Chapter VIII

The Training of the Child

The Forerunner: Vol. V, No. 8 (p. 216-222)

August 1914

With each of us, individually, our initial confusion in ethics begins in imperfect child-culture.

In place of a dawning perception of natural law we have a forced recognition of authority.

In place of social relation we are confronted only with personality.

In place of the continuing pleasure of learning how to do things we are given the continuing pain of being prevented from doing things.

In each new infancy we repeat the primal lesson of the animal world-inhibition. Our religious, moral and civil laws are so overwhelmingly prohibitive, strong, condemnatory and punitive as to what we should not do; extremely feeble and unconvincing as to what we should do.

This begins in the nursery. It begins with our primitive inchoate motherhood, a motherhood based almost wholly upon instinct, and as such lacking in the qualities of organized humanity.

With the animals below us conduct springs from inherited impulses plus the immediate stimulus of the environment, and is only subject to conscious control when some present danger makes the creature stop what it wants to do, or when one desire overcomes another.

All the pausing and waiting and lying low, the careful control of action, the sudden silence, which makes for safety and efficiency in the adult animal, the mother tries to teach her young. She also teaches it, by example mainly, the simple arts of its range of life, as anyone may see by watching a cat-mother educate her kittens. All this kind of tendency comes down to us by "instinct," and thus our human mother seeks to do. But ethics is a social science, not to be accounted for or explained in the family relations; and so long as the human mother lives only in the family, having no social relation or responsibility she has no real experience in ethics.

This lack in women has long been felt by men, though it has been glossed over by their enforced insistence on one distinctive virtue-chastity. The women's predominance in this is the main ground for their being called the more moral sex; they do not predominate in the larger social virtues, such as truth, justice, and tolerance; or in the shallower but necessary ones developed in ordinary business contact. It is true they do not fill our prisons, committing what we call "crimes" as much as men do-but that is mere negation, not social virtue.

Because of their exclusion from those relations on which the science of ethics rests, women are naturally prevented from a first hand acquaintance with or practise of that science; and their educational effect upon the child shows this limitation most unmistakably.

These are the two governing tendencies under which the child's conduct is modified: first, the very ancient one of protecting it from danger; second, the later one of protecting their belongings from the depredations of the child. In both cases the method used is frankly prohibitive.

To save the child from drowning the average mother seeks merely to keep it out of the water. To save it from burning she tries to keep it away from the fire. To protect her furniture, clothing, dishes and such objects, she forbids the child to touch them.

The principal emphasis in each child's life is laid on what he should not do.

"No! No!"-who has not seen the eager baby turn a puzzled face to this, fail of course to comprehend it until he is forcibly removed from something he wants, or it is forcibly removed from him; or, failing either, an utterly inconsequent pain is sharply applied.

He was doing something he wanted to do. He was prevented from doing it. He had an extra pain added to his disappoinment. And the foundation of his ethical perception is laid. Here it is; a. Right conduct means not doing what you want to. b. It hurts.

It is a simple method, an easy method—at the moment. If consistently and persistently carried out it develops what we call "a well-behaved child.” But it develops something else a deep, wide, universal, underlying conviction that right doing means restriction and pain.

From earliest infancy, up through childhood and youth, we beat it into them all, both actually and figuratively: To be good is unnatural and unpleasant—and they learn the lesson well.

The general belief of the world is that the practice of human virtue is really quite beyond us; that for human beings to "be good," to live together in peace and justice and freedom and happiness, is more than we can accomplish.

We assume, quite universally, that right conduct requires a struggle, a prolonged effort, a restriction of our "natural" tendencies requiring more power than we possess.

This is the child's first lesson, well learned.

If nothing else called for the humanizing of women it is the need of our children for a higher education in this one matter of ethics, this transcendently important and perfectly natural social law.

Let us parallel our experience once more from below; let us "go to the ant" for ethics.

It is necessary for ants to practise a high degree of altruism. They do, apparently without effort; not a superior few, but all of them.

How do they learn to thus instinctively sacrifice themselves to the common good?

We say, "It is merely an instinct–it has taken them millions of generations–those who did not develop it have died–those who did have survived."

One would think, to hear the slow blundering processes of "nature" thus discussed, that the human brain was a disability.

Suppose we left our arts and crafts and sciences to grow that way—by the "survival" of those who chanced to develop such advantages. We should not so have made our glorious leap up from beastdom and savagery in a few scant thousands of years; nor should we be able as at present to foresee happiness infinitely greater even now within reach of our hands—if we would but reach for it.

Our power of consciously perceiving right conduct and voluntarily developing it, is a far swifter and surer process than that long, wasteful, haphazard, negative method of "eliminating the unfit." What the ants have done in millions of generations we ought to do in a century—if we used our brains rightly.

