We come now to education among the proletariat. Here we meet first, insufficiency of the pecuniary means which education requires; second, bad housing conditions, which oblige the children to pass a great part of the day in the street; third, the total absence of pedagogical ideas; fourth, the absence during the greater part of the day of the father of the family, and in many cases even of the mother. The number of married women who work away from home is continually increasing. In 1882 there were in Germany, for example, 507,784 married working-women, and by 1895 this figure had risen to 807,172—an increase of 299,388 (59%) in 13 years. In 1882 17.3% of the working-women were married; in 1895 21.5%.[213] There are no official figures but Braun[214] calculates that in Germany there are 500,000 children under 14 years of age, whose mothers are working-women. In Austria 44.6% of the working-women are married, and in France 20.6%.[215] We have seen above (pp. 409 ff.) that juvenile criminality is increasing. This is explained in part by the increase in the labor of married women, from which it results that an increasing number of children are brought up without the proper care.
Among the working classes there is no question of education properly speaking. We can consider the children as fortunate if their parents do not set them a bad example, are not continually engaging in disputes, and are not given to alcohol. It is plain that all this does not make up a proper education; and yet how many children there are who do not have even so much of an education as this![216]
In the lower proletariat the situation is naturally worse. Not only is there a total lack of care and surveillance, but children are even brought up to crime.
Up to this point we have supposed the parents to be living. From the present organization of society it follows that the condition of the children of the poor becomes very bad as soon as the parents or even [[488]]one of them dies. Often private or public charity intervenes, but generally the community does nothing for the orphan.
As a last consequence of the present system it must be noted that children born of illegitimate unions are in a still more precarious situation, since it is only the mother who has to protect them.
The community (in this case the state) concerns itself little with the education of children; it makes education compulsory (at least in some countries) and deprives parents of the charge of their children when they neglect them too much (this again in some countries only).
Now we come to the facts. They prove that the surroundings in which many children live are an important factor in the etiology of crime. The figures at my disposal are not as numerous as I could wish, but official statistics are not yet as full as is desirable for sociological purposes.
In reading the statistics which follow we must not lose sight of the fact that when it is stated that a certain percentage of children were brought up in a bad environment, it does not follow that all the others had a good education. The figures record only the very grave cases, as, for example, where the parents have been convicted, or the children entirely abandoned, etc. It is easier to prove, in making an investigation into the condition of a family, that the children do not receive a good education than it is to prove the contrary. Raux says that 36% of the parents of the juvenile criminals whom he had examined had a good reputation. The author adds, however, that this figure is too high for the following reason: “For certain officials charged with furnishing information on this point, every man who, without being absolutely irreproachable, has not been complained against, is a person of good character. So we have been made to add to the list of those of good reputation certain families where the father, drunken, idle, and unchaste, sets a very bad example to his son.”[217]
Some readers will see in what follows only a tiresome mass of figures—quite wrongly, for those who know how to read the figures find in them a language much more convincing and more shocking than that which can be expressed in words.