: "I do not believe any of this, but I hope, when men are some day wise enough, each person may have his own belief, just as each one has his own face."