Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

Such a position seems perfectly reasonable, yet the same citizens who willingly pay taxes to support an elaborate public-school system, strenuously oppose the most moderate attempts to guard the children from needless and useless exploitation after they have left school and have entered industry.

We are forced to believe that child labor is a national problem, even as public education is a national duty. The children of Alabama, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania belong to the nation quite as much as they belong to each State, and the nation has an interest in the children at least in relation to their industrial efficiency, quite as it has an interest in enacting protective tariffs for the preservation of American industries.

Uniform compulsory education laws in connection with uniform child labor legislation are the important factors in securing educated producers for the nation. Fortunately, a new education is arising which endeavors to widen and organize the child’s experience with reference to the world in which he lives.[13] The new pedagogy holds that it is a child’s instinct and pleasure to exercise all his faculties and to make discoveries in the world around him. It is the chief business of the teacher merely to direct his activity and to feed his insatiable curiosity. In order to accomplish this, he is forced to relate the child to the surroundings in which he lives; and the most advanced schools are, perforce, using modern industry for this purpose. The educators have ceased to mourn industrial conditions of the past generation, when children were taught agricultural and industrial arts by the natural co-operation with their parents, and they are endeavoring to supply this inadequacy by manual arts in the school, by courses in industrial history, and by miniature reproductions of industrial processes, thus constantly coming into better relations with the present factory system. These educators recognize the significance and power of contemporary industrialism, and hold it an obligation to protect children from premature participation in our industrial life, only that the children may secure the training and fibre which will later make this participation effective, and that their minds may finally take possession of the machines which they will guide and feed.

But there is another side to the benefits of child-labor legislation represented by the time element, the leisure which is secured to the child for the pursuit of his own affairs, quite aside from the opportunity afforded him to attend school. Helplessness in childhood, the scientists tell us, is the guarantee of adult intellect, but they also assert that play in youth is the guarantee of adult culture. It is the most valuable instrument the race possesses to keep life from becoming mechanical.

The child who cannot live life is prone to dramatize it, and the very process is a constant compromise between imitation and imagination, as the over-mastering impulse itself which drives him to incessant play is both reminiscent and anticipatory. In proportion as the child in later life is to be subjected to a mechanical and one-sided activity, and as a highly subdivided labor is to be demanded from him, it is therefore most important that he should have his full period of childhood and youth for this play expression in order that he may cultivate within himself the root of a culture which alone can give his later activity a meaning.[14] This is true whether or not we accept the theory that the aesthetic feelings originate in the play impulse, with its corollary that the constant experimentation found in the commonest forms of play are to be looked upon as “the principal source of all kinds of art.” At this moment, when industrial forces are concentrated and unified as never before, unusual care must be taken to secure to the children their normal play period, that the art instinct may have some chance, and that the producer himself may have enough individuality of character to avoid becoming a mere cog in the vast industrial machine.

Quite aside also from the problem of individual development and from the fact that play, in which the power of choice is constantly presented and constructive imagination required, is the best corrective of the future disciplinary life of the factory, there is another reason why the children who are to become producers under the present system should be given their full child-life period.

The entire population of the factory town and of those enormous districts in every large city in which the children live who most need the protection of child-labor legislation, consists of people who have come together in response to the demands of modern industry. They are held together by the purely impersonal tie of working in one large factory, in which they not only do not know each other, but in which no one person nor even group of persons knows everybody. They are utterly without the natural and minute acquaintance and inter-family relationships that rural and village life afford, and are therefore much more dependent upon the social sympathy and power of effective association which is becoming its urban substitute.

This substitute can be most easily elaborated among groups of children. Somewhere they must learn to carry on an orderly daily life—that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help which is the only real life of civilized man. Play is the great social stimulus, and it is the prime motive which unites children and draws them into comradeship. A true democratic relation and ease of acquaintance is found among the children in a typical factory community because they more readily overcome differences of language, tradition, and religion than do the adults. “It is in play that nature reveals her anxious care to discover men to each other,” and this happy and important task, children unconsciously carry forward day by day with all the excitement and joy of co-ordinate activity. They accomplish that which their elders could not possibly do, and they render a most important service to the community. We have not as yet utilized this joy of association in relation to the system of factory production which is so preëminently one of large bodies of men working together for hours at a time. But there is no doubt that it would bring a new power into modern industry if the factory could avail itself of that esprit de corps, that triumphant buoyancy which the child experiences when he feels his complete identification with a social group; that sense of security which comes upon him sitting in a theatre or “at a party,” when he issues forth from himself and is lost in a fairyland which has been evoked not only by his own imagination, but by that of his companions as well. This power of association, of assimilation, which children possess in such a high degree, is easily carried over into the affairs of youth if it but be given opportunity and freedom for action, as it is in the college life of more favored young people. The esprit de corps of an athletic team, that astonishing force of co-operation, is, however, never consciously carried over into industry, but is persistently disregarded. It is, indeed, lost before it is discovered—if I may be permitted an Irish bull—in the case of children who are put to work before they have had time to develop the power beyond its most childish and haphazard manifestations.

Factory life depends upon groups of people working together, and yet it is content with the morphology of the group, as it were, paying no attention to its psychology, to the interaction of its members. By regarding each producer as a solitary unit, a tremendous power is totally unutilized. In the case of children who are prematurely put to work under such conditions, an unwarranted nervous strain is added as they make their effort to stand up to the individual duties of life while still in the stage of group and family dependence.

We naturally associate a factory with orderly productive action; but similarity of action, without identical thought and co-operative intelligence, is coercion, and not order. The present factory discipline needs to be redeemed as the old school discipline has been redeemed. In the latter the system of prizes and punishments has been largely given up, not only because they were difficult to administer, but because they utterly failed to free the powers of the child.