1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least three children?2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability and happiness of the family?3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in industry had upon family life?4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing men and women, married and single women, and unionized and non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's health?5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of children be best and most surely prevented?
1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least three children?
2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability and happiness of the family?
3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in industry had upon family life?
4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing men and women, married and single women, and unionized and non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's health?
5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of children be best and most surely prevented?
[16]SeeAmerican Journal of Sociologyfor January, 1912.
[16]SeeAmerican Journal of Sociologyfor January, 1912.
"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others."—Herbert Spencer."The final value of all institutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard."—John Dewey."Socialized education has four aims:First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse,—language, number, social forms and conventions.Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through participation in present social life.Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."—George Albert Coe."The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.'But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself."—Emerson."At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. It depends upon us to make the effort."—Tolstoi.
"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others."—Herbert Spencer.
"The final value of all institutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard."—John Dewey.
"Socialized education has four aims:
First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse,—language, number, social forms and conventions.Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through participation in present social life.Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."—George Albert Coe.
First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse,—language, number, social forms and conventions.
Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through participation in present social life.
Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.
Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."—George Albert Coe.
"The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.'But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself."—Emerson.
"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. It depends upon us to make the effort."—Tolstoi.
New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.—When the power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal service from each class to each class above to the tax system of modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash instead of in such personal service, took placein the era of handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.
When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in doing.
The connection between these movements in education and the family well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker or makes him seembut a machine for others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.
Education a Social Process.—These elements are attempts to socialize education. We say that education is a process in the development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.
Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17]The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book,The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency.
The Three Learned Professions.—When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not onlyis the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.
New Calls for Trained Leadership.—This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to put into the college and university. This means not only that the family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence ascompared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate, the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The education that will finally unite in better understood coöperation all class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life more secure as well as the state more united.
The Special Education of Girls.—The application of new educational ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious to require explanation.
There are those who believe that there is no question of sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of youth should be retained and further developed inthe case of boys and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the two sexes?
First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculturemanufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, women were again left out of control of the processes which man's organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were denied formal school training so long after such denial became actively injurious to the family and group life was because the popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to fit boys for "a man's part in the world."
Formal School Training of Women New.—When the principle of democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal chance with men for preparationfor vocations. The school they sought to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At first the leaders in the higher education of women, like allnouveaux riche, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.
New Training for Social Service.—Two movements have resulted from the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack ofrational social consciousness and effective social control, then it speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment. It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the wayward, and the undeveloped—these, which have been their special tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their main business in the more complex situations of modern life.
Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.—When the departments of household economics were added to college courses they were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are these studies limited to femininestudents, although far more women than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories, architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not. All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and bear active part in the race-life as parents.
Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.—Any study of the needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home partnership. This continues to bethe rule even in social strata where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury.
Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood.—The second fact which must have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without paying some adequate price.
Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ.—We are now in the midst of a social order in which the father-office and the mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant personal attention to his children as to do something well which the world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average mother this is not the case. Where there is a family of children more than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or incompetent members of the family circle call for special consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength and the most of time in the service of the private family for many years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of the familyfor greater activity in his special line, calls upon the woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a primary duty. This puts any vocational specialty she has chosen in a secondary place while the family obligation is most pressing. The result of this obvious fact is that the average woman does still have a double choice to make when marriage offers; a choice for or against the man, and a choice for or against her vocation. In proportion as women are highly educated or industrially trained they have been pressed toward some one calling for which they can be definitely prepared and in which they may hope to rise in personal achievement and in financial compensation. On the other hand, marriage and motherhood appeal to the deepest instincts of human nature; and if the man seems worth it a woman will generally risk vocational impediment and awkwardness of economic adjustment for the sake of a congenial mate and children of her own.
Should the Education of Girls Include Special Attention to Family Claims?—These facts indicate that social prudence must at least ask the question, Should not the education of girls include some distinct recognition of special problems to be met, often in acute experience of contrary currents of personal desire and social pressure, in the lives of young women? As has been shown in other connection what we are witnessing now in domestic life is the passing of the servant caste, of the ordinary "hired girl" and of the unpaid family drudge; not the eclipse of the housemother or the waning of the homemaker's power or charm. In this household change and in the demand that goes with it upon any woman who would have or make a home, and with clear understanding of the new responsibilities which the new freedom of women place upon them, certain fundamental principles should be held firmly in mind as we deal with special problems of adjustment created by new social situations. First of all, let us admit, and never cease to emphasize the fact, that the social education of women demands from now on the most scrupulous regard for the training of every normal girl for self-support. This cannot be too much emphasized. This is the only sure foundation for socially helpful sex-relationship and for that democratization of the family without which social progress is now impossible. The social education of women in general demands, also, the cultivation of domestictastes and of some measure of household technic, not as a concession to the past, but as a safeguard of the future, in such fashion that the call to personal service of the family life may recall familiar and pleasant educational activities. These educational activities should precede those which tend directly toward vocational preparation for self-support. This point, too, is vital. The age when almost all little girls like to do things which concern the family comfort is from the eighth to the fourteenth year, a period too young for proper vocational drill. Then, when they are most likely to be ordered out of the kitchen if there is a paid cook to give the order, and most likely to be thought "in the way" if trying to help in domestic process of any sort, is the period of all others when to "learn by doing" what they are interested in will give them a background capable of easy adjustment to the later demands of family life. The training of boys of the same ages has an analogue in farming and handy use of common tools; and in the "work, play, and study school" boys and girls learn much together which fit both for mutual aid in the private family. The new education of the grade schools, therefore, is coming to the rescue of the housemother's task, as the high school and college have come to the aid of those who would provide vocational careers for women. They may meet in helpful alliance just as soon as a few social principles, which can make a bridge between them, are outlined and accepted.