The laws of right living for humanity are the laws of ethics. The power to modify our own conduct to an intellectually perceived standard we have had since tatooing was fashionable, but a knowledge of right fashions of living is still uncommon.

Some have known, from age to age; seers, prophets, philosophers. Many religions have contributed their quota of ethical perception, though heavily handicapped as we have seen.

But this knowledge has failed to be incorporated in our common life.

We have had layers of conduct, detached and often irreconcilable; a high, abstract, "religious" life, accepted as impracticable for most of us; a laborious, difficult, "moral" life, indifferently fulfilled; and a "business life," with its own strange ethics, going on as if Business was as separate from Living as Art is held to be.

And in all of them the governing ethical idea is negative–as the child has learned it.

The law, like the mother, is always telling us what not to do; always punishing us after the event; always cluttering life with prohibitions.

Our conscious positive teaching has confined itself to two fields; what we call "manners," and that peculiar little nosegay of selected subjects taught in schools and colleges and called education. In these we find no great difficulty.

This supposedly headstrong, ungovernable nature of ours has long since learned how to bow and courtsy and doff its hat. The whole artificial curriculum of exterior group behavior is mastered not only without protest but with positive pride, by this "poor human nature" of ours.

Whatever a given group or class decide to be "the proper thing," whether it pinch the feet, hobble the legs, or cause nausea or keen pain-these things the people do with willingness, with joy. The instance before mentioned of tattooing, is as strong as could be given; there we the individual cheerfully submitting to prolonged torture merely because the others admire it, and he values their good opinion.

When we recognize, understand, and admire the requisite virtues of our age as the savage admires a network of raised scars, we shall as cheerfully develop them.

What then should be the training of the child?

How can we make the common necessary human virtues clear, easy, natural, to the child?

This is a question which organized motherhood should have been studying for as many centuries as organized manhood has been studying other important lines of action.

Without here attempting a primer of ethics for nursery use, we may easily outline what should be the general standard of human conduct, as easy to us as altruism to the ant.

A civilized human being should possess, first, Self-control; this both positive and negative, the power to check and modify with similar power to compel action. This first demand is so primitive, so necessary, so absolutely essential to happy and efficient life, and withal so easily developed, that it does seem marvellous our little ones are not taught it. Savages have long since. shown the capacity to develop self-control to heights of stoicism, and our modern standards of politeness frequently call for, and exhibit, similar power. So do the exigencies of business, conspicuously shown in the instance of comic actors, hiding real grief while they "make merry" for other people's amusement.

As part of self-control, in the positive compelling sense, comes the free voluntary use of the mind. One can hardly predicate ethical conduct of an idiot, or of one who merely transmits or submits to, the ideas of other people.

We read in Eastern tales of the one sent to behead the blameless young Prince, apologizing for his cruelty by saying: "I am but a slave under command." The Prince fully accepts his plea, solemnly replying: "Thou art excusable!"

A slave under command has no ethics; or a soldier under orders, or the man who says: "I have to do it or I shall lose my job." Reporters justify their indecent intrusions on this ground, and other people similarly excuse them, saying, "They have to do it." Workmen justify their conspiring with their employers to fill the market with impure and degraded products, and employers justify their long range anti-social crimes by the same pitiful plea-"A man must live!"

Such submission is, of course, a paralysis of all ethical control. One no longer concerns oneself with the right or wrong of a given act, but merely obeys orders; no thought, no judgment is used, rather avoided, as merely causing pain.

With this primary essential of self-control established, the easy, direct, well-modulated action of a free mind running its own body, there follows without difficulty the appreciation and adoption of the large and simple virtues, such as Social Love, Courage, Truth, Justice and Efficiency. These are given as requiring no argument; no one will contradict their social usefulness.

If our minds were free and exercised in ethical judgments we should have no trouble at all in seeing the simple common sense of these qualities, their general benefit and advantage.

If our minds were free and exercised in voluntarily chosen action we should have on trouble in developing these virtues after perceiving their value.

Admitting this very basic platform of ethics, let us now look at our treatment of babies and young children in regard to its ethical influence.

The most unescapable part of this influence is in that first great necessity of Self-Control. Here we repeat, age after age, that old, old mistake: We make of the child, or seek to make of the child "a slave under command," and then blindly marvel at his lack of ethics.

Surely the first requisite of ethical conduct is power to see it. Surely the next requisite is power to do it. As surely the first training towards ethical conduct should develop this Power To See, and Power To Do.

With this in mind, consider the position and training of the child.

