Now the child has a certain natural tendency toward the Napoleon-Kaiser attitude. He began, as we pointed out some time ago, by being an infantile emperor. He likes it. And being deposed by his parents does not alter his royalist convictions. For he has not merely been deposed—he has seen another king set up in his place. And one reason why parents are not the best persons to teach children democracy, is that they are the authors of the whole succession of enthronements and deposings which constitute the early history of a family. No, the children need a change of air—a chance to forget their Wars of the Roses and to take their places in a genuine democracy. The place for them to learn democracy (though I believe this has been said before) is the school. For in a properly conducted school there is an end of jealous little princes and princesses squabbling over prestige and appealing to the Power Behind the Throne; in such a school, conduct in general and work in particular is performed not with reference to such prestige as a reward, but with reference to their individual wishes in democratic composition with the wishes of their fellows.
But this will be true only if they find at school something different from what they have left at home. And what they have left at home may be described as a couple of well-meaning, bewildered and helpless people who are half the slaves of the children and half tyrants over them. It is unfortunate, but it is true, that the first that children learn of human relationships, is by personal experience of a relationship which is on both sides tyrannical and slavish. They naturally expect all their relationships with the adult world, if not with each other, to be conducted on this same pattern. They expect to find father and mother over again in the school-teacher. They hope to find the slave and fear to find the tyrant. But it is necessary that they should face the adult world into which they must grow up, as equals; and therefore they must begin to learn the lesson of equality. The school, by providing a kind of association between adults and children which is free from the emotional complexes of the home, can teach that lesson.
There is, however, so much intellectual confusion about what equality means that we must be quite clear on that point before we go on. At any moment of our careers, we are the servant of others, in the sense of being their follower, helper, disciple or right-hand man; and the master of still others, in that we are their leader, counsellor or teacher. We can hardly conduct an ordinary conversation without assuming, and usually shifting several times, these rôles. And these relationships extend far beyond the bounds of acquaintanceship, for one can scarcely read a book or write an article without creating such relationships for the moment with unknown individuals. In all the critical and important moments of one’s life one is inevitably a leader or a follower. But in adult civilized life, these relationships are fluid; they change and exchange with each other. And they are fluid because they are free. You and I can choose, though perhaps not consciously, our leaders and our helpers; we are not condemned to stand in any fixed relationship to any other person. And this freedom to be servant of whom we please, and master of whom we can, is equality. If I want to know about fishing-tackle, I will sit at your feet and learn, and if you will condescend to lead the expedition in quest of these articles I will be your obedient follower; while if you happened to want advice about pens, pencils, ink, or typewriter-ribbons, you would, I trust, yield a similar deference to me. We have no shame in serving nor any egregious pride in directing each other, because we are equals. We are equals because we are free to become each other’s master and each other’s servant whenever we so desire.
But the relationship of parents and children is not free. Parents cannot choose their children, and must serve their helplessness willy-nilly. Children cannot choose their parents, and must obey them anyhow. It is a rare triumph of parenthood—and doubtless also of childhood—when children and parents become friends, and serve and obey each other not because they must but because they really like to. But schools can easily take up the task which parents are only with the greatest difficulty able to accomplish, and dissolve the infantile tyrant-and-slave relationship to the grown-up world. The grown-up people in the school can be the child’s equals. They can become so by ceasing to encourage the notion which the child carries with him from the home, that adults are beings of a different caste. Once they regard an adult as a person like themselves—which, Heaven knows, he is!—children will discover quickly enough his admirable qualities, and his special abilities, and pay them the tribute of admiration and emulation. There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher’s ability to do sums, rather than the village bum’s ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes; the reason why the child doesn’t is plain enough—the bum has put himself on an equality with them and the teacher has not.
XXIV. Responsibility
BUT there is yet another quality which civilized standards demand of our human enterprise. People hate a quitter—and particularly the quitter whose defection leaves other people under the obligation to finish what he has started. We demand of a person that he should refrain from starting what he can’t finish. This is a demand not only for democratic intentions, but for common sense and ordinary foresight. He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves other people’s putting their trust in him, unless he can really carry it through. And if he finds in the middle of it that he has, as the saying goes, “bit off more than he can chaw,” he ought to try to stick it out at whatever cost to himself. If other people have believed he could do it, he must not betray their faith. This feeling is at the heart of what we ordinarily call telling the truth, as well as the foundation of the custom of paying one’s debts. We don’t really care how much a man perjures his own immortal soul by lying, but we do object to his fooling other people by it. We are all so entangled with each other, so dependent upon each other, that none of us can plan and create with any courage or confidence unless we can depend on others to do what they say they will do. But our feeling goes deeper than the spoken word—we want people to behave in accordance with the promise of their actions. We despise the person who seems, and who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more capable than he turns out to be. We even resent a story that promises at the beginning to be more interesting than it is when it gets going. And in regard to work, the thing which we value above any incidental brilliancy in its performance, is the certainty that it will be finished. Hence the pride in finishing any task, however disagreeable, once started.
This is the hardest thing that children have to learn—not to drop their work when they get tired of it. But it should be obvious that there is only one way for children to learn this, and that it is not by anything which may be said or done in punishment or rebuke from the authority which imposes the task. It is not to be learned at all so long as the task is imposed by any one outside the child himself. The child who is sent on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed. But the child who has volunteered to go on an errand—not as a pretty trick to please the Authorities, but because of a sense of the importance of the errand and of his own importance in doing it—that child has assumed a trust, which he will not be likely to violate.
But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget. Here we come to the ethics of punishment—a savage ritual which we generally quite fail to understand. Let us take a specific case. A group of boys are building a house in the woods, and they run out of nails. Penrod says he will go home and get some from the tool-chest in the barn. He goes; and on the way, he meets a boy who offers to take him to the movies, where Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects upon his duty; but he says to himself that he will go in and see one reel of Charlie Chaplin, and then hurry away. But the inimitable Charles lulls him into forgetfulness of realities, and when he emerges from the theatre it is nigh on dinner time. Penrod realizes his predicament, and rehearses two or three fancy stories to account for his failure to return with the nails; but he realizes that none of them will hold. He wishes that a wagon would run over him and break his leg, so that he would have a valid excuse. But no such lucky accident occurs. How is he going to face the gang next day? He has set himself apart from them, exiled himself, by his act. The question is, how is he going to get back? Now in the psychology of children and savages, there is happily a means for such reinstatement. This means is the discharge of the emotions—in the offender and in the group against which he has offended—of shame on the one hand and anger on the other, which together constitute the barrier against his return. That is, if they can express their anger by, let us say, beating him up, that anger no longer exists, they are no longer offended. While if he can by suffering such punishment pay the debt of his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence, and at the same time cleanses himself from the shame of committing it. As the best conclusion of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself for such punishment. For children understand the barbaric ritual of punishment when it really has the barbaric ritual significance.