Woman.—Throughout the period that is most decisive for its future, humanity is wholly dependent upon woman. Upon her rests not only the responsibility of preserving the integrity of the germ, but also that of the embryonal and fœtal development of man.
The respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality.
To-day we are altogether lacking in a sense of moral obligation toward the species, and hence lacking in a moral sense such as would lead to respect for woman and maternity—so much so, indeed, that we have invented a form of modesty which consists in concealing maternity, in not speaking of maternity! And yet at the same time there are sins against the species that go unpunished, and offenses to the dignity of woman that are tolerated and protected by law!
But even after the child is born and has reached the period of lactation, we should still write across it the words Woman and Mother. The education and the responsibility of woman and of society must be modified, if we are to assure the triumph of the species. And the teachers who receive the child into the school, after its transit through society (in the form of its parents' germs) and through the mother, cannot fail to be interested in raising the social standards of education and morality. Like a priesthood of the new humanity, they should feel it their duty to be practitioners of all those virtues which assure the survival of the human species.
Moral and Pedagogic Problems within the School.—Children when they first come to school have a personality already outlined. From the unmoral, the sickly, the intellectually defective to the robust and healthy children, the intelligent, and those in whom are hidden the glorious germs of genius; from those who sigh over the discomforts of wretchedness and poverty to those who thoughtlessly enjoy the luxuries of life; from the lonely hearted orphan to the child pampered by the jealous love of mother and grandmother:—they all meet together in the same school.
It is quite certain that neither the spark of genius nor the blackness of crime originated in the school or in the pedagogic method! More than that, it is exceedingly probable that the extreme opposite types passed unnoticed, or nearly so, in that environment whose duty it is to prepare the new generations for social adaptation. From this degree of blindness and unconsciousness the school will certainly be rescued by means of the scientific trend which pedagogy is to-day acquiring through the study of the pupil. That the teacher must assume the new task of repairing what is wrong with the child, through the aid of the physician, and of protecting the normal child from the dangers of enfeeblement and deformation that constantly overhang him, thus laying the foundations for a splendid human race, free to attain its foreordained development—all this we have already pointed out, and space does not permit us to expand the argument further.
But, in conclusion, there is one more point over which I wish to pause. If the Lombrosian theory rests upon a basis of truth, what attitude should we pedagogists take on the question of moral education? We are impotent in the face of the fact of the interrelation between physical and moral deformity. Is it then no longer a sin to do evil and no longer a merit to do good? No. But we have only to alter the interpretation of the facts, and the result is a high moral progress pointing a new path in pedagogy. There are, for example, certain individuals who feel themselves irresistibly attracted toward evil, who become inebriated with blood; there are others, on the contrary, who faint at the mere sight of blood and have a horror of evil. There are some who feel themselves naturally impelled to do good, and they do it in order to satisfy a personal desire (many philanthropists) thus deriving that pleasure which springs from the satisfaction of any natural need. In our eyes, all these individuals who act instinctively, though in opposite ways, deserve neither praise nor blame; they were born that way; one of them is physiologically a proletarian, the other is a capitalist of normal human ability. It is a question of birth. When the educator praised the one and punished the other, he was sanctioning the necessary effects of causes that were unknown to him:
"But still, whence cometh the intelligence
Of the first notions man is ignorant,
And the affection of the first allurements
Which are in you as instinct in the bee
To make its honey; and this first desire
Merit of praise or blame containeth not."
(Dante, Longfellow's Translation.)
The instinctive malefactor is not to blame, the blame should rest rather upon his parents who gave him a bad heredity; but these parents were in their turn victims of the social causes of degeneration. The same thing may be said if a pathological cause comes up for consideration in relation, for instance, to certain anomalies of character.