Primarily the child faces life in closely personal relation, and in absolute dependence. This is not a social relation, but a purely physical one. The child is in reality a member of society from birth, but is not so regarded. It is regarded only as a member of the family up to the time when the boy "goes out into the world." As for the girl, she never enters social relation, but remains always in the family relation-with its ethics superadded to her maternal instincts. She too is "a slave under command." She too, for all our history, has been denied the ethical power possible only to a free agent. Submission she has learned; patience, endurance, resignation, and, of course, obedience. To the natural caution of the mother she has added the timidity of the helpless dependent, burned in by long ages of exploitation.

As a mother she now governs the life of the child in hourly contact; though the father dictates the larger environment. Having no self-perceived and self-fulfilled ethics, only the accepted virtues enforced by her position, it has naturally not occurred to her to develop in the child powers to herself unknown. Her governing purpose is to "protect" the child; her next to "make it mind.' For his safety, and for that of the household gods, the child must be taught to obey.

The history of ancient races shows in long repetition the results of a too-perfect obedience.

All human growth requires some new step, some change, some daring to differ.

We serve one another by means of our differences. We advance, not by doing what we did before, but by doing something different. This is the social genesis of that worship of Liberty, the splendid young virtue, still but half seen, which is so vital an essential of social growth.

Our treatment of the child errs not only in its poverty of ethical understanding, but in the lasting confusion of mind resultant from the misplaced values of household life.

The family is, of course, a personal relation. It is a true and beautiful one, an enduring one, a nobly serviceable one, but it is personal. It is not, as we so glibly repeat, "the unit of the state." Families are not taxed, drafted into service, rewarded or punished. The individual is the unit of the state; the family as an earlier and narrower form of association above and beyond which rises the social structure so far composed of men only.

The child grows up to see the father going out into social service, which he is falsely told is done merely to provide for the family; and sees mother spending her energies entirely in family service. Love, duty, affection, effort—all are introduced to him in relation to a few individuals. To obey individuals, to please and serve individuals—these are his required ideals, his enforced activities.

When he demands a reason, a principle, as the normal young brain persistently does, he is given the arbitrary commands of ancient religions, or the practical alternative of punishment. These associations persist throughout life.

The inadequacy of religion to promote social ethics has been universally recognized. Ancient fatalistic theories accepted it, more modern hell-and-devil theories accepted it; we have all faced the fact of a kind of religious teaching which is not expected to produce results in any general measure.

That "God hates a liar" has not yet affected our truthfulness to any appreciable degree; nor has the fact that "father whips a liar" done much better. We have not taught the child to understand why truth is a social virtue, why lying is a primitive weakness, and an anti-social offense.

The conduct of the child is strongly and persistently modified, but not by his own perception, not by his own choice, not by his own fulfilled decisions. It is modified by and to persons with whom he is in visible contact, and governed by two primitive compulsions-to please those persons from affection, gratitude or hope of favor; and to avoid punishment. This list is the strongest influence.

Our major pressure in child training is what we call "discipline," and treats of how, when, why, and in what degree to punish.

Punishment is the main agent in enforcing our limited and erroneous family ethics upon the child, and punishment is the main agent in enforcing the larger but still limited and erroneous social ethics which we do recognize our pitiful array of negatives the misdemeanors, vices, and crimes which are "forbidden."

The family has some constructive ethics, narrow as it is; the State, so far, has almost none. This of course is why we behave so much better as members of families than we do as citizens.

But the method of enforcement is what affects the mind of the child; and, so, the conduct of the man. Command, backed by punishment, does not develop either the power to judge or the power to do.

Moreover, in the family, the child soon learns that punishment is fallible—that it is not an unerring consequence, but merely contingent on discovery. Here we have the simple and sweeping explanation of our world-wide sins of citizenship. We have nothing to keep us from them but threat of punishment, and that only follows upon being found out. We have never been taught why these things were wrong, nor trained in the power of self-government.

Then comes the second general result of this primitive child-culture. This is in the relating of acts to personal consequences only-a thing of deadly evil in result.

Even Emerson touches that same error in his strong saying: "If you want anything, pay for it and take it, says God."

Alas! One person cannot pay for it.

The consequences of human wrong doing are not to be restricted to the individual sinner. What our theory of personal salvation and personal damnation does to us from the religious side, our practise of personal praise and personal punishment does to us in infancy, and continues in civic life.

We have a current habit of regarding women as the "conservative" and "reactionary" sex; responsible by their very nature for the maintenance of outworn religions. Those who repeat this never once consider those religions older than ours where practically all the devotees are men. It is not any inner distinction of sex which makes women cling to the Christian religion, but that clinging is distinctly traceable to their position of sub-social development, and their tremendous power upon the child.

The child grows up in an atmosphere of intense personality. Personal supervision, personal accountability, personal praise and blame, personal reward and penalty-these surround him continually.

The mother, herself a subordinate, is subject to the same personal control; and as the arbiter over children and servants, hands down the same method.

Thus we find the child, under the immemorial training received "at his mother's knee"-or across it-growing up to face life with no true knowledge of ethics, that unstudied science; with his sense of right and wrong based on revelation and authority, not on observation, experiment and proof; with his stimulus mainly the fear of punishment, and secondarily the desire to please; with an intense self-consciousness and sense of individual responsibility which makes him miserably ask, "What have I done?" and protest, defiantly or carelessly, "It is not my fault!" and with those governing convictions that right doing is difficult and unpleasant, and wrong doing only important if found out.

To such training, practically universal, is due our confused dull-eyed struggle with what we call "the problems of human life." Problems they are, and life is full of them, but in no way more difficult than the problems of agriculture, navigation, or mechanics. Those sciences we have studied, to some degree mastered, and are practising with hope and energy. To their difficulties we have not added by trying to perpetuate ancient errors; to their failures we have not added guilt, shame and arbitrary penalty; nor do we intrust the teaching of these necessary sciences to those who have never studied or practised them.

Yet no science, no art, no craft, is so necessary as that of Human Living-Ethics.

Let us now roughtly forecast another kind of treatment for the child. Let us suppose him to open his fresh mind in an environment prepared for him as lovingly as his mother now prepares her doll-like baby clothes; with as much effort and earnestness as his father prepares a home; with as much learning and labor as the State prepares a university.

(Note for those who are deaf by choice, and who like to keep their eyes shut: NO: This does not mean that the child shall "be separated from his mother," shall "have no home," shall "be brought up in an institution.")

Such an environment necessarily assumes long, careful, professional study and practise, the social evolution of method and material, a new standard of child-culture in mother, nurse, and teacher.

Here is merely a suggestion of its effect on our attitude toward ethics:

The child's conduct should be modified by surrounding him with simple observable processes from which he should irresistibly deduce for himself, "This is the right way to do it."

To these carefully prepared conditions should be added, as far as is naturally possible, pleasure in doing it right, with disappointment and loss on failure; these to lie in the necessary results of the act, not in the least in arbitrary praise or blame.

No anger, no criticism, no punishment, is needed; only a cheerful patience, an encouragement to try again; an atmosphere in which the baby mind would take unfailing pleasure in learning to do things right.

Mistakes we should take for granted, and teach that these are to be forgotten as soon as possible; that they are to be expected in some measure, and outgrown, with no loss of energy in shame or regret.

In those most important first years all this would be of extreme simplicity, the value lying not at all in the things done or not done, but in the formation of what we even now call "good habits" with our own perverse interpretations of what is good.

Our efforts should be to reduce Cause and Effect to words of one syllable, to make right doing understandable and pleasurable in itself; to avoid all sense of personality; never to load on a child-soul our imbecile horrors of guilt and shame; and with all subtlest, lovingest, wisest effort of our highest teachers, to emphasize Principles instead of Incidents.

A little later, when that unsullied should be led through pleasant years soul was able to generalize at all, it of unconscious education, in which a new history, taught by story and picture, should show it the upward steps of Baby Humanity-how it tried, how it failed, how it made this mistake and that, and how, clearly, the failure was due to this or that lack of knowledge and lack of power.

A new literature is needed for our children; not of unrelated traditional tales and folk-lore; still less of the degraded child-catering mercantile sort which clogs the market and the mind to-day; but a literature prepared by love and genius, to introduce Life to the child.

We should cut off with psychic-antisepsis, the black currents of long-transmitted evil which have crept down the ages, not from father to son, but from child to child.

As the primitive mother would wall out wolves, and the primitive father kill them, so will the parents of tomorrow wall out and stamp out the crowding evils of the past, and bring up their children in an atmosphere as free from tradition as it is free from vermin.

Children so reared would grow up unconscious, unashamed and unafraid; skilled and strong in doing right because it meant both reason and happiness. Before they stood forth, full grown, to do their share in world-lifting, they would long have clearly understood what ails us, and how to help it.

In such minds our misery and sin would rouse only pity, patience, and a tremendous desire to show the way.

Where we see blind confusion, a welter of evil passions and selfish desires, hemmed about by laws and punishments, lit only by that high hope of the ages-Something Better Somewhere Else-they will see only an entanglement of good impulses, morbidly over and under-developed, with an almost ridiculous ignorance of the simple laws and processes of Human Living-which is Ethics.

Long before we ourselves are able to understand the whole long-range processes of social relation, we can easily grasp enough of the first principles to rear a generation of new people who will be able to understand them. As it is now our pitiful stupidity in this supreme science is largely due to gross mishandling of the child mind.

(To be continued)