Concerning Children

We need not be alarmed at some new overtures on the part of society, if we but look at what society is doing now. That we do not think of this is due to our tradition that we "take care of ourselves." We do not. No civilised man "takes care of himself." We take care of each other. But, granting this to some degree, we have heretofore supposed that the benefits of civilisation belonged only to adults, – for that matter only to adult males! – and were to be distributed to children through the individual parent. Thus, if the parent was inferior, the child was expected not only to inherit his inferiority, but to suffer from it always through inferior maintenance, breeding, and education.

The gradual reaching out of society to protect and care for the child is one of the most interesting lines of historic development. The parent had power to kill a child. The State denied the right, and protected the child against the parent. The parent had power to sell the child. The State denied that. The parent might cast off and neglect the child. The State compels him to maintain it, if he can; and, if not, the State supports the child. The parent might teach the child, have it taught, or leave it untaught. Now the State orders that the child must be taught, either at home or at school, and furnishes the school free. So far the line of advance has been from absolute parental control to a steadily enlarging State control, from absolute parental support to more and more of State support. The question of more or less in present details may be debated indefinitely to no conclusion. The principle is what we should study.

The condition of childhood in our human sense, the long period of immaturity, is a social condition. As we advance in social relation, becoming more and more highly specialised, the gulf between infancy and maturity increases. The young animal and the adult animal are far more alike than a Gladstone and his baby.

It does not take very long to mature the group of faculties required for maintaining individual life. It does take long to mature the group of faculties required to maintain social life. To rear a man —i. e., an adult male of genus homo– is no very difficult task. It is accomplished by Bushmen, Hottentots, Eskimo, every living kind of human creature. To rear a physician, an engineer, a chemist, – this takes longer. Incidentally, this is one reason why a girl's "majority" is placed at eighteen, a boy's at twenty-one. She is supposed to need only individual maturity, – physical maturity. He is supposed to take more time to become a man because he is a member of society, and so has to learn more things. It is not a question of adolescence, of physiological change. The boy of eighteen could be a father as well as the girl a mother; but he is not as well able to take his social position, to serve mankind in his craft, art, trade, or profession. Note here the early maturity and marriage of the less developed grades of society, filling those simpler social functions which require less specialisation, and the proportionate postponement of this period in the more highly specialised. Our long period of immaturity is a social condition, and not an individual one. That we may reach the full growth needed in the advanced member of society, we must be minors longer than would be necessary if we were not members of society. The exceeding childishness of the civilised child is also a social condition.

The nearer we are to the animals, the more capable and bright the very little ones. In the South it was common to set a little black child to take care of an older white one: the pickaninny matures much more rapidly. So, again, in our own lower social grades the little children of the poor are sharper, better able to care for themselves, than children of the same age in more developed classes. It is no proof of greater intelligence in the adult. It is retrogression, – a mark of bad social conditions.

Civilised society is responsible for civilised childhood, and should meet its responsibilities. The sweet confidence of a modern child, as compared to the alert suspicion of a baby savage, shows what ages of social safe-guarding have done. In the beautiful union of our civilised growth, even so far, we have made possible the Child; and it is for us still further to protect and develope this most exquisite social product, – this greatest social hope and power. Society's relation to the child is impersonal. It is not limited by parenthood. The parental relation is lower, more limited. Parentally, we care only for our own: socially, we care for all. Parentally, we are animals: socially, we learn to love one another. We become, approximately, Christians.

Christianity is a social condition. In our present degree of social progress, we produce by our specialised co-ordinate activities that safe and comfortable material environment, those comparatively developed virtues which we call "civilisation." But, in applying this common product to the advancement of the child, – which is our best and quickest way to incorporate progress in the race itself, – we allow the incapacity of the individual parent to limit the child's advantages. We deny to the child the conditions necessary to his best development, unless his particular father is able to provide them. Our theory here is that the father would not work so hard if the State provided for his child; some thinkers combating even the public school and public library on this ground. This is an outworn economic fallacy. The inferior father cannot work beyond a certain grade because he has not the capacity; and, if the child has only the advantages the inferior father can provide for him, he grows up to be another inferior father and low-grade worker. The most deadly result of this foolish neglect of the young citizen is seen in the ensuing action of the biological law, "Reproduction is in inverse proportion to specialisation." Because we leave the child to grow up unspecialised, untrained, save for the puny efforts of his single low-grade parent, therefore he, in turn, helps fill the world with very numerous and very inferior progeny.

We are hampered by the rapid reproduction of the very lowest classes of society, weighted down by their defects and limitations, forced to wait – the most advanced of us – for the great rear-guard of the population. We must wait because a society is alive, and includes all its members. It cannot outstrip its own inferior parts, however neglected and behindhand they may be. And their numbers —numbers resultant from their low condition– complicate the problem hopelessly. That is, hopelessly on this old fallacious notion that the child can have no help from all the strong, rich world, save what his father and mother can filter through their personal limitations. We are beginning to change this by our efforts at free public education. We shall change it more and more as we grow consciously awake to our true social responsibility to the child.

We cannot afford to have one citizen grow up below the standards of common comfort, health, and general education. To the scared cry, "But, if you take the responsibility off these people, they will simply flood the world with wretched babies!" comes the answer of natural law, "Improve the individual, and you check this crude fecundity." It is because they are neglected and inferior that they have so many children. Make higher-class people of the children, and you check this constant influx of low-grade life, and gradually introduce a better-born population.

When the wise, beneficent parental love of Human Society for its young really does its duty, tenderly removing obstructions from the path of all our little ones, we shall give to them those common human advantages without which they cannot grow to the happiness which is their right, the usefulness which is their duty. All parents who are able to do more for their children would be free to do so, as those who can afford private schools, or educate their little ones at home, are not compelled to send them to the public schools.

As now society provides the school for the young citizen, on the ground of public advantage, without regard to the inability of the parent, so we must learn to provide a far richer and more complete education, and all else that the parent falls short in, because it is necessary for the good of society, and because we love our children.