In its essence this form of the family has been maintained down to the present day. The modifications it has undergone may be reduced [[309]]to the two following.[63] In the first place, in consequence of her improved position as wife, the mother has obtained a greater influence over the education of her children, though her power is, under the law, still subordinated in every way to that of her husband. In the second place the state manifests a continually increasing tendency to exert an influence over the relations between parents and their children. To begin with, the state imposes upon married parents the task of supporting and bringing up their children, and prohibits by the penal law slaying or abandoning them. The origin of these requirements must be found in the fact that the state is interested in having the children cared for, in order that the population may be as numerous as possible. (The state being once formed, while the causes of infanticide among primitive peoples have almost disappeared, the law has no occasion to make any great change in the existing situation.) If the married parents were not forced by the state to support and bring up their children[64] it would be necessary to impose this task upon other institutions which do not exist in our present society. The state is not an institution for the public well-being; it is chiefly a means of maintaining the external order in the disorder which results from the complicated and muddled system of capitalistic production; it is before all a system of police. If it were otherwise, the state would consider it as one of its first duties to deprive parents of their rights over their children, if they did not perform their task, or did it badly, and would itself undertake the care and training of these children, as well of those whose parents were dead or otherwise absolutely unable to care for them. For society as a whole, as well as the children themselves, has a very great interest in this matter.
However, the state in general does not assume any duty towards abandoned or neglected children, and only in a hesitating way intervenes to punish or to take away the parental authority of those who have been guilty of such acts.[65] Little by little, as the ideas upon the duties of the state become modified however (principally under the influence of organized labor, which aims at transforming the state into an organized community), it interests itself more in the person of the child. As to the care of the child’s property all the codes are already very much detailed! [[310]]
There are two points with regard to which the state quite generally has an influence over the lot of the child. First, it prohibits or limits his paid labor; and second, it obliges parents to send their children to school.
We have already spoken of this prohibition, which is made necessary from the fact that the physical condition of the working classes is becoming worse, and because the labor movement exercises a pressure upon the state. Compulsory education has its origin, on one side, in the fact that, in some occupations, capitalism cannot make use of workmen who are altogether ignorant; on the other side, in the fact that without compulsory education the youth of the working class would be even more brutalized than at present. The opposition to compulsory education on the part of whatever is conservative is another clear indication of what an intimate connection there is between the individual family and the present economic system. The economic position of the man as breadwinner for his wife and children is the cause of his desire to be limited in his power as little as possible.
Up to this point we have been treating of conditions past and present only in so far as they are regulated by law (the formal side); we must now go on to treat conditions from the material side. Here we must consider three subjects: physical education, intellectual education, and moral education. In treating of criminality, however, we have naturally little to do with the first two, while the third is of the highest importance for us.
As to physical education it is enough to say that it is the “conditio sine qua non” of the two others. The intellectual and moral qualities of a child that is badly cared for physically, can never be entirely developed. The parents (and the child himself) use up all their energy in providing for their bodily necessities, so that there is none left for the other needs. Dr. A. Baer says: “Children of this kind (i.e., of the poor classes) already at an early age bear the cares and sorrows that life imposes upon them; they early become acquainted with the claims and demands of life, and not infrequently are very early influenced by living-conditions which will necessarily affect them long afterward.”[66]
It is only among the bourgeoisie and the relatively well-to-do portion of the petty bourgeoisie that there can be any sufficient physical education for the children. Among the proletarians, and [[311]]those of the petty bourgeoisie who are in a similar situation as regards material conditions, it is insufficient, and worse, if possible, among the lower proletariat. However, if there is a lack of it among these last, there is at times a superabundance among the bourgeoisie. There children are often brought up in such luxury that they are early made blasé and rendered unhappy for the future. Dr. Baer says upon this subject:[67] “It is through other circumstances and causes that the children of the rich and well-to-do classes are brought to a condition of precocity, accompanied by sickly irritability and arrogant self-conceit. Here are good-living, luxury, and the superabundance of bodily enjoyments, the early familiarity with the theater, balls, and outside social life in general, which make them incapable of the harmless pleasures of childhood. Improper education in the family is responsible for the fact that children in widely separated social classes are already at any early age left to themselves and fall into evil ways. ‘One must have lived in a great city,’ says von Krafft-Ebing, ‘and have visited the hovels of the poor, and the palaces of the rich to know what mistakes in the bringing up of children are committed there, where the children of the poor, amidst dirt and drink, and those of the rich, amidst arrogance and rascality, are going to ruin physically and morally.… Every day may be seen children falling asleep at the theater or other places of amusement to which their parents’ folly and desire for pleasure have dragged them. Other parents provide for their children the doubtful happiness of children’s balls and soirées. Is it any wonder, then, if we now, especially in the great cities, very seldom meet with any real children?’ ”
In the countries where education is compulsory, it is guaranteed that all the children will acquire a certain amount of knowledge. It is unnecessary to say that in general this amount of knowledge is very small in the case of the children of the poor, and consists of the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, so that there is no real intellectual education. For the children of the bourgeoisie quite a different preparation is made; here there is rather an over- than an undersupply of the means of education. The great competition in present day society, the superabundance of intellectual forces, the ardent desire to see their children succeed in spite of everything, all this obliges parents to crowd their children’s intellectual capacities, even to the detriment of their other qualities. “The thing which in our modern life conduces most to the giving of a one-sided, inharmonious development to the child, is the fact that too little weight [[312]]is given to the development of the disposition, and too much to the development of the understanding. Because there is no influence exerted upon the spiritual and emotional life, the mind of the child is often from early youth turned toward the material and sensuous, the life of pleasure, and comes to bend its thought wholly to the practical and utilitarian.”[68]
Thus we arrive at the very subject we have in view, moral education. As I have already remarked, one of the characteristic differences between education among the primitive peoples and that of our own day is this, that as a consequence of the great complexity of our present society, and the numberless conflicts between individual interests, the task imposed upon the educator is now much broader and more onerous.[69]