Adjustment of Family Service and Vocational Work.—First, most women should allow for marriage and maternity first place for the years socially required. Second, women cannot afford to lose entirely out of their married lives vocational discipline, by the use of leisure time left them by new easing of household service, even in odd jobs of unpaid "social work," as is now so much the custom. The very multiplicity and variety of ancient crafts practised in the home make some one activity, held to rules of specialization, essential to the housemother's development. The chosen vocation retained as an avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however, be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty hours to the oldfamiliar task. This is not an impractical plan, as many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated, married women with young children must learn to combine in "team work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of "continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor itself.
Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.—We are beginning to see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest social consciousness is the question, How may the individual conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual élite be harmonized with, not destroyed by, the levellingprocess of democracy? Saints and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the "Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great moment throughout the ages of the past.
Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.
The New Training in Sex-education.—The need to have the right sort of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most effective way. In the admirable volume onSex-Educationwritten by Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia University, a list of eight reasons for sex-instruction is given which are here quoted by permission:
1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health.2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or immorality of men.3. The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prostitution.4. There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the result of the common irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women.5. There is need of more general following of a definite moral standard regarding sex-relationships.6. There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning all sexual processes.7. There is very general misunderstanding of sexual life as related to healthy and happy marriage.8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that concern future generations.
1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health.
2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or immorality of men.
3. The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prostitution.
4. There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the result of the common irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women.
5. There is need of more general following of a definite moral standard regarding sex-relationships.
6. There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning all sexual processes.
7. There is very general misunderstanding of sexual life as related to healthy and happy marriage.
8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that concern future generations.
To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of family needs in education will give assent. This is not the place for specific treatment of prostitution and its effect upon the home, nor is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of sex-education and of social hygiene now advocated and beginning to show encouraging results in use. The simple statement must be made that if, as Spencer has said, one test of education is its ability to make men good husbands and fathers, the element of sex-education must not be omitted from the educative process. How or where the necessary information and stimulus to truly social conduct may or should be given is matter for another statement.
Heroes Held Up for Admiration.—One point, usually wholly ignored, must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past. That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear in outline the lives of the greatand good. It may be that some prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in social judgment required for full understanding of the character without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18]His method leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and place.
However difficult, we must try by some method to make youthrealize what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections of poems worthy to live and to be read, but at least we should insert some companion pieces which show wifely fidelity in a more modern form. We may well ask the child's admiration of the craftsman's passion for achievement in "Palissey the Potter," but there might be ethical significance in pointing out that nowadays we sometimes question the right of a man to sacrifice to his art not only himself but his wife, his children, and all related to him. The fact is that although we cannot make use of any cumbersome scheme of historic outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial institutions, we must somehow learn to permeate our teaching of history and of literature and our exaltation of examples of human greatness of character with the spirit of those who believe that humanity is learning, and can know how to manage social affairs better and better as the years of life-experience go on.[19]
Moral Training at the Heart of Education.—The right and helpful relation of the school to the family, then, is one that must first of all place moral character, the power to live a good and useful life in all social relations, at the centre. And it is one also that takes account particularly of the development of the family order and of what we must save and of what we may throw away in that order, if we would have a stable inner circle of human rights and duties as a pattern for all relationship in the industrial order and in the state.
Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies.—In view also of the danger of economic tragedies that affect the family,—dangers of unemployment of the father by reason of bad times beyond his control, of his disablement by industrial accident, of his too-early impairment of strength by reason of industrial misuse of his powers in ways he can not prevent,—it may be that education for every boy should include, while he is still under the legal wage-earning age, efficient drill in the simpler arts of agriculture. Hewho can get from the land the raw material for family comfort is alone, it would seem, able to meet all industrial catastrophes without alarm. In this country, at least, such a man, whatever his failure or misfortune in professional, in clerical, or in manual labor, may make good his father-office in basic essentials of family support. All that has been said about the need of mixing vocational training with preparation for home-making in the case of girls may be said with almost as much, force about the need of giving the average man an economic refuge in case of vocational disaster in the ability to work the land to meet essential family need. This is beginning to be understood as never before. The newest education of all, as has been said, is intent upon providing for girls and boys alike this training for economic safety in some expert use of land for self-support as well as for retranslation of older work interests. In these "schools of tomorrow" the boys as well as the girls, while still very young, are being trained to cook and to do necessary things for household comfort. This is not subversive of inherited divisions of labor in the home. This teaching only adds to the economic security of both sexes and may make the men of the future able to exist comfortably without so much personal service from their womenfolk, and, above all, may make the home a more perfectly coöperative centre of our social order.
A Graduated Scale of Virtues.—In the FrenchCategoriesof "Moral and Civil Instructions," first outlined in 1882 and perfected and applied in 1900, the children of the Public Schools of that country have their attention called first to the duties related to "Home and Family," going on from that topic to "Companionship, The School, Social Life, Animal Life, Self-respect, Work, Leisure and Pleasure, Nature, Art, Citizenship and Nationality," and ending with a study of the "Past and Future." The latter topic indicates an intent to give in some fashion the idea of human progress and something of its outstanding points of interest and value. Other moral codes aim at some sublimation of history and literature as a finish to courses in ethical instruction. It is for the student of social progress to insist that such study of the past, linked to the study of the present and to some hopeful outline of the future, be not used merely as a capstone but shall be woven in, as warp and woof of all education, as it touches every side of life.
Types of Education.—Dr. Lester Ward, in hisDynamic Sociology, lists the various types of education we must cherish and realize in the common life as follows: