The Elements of Child-protection

by Sigmund Engel

(b) The public elementary school has to teach children to love their country; but this should on no account be done in such a way as to inspire hatred for other countries.

(c) The old elementary schools taught obedience and subordination. But to-day, when the conditions are quite different from those of the Middle Ages, the public elementary school should do nothing of the kind, but should rather teach independent judgment, promptness of action, and soundness of decision. The public elementary school is a public institution like the (State) railway and the post office, and compulsory school attendance is a civic duty analogous to the duty of military service. But it is necessary to protest most energetically against the inference sometimes drawn from the analogy between the two last-named duties, that the elementary school should be the preparatory school to the barrack, and the barrack a sort of continuation school to the elementary school—against the doctrine that children should be disciplined to a blind obedience. We must carefully avoid overestimating the importance of discipline. The school must and does use compulsion. Discipline is an important means of elementary school education, and such education is unthinkable without discipline. But children are sufficiently disciplined by mere attendance at school for a certain time.

(d) The following idea is very generally diffused, that it is the aim of the school to prepare children for the life they will have to lead when they are grown up. Most of the children attending the public elementary schools will become proletarians, wage-workers. Since the proletarian must be diligent, thrifty, humble, disciplined, it is regarded as the duty of the elementary school to inculcate these virtues. But these so-called virtues are not virtues at all. The greatest obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the average wage-earner is that he should be content with things as they are. The labourers’ wage represents the minimum that he finds requisite to the satisfaction of his needs; when his needs increase, his wages rise. Every friend of social progress should endeavour to secure that the elementary school should arouse in the children certain needs and desires.

(e) Many persons wish to utilise the public elementary school to turn children away from socialist ideas. This is to be done by making the children acquainted with the dangers which the realisation of socialist theories would involve, and in addition by inculcating in the children the afore-mentioned virtues. But the attainment of this end is less easy than such persons imagine. The public elementary school exercises a certain influence. The workman who has received at school education and instruction of the suggested type will doubtless less readily become an enthusiastic adherent of the socialist party than the workman who has never attended an elementary school, and who was an illiterate until he first came under the influence of his trade union. But the notions inculcated in the public elementary school in respect of obedience, humility, and the like are readily eradicated by a short experience of socialist comradeship, and replaced by social-democratic ideas.

General Culture.—It is by no means one of the aims of the public elementary school to provide general culture. Even less is this the aim of education than it is the aim of the public elementary school—and the provision of general culture by the latter would appear to be entirely out of the question. During the few years a child spends at the public elementary school, it is impossible to attempt to impart all that is included in the wide field of general culture.

Individuality.—A large proportion of those pupils with a well-marked individuality can develop their personality even in the school. The tendency of the school is in many cases to rub off the edges and corners of individuality. But it is impossible to approve of the extent to which, in the public elementary school of to-day, the children’s individuality is repressed. Our present elementary schools do not individualise enough. Their principal aim is, not so much to provide a sound education, as to force all the pupils through the same rigid curriculum, without making any allowance for their various special aptitudes. (For what good end is it that the modern educational authority should regulate every detail of school-life, down to the quality and price of the articles used in class, and even to the colour of the manuscript books and the precise number of pages they are to contain?) In the elementary school of to-day, owing to the large size of the classes and the small number and defective training of the teachers, individualisation is impossible.

Beauty.—The school must not indeed attempt to make all the children into artists; but the children must most certainly be taught to understand and appreciate beauty—that is, the arts. Our present public elementary schools are extremely defective from this point of view.

Knowledge.—Knowledge gives the individual power, and provides him with a powerful weapon in the struggle for existence. The dominant classes, for the protection of their own egoistic interests, keep knowledge for themselves, and refuse to provide the lower classes with the means and weapons for their liberation. The State insists upon a minimal quantity of knowledge for every one of its members, because this is to the interest of the community and of the upper classes. But since to impart to the common people anything beyond this minimum of knowledge would threaten the dominance of the upper classes, or would at any rate involve pecuniary sacrifices on the part of the latter, and since it might even lead to the liberation of the lower classes, the functional activity of the public elementary schools is kept at as low a level as possible, and is limited as much as possible both intrinsically and extrinsically. The State and the upper classes devote to popular education only such an amount as is found to be absolutely essential. They are well aware that much more could be done than is done in the way of popular education; but since they know also that this would redound chiefly to the advantage of the lower classes, they propose no advance upon the present system. This affords a satisfactory explanation of the fact that the modern State spends so much less upon elementary schools than upon middle or high schools—that is, upon institutions for the upper classes, and why the State spends so much less upon education in general than upon other things. The budget of any modern State would exemplify the fact that the individualist State spends at least five times as much for military purposes as upon elementary education. The more complete the division of labour, the more do employers tend to utilise the services of unskilled labourers—that is, the services of those whose work is of such a character that all they need know to enable them to perform it is at most a little reading, writing, and arithmetic. The capitalists have no use for workmen with more knowledge than this, for the unskilled workers are cheaper. The owning class are not inclined to make sacrifices to enable the children of workpeople to learn more in the elementary school. They know very well that to do this would merely be to do themselves harm, for the more the workman knows the more readily does he think independently, the more critical is he, and the more readily does he recognise the defects of the existing social order.

Science.—The modern public elementary school professes to teach children science. But they must first of all give their pupils desire and capacity for the acquirement of science. It should not be their aim to impart to the child the elements of any particular science, but rather to develop a capacity for a speedy acquisition of the knowledge it will find necessary in the course of its life. The procedure of the older elementary school which laid stress only upon memory is almost completely a thing of the past. But even to-day the elementary schools of Europe lay most emphasis upon the exhibition by their pupils of extensive knowledge, and this involves an overtaxing of the memory at the expense of the powers of thought. The elementary schools of the United States of America, on the other hand, do not so much endeavour to secure that a certain quantity of knowledge should be imparted, they do not so much insist upon thorough instruction, and strict concentration in the narrower sense of the term, as endeavour to effect a stimulated interest and a certain degree of orientation in all departments of knowledge. The latter system is the sounder. But a certain foundation of positive knowledge is absolutely essential, for upon this foundation is based the acquirement of all the knowledge subsequently gained, and necessary for the purposes of life. The modern elementary school teaches much and many things, including much that is altogether superfluous, but what the children will really need in life is either not taught at all, or taught defectively and inefficiently. Great emphasis is laid upon religion, grammar, and history; modern science is comparatively ignored; technical instruction, drawing, natural history, the principles of morals, political economy, and legislation, are neglected. (It is through the neglect of the last-mentioned that it results that man is perhaps able to understand his responsibilities towards his Heavenly Judge, but certainly not towards any earthly one.) When we examine the teaching of history in the modern elementary school, we find that the pupils, instead of acquiring some general ideas upon universal history, and the history of civilisation, have their minds crammed with a jingo record of wars and dynasties, a mass of dates of battles and other trivial incidents, patriotic anniversaries, and a biassed selection of anecdotes—all this having no other object than to bring the children up as jingoes and anti-socialists.

Home Work.—The idea that children must have no home work to do, and that they should do all their work at school, is an exaggerated one. But the fact remains that the tendency of the modern elementary school is to overburden children with home work. This is all the worse because the work at school is often too much for the pupils, and to add home work is then sheer cruelty. The domestic arrangements in the majority of proletarian homes are so exiguous, that it is impossible for children to find the necessary conveniences and the necessary order and quiet for any considerable amount of home work.