Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

It may be objected here that in our present society, consisting as it does for the most part of adherents of Christianity, most children are taught to love their neighbor as themselves. This is true, but in a society such as ours, where the interests of all men are opposed, the effect of this commandment cannot be great, or will be practiced only in words and not in acts, and so end in hypocrisy. He who wants to follow this commandment to the letter sees himself at once defeated in the conflict of life, unless he changes his opinion.[76]

No one known to me has better characterized the existing educational system than Owen. “As society is now constituted,” he says, “no children can by possibility be really well educated. The fundamental errors upon which it has been based, filling the early mind with error and hypocrisy and all manner of conflicting ideas, opposed to facts and to nature, render it impracticable for any child to be rationally trained or treated by society. And the more education of this kind is given to children, the more they are estranged from a knowledge of themselves, or of human nature generally, and the less competent will they be to understand what society has been made to be, and yet less what it ought to be, and how it may be made what it is desirable that it should be, for the happiness and well-being of all. [[316]]

“Mothers and fathers thus taught, are incompetent to teach and educate their children in the spirit, manner, and conduct, which should, for the benefit of all, be given to all children. Their affections also, especially the strong natural animal affections of the mother, are, in almost all cases too strong for the very limited powers of judging accurately respecting their own children and those of other parents, which females now acquire from their present mal-education.

“The individual family arrangements confining the child to the limited number of ideas among them—to their early deep impressions in favor of family interests and supposed rights—to the narrow and partial experience of a family and its usual small connections, are equally destructive of a good sound practical education or well-training of children.

“The individual system of society which has so long prevailed in all nations, and amongst all peoples, is also a strong barrier to the proper education of beings intended to be made rational. The individual system of society is injurious to man now, under every point of view in which it can be considered; but especially in the education of children of all classes. It confines all their strongest feelings to self first, then to family, afterwards to kindred, and then to small neighborhoods and districts, regularly and systematically training each child to become at maturity a merely localized, ignorantly selfish animal, filled with family and geographical prejudices.

“As long as this individual system shall be continued, it will be vain to expect that any child can be well educated, or properly trained to become a rational being—a man with the full physical and mental powers of humanity, intelligent, moral, and virtuous. The isolated character formed by the individual system will, as long as children shall be educated under it, and in accordance with all its innumerable errors in practice and principle, render it impossible for any child to be so educated and placed in society as not to become, more or less, a cause of anxiety to its parents. Every child under this system comes into society, at its birth, opposed by the capital and experience of society; and as it advances in its progress, and has to take part in the jostle, bustle and business of life, it has to contend for itself, often, not only against these general powers of society, but on the death of parents, or sometimes even before, with brothers and sisters, for individual property or other advantages.

“Besides, children before they have any resisting powers of mind, being forced to receive the errors of their parents and other early instructors, respecting their supposed faculties of believing and disbelieving, [[317]]loving and hating, are by this process, placed through life in direct opposition to nature; and, as vice has been made, by the gross errors of our ancestors, to consist in acting in accordance with nature, and virtue in acting in opposition to it, and as nature continually impels the individual to desire to act in accordance with its own laws, in defiance of man’s unwise and unjust laws, the great probability is that children will be more liable to obey nature than man; and thus, where there are children, they must be a source of constant anxiety to parents; and that anxiety must be injurious to the best formation of the organization of the remainder of the infants that may be born to them.”[77]

We have still to fix our attention upon the sexual education of the children of the bourgeoisie. In our society the Christian sexual ethics is dominant, often even among non-Christians, without their being conscious of it. According to this system the whole sexual life proceeds from the evil one, and man would be better without any sexual instincts.[78] This is why children are generally raised in an absolute ignorance upon this subject, or even have lies told to them about it. As nature cannot be suppressed it follows that the curiosity of the child only becomes the more inflamed, and that the conduct of men in this regard becomes hypocritical.[79]

Secondly, let us take up education in the petty bourgeoisie. Upon this point we can be very brief. A part of this class joins on to the proletariat from the conditions of its life, and another part to the bourgeoisie. It is unnecessary, therefore, to speak of it at length. It is only the core of the petty bourgeoisie who, having kept the traditions of their class, show any differences in this regard. Here there is no danger of the demoralizing influence of the luxurious surroundings of the rich, and the surveillance of the father is greater, and thus the education more severe; but the limited conception of life, and the continual efforts of the parents, eager to procure advantages for their families, develop egotism among their children in a high degree.

With regard to the proletariat it has already been shown that the material advantages necessary for a sufficient education are lacking in the case of this class. Housing conditions are here of the greatest importance. Generally there is not room enough for the children at home, so that they spend the greater part of the day in the street. [[318]]Then again the housing conditions are responsible for the fact that the children often are thrown with persons whose influence is harmful to them (prostitutes, etc.). And finally the small apartments bring it about that the children are too early instructed in sexual matters, and this in a bad way (through sleeping in the same small room with their parents, or in the same bed with children of the opposite sex, etc.).