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Title: The Century of the Child

Author: Ellen Key

Translator: Francis Maro

Release date: June 6, 2018 [eBook #57283]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CENTURY
OF THE CHILD ***

ELLEN KEY
From a photograph

The
Century of the Child

By

Ellen Key

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, February, 1909
Reprinted, December, 1909
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The present translation is from the German version of Frances Maro, which
was revised by the author herself.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents 1
II. The Unborn Race and Woman's Work 63
III. Education 106
IV. Homelessness 191
V. Soul Murder in the Schools 203
VI. The School of the Future 233
VII. Religious Instruction 284
VIII. Child Labour and the Crimes of Children 316

The Century of the Child

CHAPTER I
THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS
PARENTS
Filled with sad memories or eager hopes, people waited for the turn of the
century, and as the clock struck twelve, felt innumerable undefined
forebodings. They felt that the new century would certainly give them only
one thing, peace. They felt that those who are labouring to-day would
witness no new development in that process of change to which they had
consciously or unconsciously contributed their quota.
The events at the turn of the century caused the new century to be
represented as a small naked child, descending upon the earth, but drawing
himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with weapons, a world
in which for the opening century there was not an inch of free ground to set
one's foot upon. Many people thought over the significance of this picture;
they thought how in economic and in actual warfare all the lower passions
of man were still aroused; how despite all the tremendous development of
civilisation in the century just passed, man had not yet succeeded in giving
to the struggle for existence nobler forms. Certainly to the question why this
still is so, very different answers were given. Some contented themselves
with declaring, after consideration, that things must remain just as they are,
since human nature remains the same; that hunger, the propagation of the
race, the desire for gold and power, will always control the course of the
world. Others again were convinced that if the teaching which has tried in
vain for nineteen hundred years to transform the course of the world could
one day become a living reality in the souls of men, swords would be turned
into pruning hooks.
My conviction is just the opposite. It is that nothing will be different in the
mass except in so far as human nature itself is transformed, and that this
transformation will take place, not when the whole of humanity becomes
Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to the consciousness of
the "holiness of generation." This consciousness will make the central work

of society the new race, its origin, its management, and its education; about
these all morals, all laws, all social arrangements will be grouped. This will
form the point of view from which all other questions will be judged, all
other regulations made. Up to now we have only heard in academic
speeches and in pedagogical essays that the training of youth is the highest
function of a nation. In reality, in the family, in the school, and in the state,
quite other standards are put in the foreground.
The new view of the "holiness of generation" will not be held by mankind
until it has seriously abandoned the Christian point of view and taken the
view, born thousands of years ago, whose victory has been first
foreshadowed in the century just completed.
The thought of development not only throws light on the course of the
world that lies behind us, continued through millions of years, with its final
and highest point in man; it throws light, too, on the way we have to travel
over; it shows us that we physically and psychically are ever in the process
of becoming. While earlier days regarded man as a fixed phenomenon, in
his physical and psychical relations, with qualities that might be perfected
but could not be transformed, it is now known that he can re-create himself.
Instead of a fallen man, we see an incompleted man, out of whom, by
infinite modifications in an infinite space of time, a new being can come
into existence. Almost every day brings new information about hitherto
unsuspected possibilities; tells us of power extended physically or
psychically. We hear of a closer reciprocal action between the external and
internal world; of the mastery over disease, of the prolongation of life and
youth; of increased insight into the laws of physical and psychical origins.
People even speak of giving incurable blind men a new kind of capacity of
sight, of being able to call back to life the dead; all this and much else
which it must be allowed still belongs simply to the region of hypothesis, to
what psychical and physical investigators reckon among possibilities. But
there are enough great results analysed already to show that the
transformations made by man before he became a human being are far from
being the last word of his genesis. He who declares to-day that human
nature always remains the same, that is, remains just as it did in those petty
thousands of years in which our race became conscious of itself, shows in
making this statement that he stands on the same level of reflection as an

ichthyosaurus of the Jura period, that apparently had not even an intimation
of man as a possibility of the future.
But he who knows that man has become what he now is under constant
transformations, recognises the possibility of so influencing his future
development that a higher type of man will be produced. The human will is
found to be a decisive factor in the production of the higher types in the
world of animal and plant life. With what concerns our own race, the
improvement of the type of man, the ennobling of the human race, the
accidental still prevails in both exalted and lower forms. But civilisation
should make man conscious of an end and responsible in all these spheres
where up to the present he has acted only by impulse, without
responsibility. In no respect has culture remained more backward than in
those things which are decisive for the formation of a new and higher race
of mankind.
It will take the thorough influence of the scientific view of humanity to
restore the full naïve conviction, belonging to the ancient world, of the
significance of the body. In the later period of antiquity, in Socrates and
Plato, the soul began to look down upon the body. The Renaissance tried to
reconcile the two but the effort was unfortunately not serious enough.
Boldness it did not lack, but its effort was not successful in carrying out a
task which Goethe himself said must be approached both with boldness and
with serious purpose. Only now that we know how soul and body together
build up or undermine one another, people are beginning to demand again a
second higher innocence in relation to the holiness and the rights of the
body.
A Danish writer has shown how the Mosaic Seventh Commandment sinks
back into nothing, as soon as one sees that marriage is only an accidental
social form for the living together of two people, while the ethically
decisive factor is the way they live together. In morality there is taking
place a general displacement from objective laws of direction and
compulsion to the subjective basis from which actions proceed. Ethics
become an ethic of character, a matter dealing with the constitution of the
temperament. We demand, we forgive, or we judge according to the inner
constitution of the individual; we do not readily call an action immoral
which only in an external point of view does not harmonise with the law or

is opposed to the law. In each particular case we decide according to the
inner circumstances of the individual. Applying this point of view to
marriage, we find in the first place that this form offers no guarantee that
the proper disposition towards the relation of the two sexes is present. This
can exist as well outside of as within marriage. Many noble and earnest
human beings prefer for their relation the freer form as the more moral one.
But as the result of this, the significance of the Seventh Commandment is
altered, that states explicitly that every relationship of sex outside of
marriage is immoral. People have commenced already to experiment with
unions outside of marriage. People are looking for new forms for the
common life between man and woman. The whole problem is being made
the subject of debate.
In this respect humanity occupies a field of discovery. People are seeing
more and more what a complicated subject the whole relation of sex is, how
full it is of dangers to the happiness of man. New observations are being
constantly made both in regard to the significance of this relation for
individuals and for posterity. To bring light gradually into this chaos is
supremely important for humanity, and literature should therefore have the
greatest possible freedom in this sphere,—just the opposite to the
tendencies of the present day that would limit this freedom. While I fully
agree with what has been said I should like to state that the greatest obstacle
to the free discussion of this theme is still the Christian way of looking at
the origin and nature of man. His only possible escape from the results of
the fall is made to consist in his belief in Christ; for with this point of view,
there came into Western Europe, by means of Christianity, the opinion that
everything concerning the continuation of the race was impure; to be
suppressed if possible, and if this could not be done, that it must at least be
veiled in silence and obscurity. For Christianity, eternal life, not life in the
world, is ever the significant factor. The dualism of existence it tries in the
first place to remove by asceticism, not by attempting to ennoble the life of
human impulses. This standpoint still continues to be popular in our days,
as is shown in its victories through legislation directed against the nude in
art and in literature.
The Christian way of looking at the relation of the sexes as something
ignoble, alone capable of being made holy by indissoluble marriage, has
had great direct influence on man's development during a certain period of

time. It has caused progress in self-mastery, which has elevated the life of
the soul. Modesty, domesticity, sincerity, have been promoted by it; these
along with innumerable other influences have developed the impulse to
love. If these emotions disappeared from love, it would not be human, but
only animal.
But allowing that the individual love between every new pair of human
beings always requires seclusion and reserve; allowing too that personal
modesty always remains an achievement wrought by mankind,
differentiating man from the animal world, it is still true that this kind of
spirituality, which passes over in silence and shame all the serious questions
connected with this subject, or treats them as occasions for ambiguities
calling forth joking and blushes, must be rooted out.
Each one from earliest childhood should on every question asked about this
subject receive honest answers, suitable for the especial stage of his
development. One should be in this way completely enlightened about one's
own nature as man or woman, and so acquire a deep feeling of
responsibility in relation to one's future duty as man or woman. One should
be trained in habits of earnest thought and earnest speaking on this subject.
In this way alone can there come into existence a higher type of sex with a
higher type of morality.
But at the time when Bjoernsen in Thomas Rendelen brought up the
question of training youth to purity through intelligence of nature's laws, I
objected to his book on the ground that like the purity sermons of
Christianity his efforts were rather directed to the mastery of natural
impulses than towards their ennoblement. I showed that Bjoernsen certainly
brought up two new points of view, that of bodily health, and that of the
ennobling of sex. He did not, as Christianity does, stress the spiritual and
personal side of the question. These new points of view of his were
significant, because they united the just egoism of the individual with the
combining altruism produced by the feeling of solidarity. The great purpose
of Bjoernsen's book was to transform inherited characteristics as they are
related to man's attitude towards morality. So he proposed to create a sound
and happy new generation, in which the sufferings of present day sexual
discord should be brought to an end. For this purpose he wished the
collaboration of the schools. They were to communicate the knowledge of

human beings as members of sex, and to instruct their scholars how, as
human beings, they should protect themselves and their posterity.
I objected at that time to this plan, showing that the school was not the
place to lay the foundation for such knowledge. It should be slowly and
carefully communicated by the mother herself; the school should only give
a theoretical basis. More defective still, I found the question of chastity
handled essentially and solely as a question of bodily purity, as a negative
not a positive ideal. I maintain that only erotic idealism could awaken
enthusiasm for chastity. The basis for such idealism must be found in
stories, history, and belles-lettres. Information derived from physiology is,
in this respect, very inadequate, unless the imagination and the feeling are
moved in the same direction. Neither imagination nor feeling can be helped
by natural science and bodily exercises alone, and just as little by Christian
religious instruction.
No, we must on the basis of natural science attain, in a newer and nobler
form, the whole antique love for bodily strength and beauty, the whole
antique reverence for the divine character of the continuation of the race,
combined with the whole modern consciousness of the soulful happiness of
ideal love. Only so can the demand for real chastity save mankind from the
torments which sexual divisions and degradations now bring with them. It
is profoundly significant that in the world of the past, divinity was
associated with woman on the ground of observations concerning the
continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman became divine as the
Virgin Mother. Through heathen and Christian thought, reunited and
ennobled, the woman will receive a new reference for herself as a sexual
being. Antique and modern love, the love of the senses and the love of soul,
will, united and ennobled, induce human beings, men and women alike, to
adore again Eros the All-powerful.
To diminish the significance of love, to oppose it as a lowering sensualism,
does not mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on the other hand,
working for its debasement. For as lowering as sexual life would be if it
were continued in man accompanied by a feeling of shame as a
characteristic of animal life, it would be just the same if it were regarded as
a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out for the preservation of the species.

Antiquity stood higher than the present day, for example when Lycurgus'
laws asserted that a people's strength lies in the breast of blooming
womanhood. Accordingly in Sparta, the physical development of the
woman was watched over as well as of the man, and the age of marriage
was determined with reference to a healthy offspring. Higher, too, stood
Judaism in relation to the conception of the seriousness of bearing children.
This conviction expressed itself in the strictest hygienic legislation known
to history. Jewish, like other Oriental legislation, depended, in relation to
sexual morality as in relation to diet, on sharp-sighted observations of
natural law and disease. The foundation to a new ethic in these questions
cannot be laid, until men begin with Old Testament shrewdness and Old
Testament seriousness to handle the life questions which the idealism of
Christianity has indeed spiritualised but at the same time debased.
This new ethic will call no other common living of man and woman
immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring, and
produces bad conditions for the development of their offspring. The Ten
Commandments on this subject will not be prescribed by the founders of
religion, but by scientists.
Up to the present day, partly as a result of a perverted modesty in such
things, science has only been able to offer incomplete observations on the
physical and psychical conditions for the improvement of the human type in
its actual genesis.
Ontogeny is really a new science in our century, introduced by Von
Leeuwenhock, de Graaf, and others. It was founded in 1827, by von Baer.
The differences of opinion and the discovery of different theories are very
far from being ended. Purely scientific points of view are being combined
with social, physiological, or ethical ones. It is maintained that by changing
the diet of the mother the sex of the child can be determined. Attempts have
been made to show that about three fifths of all men of genius were first-
born children.
People are studying what influence the age of parents has on the child;
extreme youth of parents seems unfavourable for the offspring as well as
extreme age. The first child of a too youthful mother is often weak, and
besides ordinarily the joys of motherhood are not desired, because she feels

that physically and psychically a child is too great a burden to her, who
herself is only a child. The conditions of a strong, well-nourished offspring
require the postponement of the marriage age for women. In northern
countries it should be established, if not by law at least by custom, at about
twenty years. This is all the more necessary because then the young woman
can have behind her some years of careless youthful joy, an undisturbed
self-development, and will also have reached the physical development
necessary for motherhood. While twenty years should be regarded as the
earliest period of marriage it should actually be often postponed some years
still for the well-being of the woman, the man, and the children, and
married life as a whole, in which most conflicts arise because women have
decided about their fate before their personality was definitely formed,
before their heart was able to find its choice. The love of the man chooses
and the young girl often confuses the happiness of being loved with the
happiness of loving, an experience which later on is gone through in a
tragic way. To the many questions which are related to heredity and natural
selection, belongs one which notices the significance of nature's purpose to
cause strong opposites to exert upon one another the strongest attraction.
This attraction often during married life changes into antipathy; it almost
results in impatience against the characteristics which originally had so
deep an attraction. Nature in this case seems to wish to reach its end with
the greatest lack of consideration for the happiness of the individual. So
often the contradictions of parents seem really to be moulded in full in the
child. Occasionally these contradictions are expressed as a deep discord, but
in both cases there often arises an exceptional being. To attain correct
results in this case, belongs to the numerous still open possibilities.
Differences of opinion are most apparent in the theory of heredity, where
there is a struggle between Darwin's view, that even acquired characteristics
are inherited, and Galton's and Weissmann's conviction that this is not the
case. In connection with this stands, also, the question of the marriage of
consanguineous relations; some regard these marriages as dangerous, per
se, for the posterity; others only as dangerous from the point of view that
the same family trait is often found in both parents, and so becomes
strongly impressed on the children. For example, congenital
shortsightedness of both parents develops into blindness of the children,
their stupidity becomes idiocy, their melancholy, insanity.

The Occident has gradually abolished the Oriental marriage law to which
Moses gave validity, while other Oriental legislators, for example, Manes
and Mohammed, are still followed to a great extent. In China, too, similar
prohibitions have a binding power. Here and there the feeling of the
significance of heredity has vaguely appeared in some Occidental writers.
Sir Thomas More, like Plato, required a physical examination before
entering into marriage. It was not until the nineteenth century that the
question of the rights of the child in this respect began to be noticed. It was
Robert Owen who in one way awakened the general right feeling in favour
of children, by investigations begun in 1815. They showed that children
under eight years old were forced to work by blows from leather whips, to
work from fifteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that a fourth or fifth
of them ended as cripples. Another Englishman, Malthus, published in 1798
an essay on the Principle of Population, and directed the attention of
society to the conditions which had caused him to write his work. He
pointed to the deficiency of food supply produced by over-population and
the obstacles it offered to legitimate marriages. Again, these conditions, he
showed, resulted partly in great mortality among children, partly in the
murder of children. Malthus saw the significance of selection and the
danger of degeneration. With perfect calmness of conscience he met the
storm he had evoked. Personally a blameless and tender hearted man,
Malthus, as all other reformers of moral ideas, had to allow the shameless
accusations of corruption and immorality to pass over his head. Harriet
Martineau, who advocated Malthus's views, had the same experience. When
she wrote her novels on this subject she knew very well to what she was
exposing herself; but this remarkable woman, who died unmarried and
childless, was at an early period of her life filled with a feeling for the
holiness of the child. When nineteen years old, at the time of the birth of a
small sister, she fell on her knees and devoutly thanked God that she had
been allowed to be the witness of the great wonder of the development of
the human being from the beginning. The same feeling caused her in her
novels to expound the duty of voluntary limitation of population. She was
pained by the thought of the fate endured by children, when they were so
numerous that their parents were unable to maintain and educate them. This
part of the subject of the right of the child called forth in all countries books
for and against it. Everywhere the question is discussed. I shall briefly
handle the differences of opinion about other sides of the right of the child.

In Francis Galton's celebrated work, Hereditary Genius, almost all has been
said that is required to-day from the point of view of the improvement of
the race. Galton, as early as the seventies, opposed Darwin's view that
acquired characteristics were inherited. In this respect he had a fellow-
champion in the German Weissmann, who on his side was opposed, among
others, by the English Darwinian Romanes.
Galton invented from a Greek word a name for the science of the
amelioration of the race, Eugenics. He showed that civilised man, so far as
care for the amelioration of the race is concerned, stands on a much lower
plane than savages, not to speak of Sparta which did not allow the weak, the
too young, and the too old to marry, and where national pride in a pure race,
a strong offspring, was so great that individuals were sacrificed to the
attainment of this end. Galton, like Darwin, Spencer, A. R. Wallace, and
others, has brought out the fact that the law of natural selection, which in
the rest of nature has secured the survival of the fittest, is not applicable to
human society, where economic motives lead to unsuitable marriages, made
possible by wealth. Poverty hinders suitable marriages. Besides the
development of sympathy has come into the field as a factor which disturbs
natural selection. The sympathy of love, chooses according to motives that
certainly tend to the happiness of the individual, but this does not mean that
they guarantee the improvement of the race. And while other writers hope
for a voluntary abstinence from marriage in those cases, where an inferior
offspring is to be expected, Galton, on the other hand, is in favour of very
strict rules, to hinder inferior specimens of humanity from transmitting their
vices or diseases, their intellectual or physical weaknesses. Just because
Galton does not believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics,
selection has the greatest significance for him.
On the other side, he advocates using all means to encourage such
marriages, where the family on both sides gives promise of distinguished
offspring. For him, as later for Nietzsche, the purpose of married life is the
production of strong, able personalities.
Galton makes it plain that civilised man, by his sympathy with weak,
inefficient individuals, has helped to continue their existence. This tendency
on its own side has lessened the possibility of the efficient individuals to
continue the species. Wallace, too, and several others, have on different

occasions declared that men in relation to this question must have harder
hearts, if the human race is not to become inferior. The moral, social, and
sympathetic factors, they say, which in humanity work against the law of
the survival of the fittest, and have made it possible for the lower type, to
continue and to multiply in excess, must give way to new points of view
where certain moral and social questions are concerned. So the natural law
will be supported by altruism, instead of as now being opposed by this
sentiment.
Spencer's thoughts contain a great truth. They have been quoted in just this
connection. He says: We see the germ of many things that later on are
developed in a way no one now suspects. Profound transformations are
worked in society and its members, transformations which we could not
have hoped for as immediate results, but which we could have looked for in
confidence as final consequences. The effort to find natural laws which
cause racial progress or deterioration is one of these germinal ideas. As to
scientific investigation in this field, we can apply another maxim of the
same thinker, one often overlooked by science. "The passion to discover
truth must be accompanied by the passion to use it for the welfare of
mankind." But science must really reach universally accepted conclusions
before we can expect humanity to begin seriously its self-purification; but it
is certain to come then. When we read in ethnographical and sociological
works what restrictions in marriage are imposed by savage people on
themselves, and religiously obeyed on the ground of superstitious prejudice,
we have a right to hope that civilised men will one day bow before
scientific proofs. This hope is not too optimistic.
Wallace pleads not for such absolute regulations as Galton, in order to
prevent the marriages of the less worthy and to encourage the marriages of
the superior types of humanity. He perceives that the problem is
tremendously complicated. One thing is, that the personal attraction of love
is extremely essential from the point of view of the improvement of the
race. If human beings could be bred like prize cattle, it is not likely that a
superior type of humanity would be produced. In the Middle Ages, the
human race deteriorated, Galton said, because the best fled to the
monasteries and the worst reproduced themselves. But if Galton's strict
requirements had to be carried out in every case before a marriage could be

allowed, not only would marriage lose its deepest meaning, but the race
also would lose its noblest inheritance.
But even with a strict limitation of Galton's principles and with a wise
limitation of his requirements, science has already shown the truth of so
many of the first, that the significance of the last, taken as a whole, must be
granted. We know that in the inherited tendencies of children, often another
form is taken from that which appears in their parents. Of three hundred
idiots, one hundred and forty-five had alcoholic parents. Epilepsy, too, is
often produced by the same cause. It is known that apparently sound
individuals are often attacked at the same age by a disease to which their
parents were subject. On the other hand, there are fortunately proofs that
individuals endowed with power of will can resist certain dangerous
inherited weaknesses. In the discussion on this subject, it should also be
justly brought out, that it is possible for the unsound tendency of one parent
to be neutralised in the case of children, by the soundness of the other. But
this result, as well as the many other questions involved, as I have shown
above, are far from being established.
The question as to the inheritance of mental diseases has been especially
examined by Maudsley. In this case, too, nervous and psychic diseases of
the parents often change their character in the children. He requires medical
testimony before marriage, and asks that the appearance of mental diseases
after marriage shall form a legitimate ground for divorce. And he hopes that
a pure descent, in a new sense of the word, will be as important for the
marriages of the future, as for aristocratic marriages in early times. One of
Maudsley's statements is so interesting that it should be mentioned here.
Fathers, he says, who have directed their whole energy towards attainment
of wealth, have degenerate children; for this sort of nerve strain undermines
the system as infallibly as alcohol or opium. If this statement be true, we
would add another point of view to the many already existent, that show
how hostile to life is our best social order, which aims at power and gain. It
proves how necessary is that transformation of existence which will make
work and production serve a new end. Each man should claim to live
wholly, broadly, and in a way worthy of humanity. He should be able to
leave behind him a posterity provided with all capacities for a similar life.
When this day dawns people will regard, as a terrible atavism, that

expression on the face of a child, which an artist of the present day has
preserved in a picture of a boy represented as a future millionaire.
I will mention now from literary sources, some of Nietzsche's work on this
subject. Although this author did not base his ideas of the "superman"
directly on Darwin's theories, yet they are, as Brandes has lately shown, the
great consequences of Darwinism, that Darwin himself did not see. In no
contemporary was there a stronger conviction than in Nietzsche that man as
he now is, is only a bridge, only a transition between the animal and the
"superman." In connection with this, Nietzsche looked upon the obligations
of man for the amelioration of the race as seriously as Galton, but he
expressed his principles with the power of poetic and prophetic expression,
not with scientific proof.
Literature on this subject is increasing every day; different opinions press
one another hard. As long as this is the case, there is every reason to
observe the warning of the German sociologist Kurella, who says that we
must reckon with social as well as with anthropological factors if we wish
to prevent the degeneration of the human species. A vital point in his
position is, that it is a matter of indifference whether the Darwinian theory
of the transmission of acquired characteristics, or its contrary is victorious.
The former is the theory of an unchangeable germ plasm transmitted by the
parents to the children; so that better types can only originate through a new
combination of the characteristics of father and mother, and also by natural
selection in the struggle for existence. We must be careful before beginning
to act in a social and political way on the basis of anthropological motives.
He finally lays down with perfect justice, that the material to be gathered
from the works of Spencer, Galton, Lombroso, Ferri, Ribot, Latourneau,
Havelock Ellis, J. B. Haycraft, Colajanni, Sergi, Ritchie, and others, must
be systematically worked over. The sociologist must be zoölogist,
anthropologist, and psychologist before his plans for civilising man, and for
elevating the human race could be carried out.
As to intellectual characteristics it has been maintained that exceptionally
gifted men have mostly inherited their characteristics from the mother. This
fact has in our day, so very much increased the interest taken in the mothers
of famous men. This truth is supposed to hold good for a son, but if the
daughter is gifted, her talent is held to come from the father. Another and

certainly a better founded phenomenon seems to be this: That when in a
family characteristics find their culmination in a world genius, this genius
either remains childless or his children are not only ordinary, but often
insignificant. It may be that nature has exhausted her power of production
in these great personalities, or as is often assumed, the creative power of
genius in an intellectual direction, diminishes the creative power in the
physical direction.
Along with the question of heredity stands that of the development of races.
In the beginning of the Origin of Species Darwin showed how essential
pure descent is for the production of a noble race. This theory is appealed to
by a modern anti-Semitic writer, who represents the Jew as a typical
example of pure race, an idea which one of the most conspicuous
representatives of Judaism, Disraeli, has also expressed in the following
words: "Race is everything; there is no other truth, and every race which
carelessly allows mixed blood, perishes." Yet other specialists consider
some racial mixture as highly advantageous to the offspring.
Professor Westermark has offered a good reason for the significance
attached to beauty in the case of love, and therefore its importance for the
race. He has shown how man has conceived physical beauty to be the full
development of all of those characteristics which distinguish the human
organism from the animal, and which mark sex distinctions, and, most of
all, race distinctions. He thinks individuals with these characteristics are
best suited for their life work. Accordingly it is the result of natural
selection that exactly those individuals are found most beautiful and are
most desired, who first as human beings best fulfil the general demands of
the human organism, as sexual beings fulfil those of their sex, and as
members of the race are best suited to the conditions which surround them.
In the struggle for existence, those are overcome, who are descended from
human beings, whose instincts of love are directed to individuals badly
adapted to that struggle; while those who are victorious are children happily
so adapted. In this way, taste has developed by which, what is best adapted
to environment appears as the highest beauty. This is equivalent to health,
the power to resist the attacks of the external world. While every
considerable deviation from the pure type in sex and race, has a lesser
degree of adaptability; that is of health, and also of beauty.

Another writer has used the foot as an example of this principle. The small,
high-arched foot with the fine ankle is always, he says, regarded as the most
beautiful. But such a foot is only combined with a fine, strong, and elastic
bony structure. Such a foot besides has, by its great elasticity, a
considerably higher power of bearing weight than the flat foot. The high-
vaulted foot, in walking and jumping, increases the activity of the lungs and
the heart. This again makes the walk elastic, strong, and easy, agile and
stately. These traits, for the same reason as the beauty of the foot itself, are
looked upon as a racial sign. This physical power and ease influence the
mind, and produce self-confidence, and so increase the feeling of
superiority and the joy of living, marks of distinction in human beings.
Whether the illustration in this special case holds good or not, it proves
nothing against the truth of the theory on which it rests, and which is
gradually becoming prevalent; the view I mean, according to which souls
and bodies are mutually developed through adaptability to their
surroundings.
So it is necessary not only to investigate what conditions give the best
selection, but also what external ones strengthen or weaken the
characteristics found in natural selection. We must again see the importance
of bodily exercise. Painful experiences have taught us to prevent the
consequences of overstrain, over-exertion in competitive imbecility, and
mania for sport. Such results have specially shown themselves to be
harmful for women in respect to motherhood. Sport and play, gymnastics
and pedestrianism, life in nature and in the open air, a regenerated system of
dancing, after the model of the Swedish peasant dances, will be most
excellent bases for the physical and psychical renewal of the new
generation.
In plans concerning this renewal, people have pointed to the influence of
art; it has been shown how Burne-Jones created the new English type of
woman. It was formed by an adaption to the quiet, distinguished style, by a
process that went slowly on. This was the type regarded by him as the
model one. It is maintained that we only need to see a pair of young English
girls in front of one of his pictures, in order to notice how not only the faces
but the expressions show a resemblance. The artist has impressed his trait
on youth before it was conscious of it. Before these forms they grew up,

they have seen them in their picture books, they have been dressed in
clothes cut in the fashion of the master's pictures. There is another reason.
Mothers of the present day are supposed to have passed on to their children
the Burne-Jones type in the same way in which the charm of the Greeks
was influenced by the beauty of their statuary. In antiquity it was believed,
even in other details, (for example, in attaining the much-longed-for blonde
hair) that this end could be secured by observing the proper directions.
As to the significance of external influences of this kind on mothers, there
is too little material still to build up conclusions. On this point, learned men
also disagree. I have only, therefore, incidentally mentioned this factor
among others. All should be established before we can get a final and
certain insight into the conditions of human birth. In the absence of
scientific knowledge I can only refer to the literature and comprehensive
investigations commenced in the preceding century, that throw light on the
riddle of man's coming into the world. Many of these matters are still
involved in obscurity. But man's spirit is resting on the waters; gradually a
new creation will be called forth from them.
In connection with this, must be discussed the development of new ideas of
law in these spheres. Heathen society in its hardness, exposed weak or
crippled children. Christian society on the other hand, has gone so far in its
mildness, that it prolongs the life of the child who is incurably ill,
physically and psychically, even if he is misshapen and so becomes an
hourly torment to himself and his surroundings. Yet respect for life is still
not strong enough in a social order, which keeps up among other things, the
death penalty and war, that one can without danger suggest the extinction of
such a life. Only when death is inflicted through compassion, will the
humanity of the future show itself in such a way, that the doctor under
control and responsibility can painlessly extinguish such suffering. On the
other hand, this Christian society still maintains the distinction between
legitimate children and the children of sin, a distinction which more than
anything else has helped to obstruct a real ethical conception of the duties
of parents. Every child has the same rights in respect to both father and
mother. Both parents have just the same obligation to every child. Until this
is recognised there will be no basis for the future morality of the common
life between man and woman. Some day society will look upon the
arrangements of the love relation as the private affair of responsible

individuals. Those who are lovers, those who are married will regard
themselves as completely free, and will also be so regarded. Binding
promises in respect of emotions, demands of exclusive possession over
personality, have already come to be regarded by fine feeling and fully
developed human beings as a relic of erotic sentiments on a lower plane.
These sentiments were the outcome of desire for mastery, vanity, cruelty,
and blind passion. People are beginning to see that perfect fidelity is only to
be obtained by perfect freedom; that complete exchange of individuality
can only take place in perfect freedom; that complete excellence can only
come into being in perfect freedom. Each must cease to try to force and
bend the emotions, opinions, habits, and inclinations of the other towards
him- or herself. Each must regard the continuance of the feeling of the other
as a happiness, not as a right. Each must regard the possible cessation of
this feeling as a pain, not as an injustice. Only in this way can there arise
between the two souls such pure, full, freedom that both can move with
absolute independence, and complete unity.
Freedom is no danger to fidelity. The kind of fidelity required by the church
and by the law has certainly been a notable means of education. But the
method, as it is, is opposed to the end. For it has produced the feeling of
possession. This has led to loss of respect in the worship of love. The
requirements based on force have awakened hostility in soul and sense; the
fear of public opinion has produced all sorts of dishonesty between man and
wife, between them and the world. When the bonds of compulsion fall away
feeling will be strengthened. For when the external supports of fidelity are
wanting, the power required for it will come from the inner life. Although
human beings will be exposed always to the possibility of serious mistakes
about themselves and the object of their love; although time can always
change human beings and their emotions; although, even in a marriage
which has resulted from mutual love, conditions can arise which make
Nietzsche's ideal legitimate, that it is better to break up the marriage than to
be broken up by it; yet on the whole freedom will encourage fidelity, which
itself will always have a support through the experience of its psychological
and ethical value.
It is not through a series of lightly entered into and lightly dissolved
connections that one is prepared for the happiness of great love. Voluntary
fidelity is a sign of nobility, because it assumes the will to concentrate about

the centre of life's meaning; because it signifies the unity with our own
proper innermost ego. This is as true of fidelity in love as of all other kinds
of fidelity. Only when love is the practical religion of the work-day, and the
devotion of the holiday, when it is kept under the constant supervision of
the soul, when it brings with it a constant growth, (why should not the fine
old word "sanctification" be used) of personality, is love great. Then it
comes into possession of a higher right than some earlier union, because it
then means really fidelity and nothing else towards our own highest ego.
But where it does not have this character, it does not possess this right. It is
then a petty emotion even when it is made pardonable by great passion. The
children which issue from temporary unions are often as imperfect as their
origin. Great love is, as a young doctor once said, only that which grips so
deeply, that after its loss one no longer feels as a whole, but as a half of a
whole. Yet nature has protected itself against annihilation by giving the
possibility of love more than once. But what nature's ideal is cannot be
doubted. The race which would come into existence, provided young men
and women were given the possibility of uniting when the first love took
possession of them,—that love which is the deepest,—this race would be
sound and strong, different from what our own race is now. But when
young people love now they seldom have the means for union, and when
they have the means, then that which leads them to the marriage union is
not the deepest feeling they have ever felt, but only an impulse, which, even
if real, is still only a substitute.
Such a transformation of the conditions of society and of the individual
view of the true worth of life will enable young men and women, between
the ages of twenty and thirty, to found their own home and under simple
conditions, to secure their happiness. Here would be one of the most
essential foundations for the origin of a new race, which would have the
ancient feeling for the hearth as an altar, and would have the life of love as
the service of a divinity. Only through such a transformation might it be
expected that the deepest misery of society, prostitution, could be
restrained. Only after such a transformation could we with full right require
from our youth that self-mastery which is the best pre-condition of the
sound development of the new generation.
As things are at present, it is certain that just as there are really immoral,
unmarried mothers, so there are others deeply moral, who would be mothers

with a great pure love to the father of their child, but who for various
reasons should not be united with them in legal marriage. And even if the
contraction of marriage were simplified, such motherhood on the part of
single women, should continue to exist.
Bjoernsen, when he gave lectures in Norway on sexual morality, maintained
the view that the woman who wished for motherhood, but who was not
adapted in her opinion for marriage, should be fully entitled to the first,
without the last being regarded as necessary, on condition that she was
willing to fulfil to the child her maternal duties. This idea certainly has a
future. In Germany there was a well-known case in which a fully mature
woman, not a mere girl, saw shortly after her marriage that the
temperaments and conditions of both parties to the marriage would make it
an unhappiness for both. She separated, therefore, brought her child into the
world unmarried, educated it publicly and with self-sacrifice. Now she has
along with the peace which comes from work and the happiness of
motherhood, the possibility of fulfilling her duty also as daughter, while
married life would have destroyed this for all parties. This is one of the
many cases out of the great collection of life, that shows how foolish is that
requirement of society to press human nature, in its manifold types, into one
mould, with a sphere of duty arranged in the same way for all.
But the sphere of duty, an ever-widening one, is the sphere which embraces
the right of the child. Yet its lines will be drawn in the future bounded in
quite a different way from now. It will then be looked upon as the supreme
right of the child that he shall not be born in a discordant marriage. Above
everything, therefore, marriage must be free. This means that the two
parties can freely separate after mutual agreement. In entering into marriage
and in dissolving it, only certain duties towards the children are to be
assumed. Such legal provisions might well be superfluous even in this case;
in others, they might be important. But in none are they to become an
obstacle to the development of this relation to the children. On the other
hand, the compulsory marriage laws of to-day, as well in relation to divorce
as to the guardianship given the man, have become obstacles to the higher
development of the common life of man and woman.
The vigorous drawing together of the bonds of marriage will not protect
children from growing up in a destroyed home. This protection will be

secured by deeper earnestness in entering upon marriage, but above all by a
deeper sense of responsibility to the children themselves. This will make it
possible for the parents who see themselves deceived in their married
happiness to keep a peaceful resignation, a high character, as they continue
to live together, if they feel that this is the best solution of the conflict, for
the children who are already born. But this resolution does not mean the
continuance of real married life, but parenthood alone. Only so can it be
really useful to the children that the marriage should not be dissolved. The
parents, who are profoundly and finally alienated must not bestow life on
any new being.
Marriages lightly entered into are many; lightly entered into divorces are
few, at least where there are children. It is not the prescriptions of the law,
but those of blood which work as a restraining influence here even at the
present day. The decisive sentence is not spoken by society but by the
children. But these deep motives are just as decisive in the case of a free
union as in the case of a legal one; if the father or the mother is only kept
with the children by compulsion, the children have not much to lose. The
important thing for unwritten duties, duties which largely can not be
determined by law, is to awaken the conscience of fathers and mothers in
order to create a better morality. Perhaps for this, new legislation is
necessary for the present. Certainly antiquated legal conceptions should be
done away with; they have done good duty as a past training for morality.
Now they stand in the way of the higher morality. The man or the woman
who plays the rôle of seduction, spoiling the life of a young woman or a
young man, or disturbing the peace of a happy marriage, this type of
character, is being treated with ever-increasing contempt. The more one
learns to distinguish the heartless play of masculine or feminine desire for
conquest, the selfish soulless claims of the senses, from those of love, the
more does the conception of morality become equivalent to the feeling of
responsibility towards the new generation.
The gratification of natural impulses, which act contrary to the real
profound intention of nature, is what destroys individuals and peoples. But
as has been said, these devastations cannot be successfully restrained by the
extermination of man's material nature.

It is a favourable symptom when a poet opposes the mastery of material
nature, apart from the feeling of responsibility. But it is harmful when this
sensuousness is made, as Tolstoi does, equivalent to the conception of love.
Love must not be debased to simple sensuousness, nor must it be
etherealised to a simple spiritual quality, if the human race is to be freed
from the debasing mastery of impulse. This happens, as I have often shown
before, and in an earlier part of this work as well, by the elevation of
sensuousness to love. I mean by this that the spiritual unity of beings, the
indulgence of tenderness, the sympathy of souls, the community of work,
and the happiness of comradeship, will be as really decisive factors in the
lofty emotions of love, and in the charm of love, as the attraction of the
senses. This wealth in the elements of mutual dependence is what keeps
fidelity in love both inwardly and outwardly. This soft current of the soul's
depths keeps the sensuous charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal
marriage and free union, very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind
ennui, if love has contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual
feeling of dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense,
and which unites the spirit and the sympathies.
The duty and responsibility towards the children will be all the more strict
as society learns to regard it as one of its principal duties to hinder all
thoughtless and undeserved suffering.
The morality of the future will not be found in sacrificing to the holiness of
the family so-called illegitimate children, who are often by nature richly
endowed, but who by the prevailing legal system receive such treatment,
that they often become what they are called, and so are filled with
vengeance against society and the perverse conceptions of law whose
victims they are. Child murder, phosphorous poisonings, "angel-making"—
all these are connected with these perverse legal ideas. But all of these
results are still less pernicious than those which society draws upon itself
through those "disgraced" children, who go to ruin not physically but
psychically. In them, there are not only frequently good powers lost, but
socially destructive powers developed. When the whole of Europe
shuddered over the murder of the Empress Elizabeth, one fact above every
other seemed to me terrible. The murderer confessed, "I know nothing of
my parents."

The time will come in which the child will be looked upon as holy, even
when the parents themselves have approached the mystery of life with
profane feelings; a time in which all motherhood will be looked upon as
holy, if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and if it has called forth deep
feelings of duty.
Then the child, who has received its life from sound, loving human beings
and has been afterwards brought up wisely and lovingly, will be called
legitimate, even if its parents have been united in complete freedom. Then
will the child, who has been born in a loveless marriage, and has been
burdened by the fault of its parents with bodily or mental disease, be
regarded as illegitimate, even if its parents have been united in marriage by
the Pope at St. Peter's. The shadow of contempt will not fall on the
unmarried tender mother of a radiantly healthy child, but on the legitimate
or illegitimate mother of a being made degenerate by the misdeeds of its
forefathers.
In a much discussed drama called The Lion's Whelp, there occurs the
following dialogue between an older and younger man:

The Older Man: The next century will be the century of the child, just
as this century has been the woman's century. When the child gets his
rights, morality will be perfected. Then every man will know that he is
bound to the life which he has produced with other bonds, than those
imposed by society and the laws. You understand that a man cannot be
released from his duty as father even if he travels around the world; a
kingdom can be given and taken away, but not fatherhood.
The Youth: I know this.
The Older Man: But in this all righteousness is still not fulfilled—in
man's carefully preserving the life which he has called into existence.
No man can early enough think over the other question, whether and
when he has the right to call life into existence.

This dialogue has supplied me with a title for this book. It is the point of
departure of my assertion, that the first right of the child is to select its own
parents.

What here must be first considered is the thought constantly being brought
out by Darwinian writers, that the natural sciences, in which must now be
numbered psychology, should be the basis of juristic science as well as of
pedagogy. Man must come to learn the laws of natural selection and act in
the spirit of these laws. Man must arrange the punishments of society in the
service of development; they must be protective measures for natural
selection. In the first place this must be secured by hindering the criminal
type from perpetuating itself. The characteristics of this type can only be
determined by specialists. But the criminal must be prevented from handing
on his characteristics to his posterity.
So the human race will be gradually freed from atavisms which reproduce
lower and preceding stages of development. This is the first condition of
that evolution by which mankind will be able to let the ape and tiger die.
Then comes the requirement that those with inherited physical or psychical
diseases shall not transmit them to an offspring.
As to this type of heredity opinions are still very much divided. Great
authorities are in conflict with one another on the question of tuberculosis.
Some contend that it is hereditary, others declare that it is only transmitted
by infection. Accordingly when a child is born of a tuberculous mother, and
is taken away from her, there is no danger for the child. Views are also
divided on the subject of cancer. Regarding other diseases, however, there is
complete certainty. Legislation has already interfered in the case of
epilepsy, although the law in practice is not always applied. But in the case
of syphilis, alcoholism, and many kinds of nervous complaints, diseases
which afflict children most certainly, in various ways, legislation has yet
done nothing.
There is an old axiom that we are obliged to thank our parents for life. Our
parents, I know from my own experience, can themselves have been the
heirs of bodily and mental health, resulting from the fact that maternal and
paternal ancestors all made early, right, and happy marriages. But generally,
parents must on their part, ask the children's pardon for the children's
existence.
It makes no difference, whether we talk with people sunken in necessity or
crime, or with those suffering from nervous and other diseases, or finally

with people who are spiritually maimed. In most cases we are convinced
that the main cause of their condition as indicated by them, goes back to
their birth, or to the time of their childish consciousness. Sometimes their
parents have been too young or too old, their fathers or mothers invalids.
Sometimes they are the offspring of intemperance. Again their mother may
have been overburdened by the torment of work, or by a large family of
children; or they may have received their life in marriages concluded
without love, or after the cessation of love. They have been unwelcome, or
born under feelings of revulsion, bearing in their blood the germ of discord
or disgust of life. Numerous abnormal tendencies, among them misanthropy
in women, can be traced back to these causes. Finally they have been
brought up in a home where they have suffered from the burden of bad
examples, or conflicting influences.
So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that young
men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of one
character or another, have begun to see that it is their duty rather to abstain
from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate inheritence to a new
generation. I knew a woman in whose family on her father's and mother's
side, mental disease was inherited. Therefore, though healthy herself, she
refused to marry the man she loved. I know of another who broke her
engagement, because she was convinced that the man whom she loved was
a drinker, and she did not want to give her children such a father. It is
especially on this point that women sin in marrying from ignorance,
because they do not know that epilepsy and other diseases, especially
alcoholism, are often caused because the child has had a drunkard for a
father. A young woman could have no more certain test for the continuance
of her feelings for a man, than whether she feels exalted joy or tormenting
distress, at the thought of seeing his characteristics transmitted to their
child.
Men sin against the coming race not only by excessive drinking, but in
other respects where the results are still more destructive.
Besides the conscience of men must begin to awaken. This will express
itself partly in the requirement to abstain from marriage when they know
that they have to transmit a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres of
morality as in the following examples:

A young man, himself a physician, thought he was healthy when he
married. He discovered his mistake and found himself confronting the
choice of wronging his wife or separating from her. As they were deeply in
love, the only possible way was separation. He chose death which he
inflicted on himself in such a way that his wife thought it was caused by
accident.
Another man acted in the same way after he had been married several years
and had three children; he found out that he was his wife's half-brother.
But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are
concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the
development of several generations before it will be the woman's instinct,
an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or psychically
degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her children. The
instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but it is dulled too by an
antiquated legal conception, according to which the woman must subject
herself as a duty to requirements against which her whole being revolts. In
this respect a woman has only one duty, an unmistakable one, against which
every transgression is a sin, namely that the new being to which she gives
life, must be born in love and purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual
harmony, in a complete common will, in a complete common happiness.
Until women see this as a duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by
beings, who in a moment of their existence have been robbed of the best
pre-conditions of their life's happiness and their life's efficiency.
Occasionally they show plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or
of discord. Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and
powerful specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to
pieces through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality
caused by their very origin.
As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can do
nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children must
be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their future
duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can impress on
the conscience of the children not any abstract conception of purity, but the
concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire. So they will keep their

health, their attractiveness, their guilelessness, for the being they are to
love; for the children who from this love will receive their life.
The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low,
small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have
depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when the
impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or when this
end is attained without consideration for the production of an offspring
qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is that which
diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life. This type of love
really degrades human beings, is immoral from the standpoint of the
modern view, which wills life to be, but above all, wills the progress of life
to ever higher forms.
Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties. These
they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily obligations,
in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any intention of
fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they must also know that it
is a still greater transgression of their duty if the life of a child is called
forth with cold hearts and cold temper, whether this happens in a marriage
based on worldly motives or one maintained on moral grounds in which the
previously existing discord is transmitted to a new being.
Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of
numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal
convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle against
the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its higher aims.
They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage, that marriages can
be made without love. This is a process of thought resembling the
conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea with some defect,
since it is possible in any event that it will be damaged. They speak of the
impurity of the senses, of the advantages of a marriage based on friendship
and reason, of the calming power of duty. All of these are chilly processes
of reason by which souls, filled with the warmth of life, are killed.
Daughters must be helped by their mothers, wisely and delicately, in order
to be protected from hasty acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when
their feelings themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls
and their nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from

other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions alone,
will there be a great transformation of present ethical standards. Men think
that they can do with marriage what they will; that they can enter upon it
with any kind of motive; they think that they must marry from feelings of
duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to atone for some fault; that they
have the right to enter upon a marriage without love because they long for
home life. While these things are regarded as legitimate, men stand on the
same ethical level as the person who commits murder because he has first
stolen, or has stolen because he was hungry. The great crime against the
holiness of generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most
sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences
order the destiny of a new generation.
While children continue to be born in the cold atmosphere of duty, or in the
stormy atmosphere of discord, while people continue to regard such
marriages as moral, while people can transmit to their children all kinds of
intellectual mutilation and bodily unsoundness, and their parents continue
to be called honorable, so long will the world be without the slightest
conception of that morality which will mould the new mankind.
This morality has still more exalted precepts. To-day it seldom happens that
a young girl enters marriage in ignorance, but in my generation I know
cases where the ignorance of the bride resulted in insanity. In another case
this ignorance led to thoughts of suicide; in a third, the child was regarded
with coldness by its mother; in the fourth, the child had abnormal psychic
qualities. Still it is not sufficient for the ideal beauty of marriage and the
harmony of the child that the woman knows in general what is before her. A
young man said once to me that most marriages are spoilt at the very
beginning, because the man brings with him the point of view and the
habits of those degraded women, from whom he has received his initiation
into love; frequently he annihilates forever the tenderest element in his
relation to his wife. He damages the most beautiful factor in their mutual
feelings. Man must learn to have reverence and patience, and I know men
who have shown these characteristics really because they saw that their
wives gave, as is not unfrequently the case, their souls and their hearts
before their senses were awakened. Only the constant close association
taught them to desire a completed marriage. A child should receive life only
through this common impulse. Many children are born, as it is, in legalised

prostitution, in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in the consciences of
many women and men, the slightest shadow of religious reverence, of
æsthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of existence. And yet we
continue in the name of morality to veil for youth the nakedness of nature
and we neglect to inspire their feeling of devotion towards their own being
as the shrine in which the mystery of life must some day be fulfilled.
In this mystery there are still hidden fields only penetrated by the intuition.
Here and there a profound poet has surmised the innumerable affinities or
repulsions which under changing spiritual and material dispositions with
altering opinions, condition the life of love in modern human beings, the
mystic influences which sometimes forever, sometimes partially, can
change the deepest feeling. All these mystic influences, the tender woof of
all these fine threads, will then be a part of the living fabric of the child.
These secret processes explain the great differences between children of the
same parents,—children who externally are born and brought up in quite
similar conditions.
In all these promptings of instinct, in all these categorical imperatives of the
nerves and the blood, human beings must be at the same time obedient
listeners and strict masters. On this depends the future happiness of love,
and with it a happier future race.
The people of to-day live under inherited morals and newly acquired
transgressions of morality. Both must be conquered before soul and sense in
love can become inseparable, or in other words, before this unity is
recognised as the only possible moral basis of the relation between man and
woman.
Talented men, as well as one-sided advocates of women's rights, think that
the development will take quite a different course, after the low impulse
which is at the basis of love has been laid bare and scientifically analysed.
They say that the superior person will satisfy the impulse shamelessly and
animally, without any emotional decoration; or he will isolate himself from
its influence and devote to more noble purposes that vital power, that
emotional capacity, which is now consumed by love.
Nothing impossible is to be found in this point of view. I have shown more
than once that woman by her maternal functions, uses up so much physical

and psychical energy, that in the sphere of intellectual production she must
remain of less significance. What I at an earlier period assumed intuitively,
has been substantiated since then by a specialist. A Finnish doctor has
shown how the vital power of lower organisms, is concentrated in sexual
production. But the higher man goes, so much more power is made free.
This power which is not consumed in the production of new generations,
can serve intellectual production. Each of the two different productive
expressions of human vital action must to a certain extent limit the
development of the power of the other, and restrict its capacity of work. The
same writer contends that this is the natural cause of the more limited
fertility of civilised man, and will be, according to the pessimists named
above, the decisive factor in the prophesied downfall of love.
According to my conception of the word, it is love on the contrary, which
will win the victory by the relative weakening of impulse, and by scientific
analysis of the same. Men will no longer mistake impulse for love. Of
course this impulse is always present in love, but in the same way in which
the sculpture of the cave man is present in the work of Michael Angelo.
Man will then, with all the powers of his being, be able to love, when love,
according to the happy expression of Thoreau, is not a glow, but a light.
Then he will see for the first time, what wealth life can have through love,
when love becomes a happiness worthy of man because it becomes an
æsthetic creation, a religious worship; when the completed unity of those
who love is expressed in a new being,—a being that will some day be really
grateful for the life it has received. Where the amelioration of the human
race is concerned, the transformation of customs and feelings is always the
essential thing. Influence of legislation in comparison with it is ever slight.
But as has been said before, legislation has its role to play. Especially where
there are diseases which can certainly be transmitted, society must interfere
to restrict marriage. In Germany and America a good proposal has been
made, for the period of transition in this direction. It is suggested that the
law shall require as an obligatory condition for marriage, a certificate of a
medical witness with complete data as to the health of both parties. Those
who contract marriage will continue to have their freedom of choice but at
least they would not enter ignorantly upon marriage as they do now, and
expose themselves and their children to disastrous consequences. It appears
to me to be at least as important for society to have a medical certificate as

to capacity for marriage, as it is for military service. In the one case, we
deal with giving life, in the other with taking it away. And although the
latter has certainly been, up till now, regarded as a more serious occasion
than the former, still an awakening social conscience should demand
progress in this direction. It is conceivable that from this beginning new
customs will develop; further legislation may be dispensed with; human
beings will agree to sacrifice the most dangerous of all liberties, giving life
to a defective offspring, while prohibition of marriage now would not
hinder parenthood. For the great mass might continue, outside of marriage,
to rob children of the possibilities of health and happiness, by burdening
them with inherited diseases or bad tendencies.
Nietzsche, who knew little of love because he knew nothing of woman, and
who therefore on this subject says little worthy of attention, has still spoken
more profoundly on the subject of parenthood than any contemporary
writer. He saw what impurity, what poverty are concealed under the name
of marriage. He saw how meretricious, how ignorant education is. In his
writings are to be found prophetical and poetical words describing the end
aimed at in parenthood, and showing what true parenthood should be.

I will that thy victory and thy emancipation shall yearn for a child.
Living memorials shalt thou build for thy victory, and for thy
emancipation.
Thou must build upward to a height beyond thyself. But first I would
have thee thyself built with a square foundation, body and soul.
See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only.
Let a true marriage help thee to this end.
A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with initiative
like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle shouldst thou create.
Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the one,—
the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence for one
another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for those whose
wills are united in this one act of will.

CHAPTER II
THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK
There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism between
theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in questions
concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement are in many
cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against the idea that they
could have any share in the sort of emancipation of personality that includes
freedom for all the powers and activities of the personality. Individualism,
and the assertion of self are for them degrading words with a sinful
significance. That the emancipation of women is practically the greatest
egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense
affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen, they have no
suspicion. Freedom for the powers and the personality of woman have
never appeared to them except as an ideal struggle for justice, as a noble
victory to be won. In its deepest meaning this is as true of every other effort
at self-affirmation, the end of which is the recognition of the right of human
personality to the full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom,
where responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such
affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls into an
unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the
course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in
terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real
emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers
of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a
question, a social institution with officers, a church system with dogmas.
Certainly we still hear in books and speeches that the woman question is
being discussed and urged, in its relation to the happiness and development
of the whole of humanity. But in reality the woman question, since it
became a fact, a cause with an end of its own, since its champions have lost
more and more their appreciation of its connection with other great
questions of the day, is tending to increase the civil rights and the fields of

woman's labour. In both cases people really have the women of the upper
classes in view. This has been the end, and it is thoroughly justified and
justifiable. But, in striving for this end, those who are aiming at it have
come more and more into opposition to the first and highest of all rights, the
rights of the individual woman to think her own thoughts, to go her own
ways, even when these thoughts and these ways follow other courses than
those of the advocates of woman's rights. While this group is, on one hand,
very far from conceding to the individual woman the freedom which
belongs to her, it is, on the other hand, blind to the results of the self-
assertion of the whole female sex. In taking up work more and more
external in character, they are blind to the profound and revolutionary
effects of this movement, on the conditions of labour in the present day, on
the existence of man and the family, on society as a whole.
Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman,
turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied
before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed,—
these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights
movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities,
nature, and environment.
The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had
become a butcher, "Go thou and do likewise," and an American young lady
working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic
phenomena.
The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which
enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a business, and
dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating manifoldness of life, and
has become an egoistic self-concentrated campaign. On this account I, and
many others of my generation, with many more of the younger generation,
stand outside of the movement, although we actively wished, and still wish,
for the freedom of woman. The champions of woman's rights, like the
champions of other movements for rights, illustrate the truth of the old
Swedish saying, that "what we are pursuing is really only a runaway horse
attached to our waggon." How blindly the fanatics of woman's rights have
rushed by the other needs of the time can be best measured by considering

their attitude towards the greatest question of the day—I mean the social
question.
The old advocates of woman's rights maintain that the adult woman must
have the same right as the adult man to "protect" herself, and they ask why
the woman is hindered from working because she is married, or because she
has children. Protective legislation drives woman from the factories and
workshops; and this legislation is very far, they tell us, from meriting the
support of women. Women, on the contrary, they say, should demand the
same protective legislation for women as for men. They ask for technical
instruction and an extended field of work for women.
This whole argument is quite logical from the point of view that limitation
of woman's labour is opposed to one of the foremost principles of our time,
—the self-determination of the individual. This implies the right of the adult
woman, as well as the adult man, to choose her own work. Privileges on the
ground of sex only hinder the woman from being put on an equality with
man before the law.
But all these arguments are based on the sophistical notion which perverts
the whole feminist movement. The idea is to free woman from the
limitations of nature. It involves, too, the other sophistical notion with
which capitalistic society meets every demand of protective legislation for
men, women, or children. Such legislation is said to be an interference with
the individual's right of choice.
Every human being who is socially alive is aware that this right to control
one's life is the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a society built up on a
capitalistic basis. It is doubly empty where woman is concerned. I have
never heard a woman desire that woman should fulfil military duties as an
equivalent for having civil rights like man. But this would be the
consequence of the argument that woman should have no privileges on the
ground of her sex. The greatest privilege that can be thought of in modern
society is to be spared the discomforts and loss of time that come from
military training, to be exempt from the dangers and the terrors of war. That
women are not absolutely incapable of service in warfare, women have
shown on many occasions, especially in the Boer War. So when the
advocates of women's rights hesitate before this extreme consequence of

their principle, and introduce the functions of motherhood as a cogent
ground for the privilege of being freed from military service in time of war
(even if women at some time should receive the same civil rights now
enjoyed by man), they are in the highest degree illogical. Other women with
more logic declare that on another battle-field, a still more destructive one,
that of the factory system, the same maternal functions require certain
privileges for woman, and these same functions must result in subjecting
her to certain limitations of her individual right to control her life. That is,
she cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by nature, without interfering with
the rights of another, the potential child.
It lies in the individual sphere of woman's choice as of man's choice not to
choose marriage, or to desire it without parenthood; and for exemption from
the latter, real altruistic as well as real egoistic reasons can be urged. It lies
in the individual choice of the woman, as well as of the man, to isolate
herself from what may be regarded as an obstacle to her individual
development, or to her freedom of movement. She can do without love or
motherhood, if the one or both of these are regarded from this point of view.
Woman has the full right to allow herself to be turned into a third sex, the
sex of the working bees, or the sexless ant, provided she finds in this her
highest happiness.
A good while ago I was ingenuous enough to maintain that motherhood was
the central factor of existence for most women. In the discussion of this
question I considered several facts: woman's work imposed by necessity,
woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom of her power, woman's
intellectual life modified by many other influences of contemporary
thought,—all these have forced the maternal instinct into the background
for the time being. Here was a danger which, it seemed, was not too late to
expose. There are women in whom the feeling of love is really and
absolutely stunted; there are others who do not find in modern man the
soulful and profound harmony in love that they quite rightly demand; there
are others, more numerous, who wish for love but do not wish for
motherhood. They absolutely fear it. The famous German authoress
Gabrielle Reuter has spoken of this fear, this alarm of motherhood
continually vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude of self-defence,—
a fear which to-day has taken possession of so many strenuous and creative
women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so strong, so dominant in them

that one might almost believe it a dark perverse instinct, which, like all
unnatural instincts, has been conceived and born through cruel necessities,
and through these necessities has become overmastering. It is as if a secret
voice in the depths of their nature was telling these women that, by paying
their tribute to their sex, they would lose that power, brilliancy, and
sharpness of intellect by which they have elevated themselves above their
sex; and perhaps certain kinds of women are right in having this fear.
I am convinced, just as the German writer is, that every actual phenomenon
of disease and of health alike is a necessary result from given causes; and I
am more convinced than the advocates of women's rights ever were, that it
is in the sphere of human freedom to choose one's own type of
development, happiness, or ruin. I am not inclined to say anything further to
the women who do not desire motherhood.
It would be very disastrous if these women, who have never been moved by
tenderness when they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who have never
longed to surrender themselves entirely to another being, were to become
mothers. Their children would be more unfortunate than they themselves.
Many women like these are to be found to-day, and if things remain as they
are, they are bound to increase in numbers. In some of them, however, the
maternal instinct is not dead, but only dormant. Modern women with their
capacity for psychic analysis, with their physical and psychical refinement,
are often repelled by the crudeness, the ignorance, or the importunities of
man's nature. The whole factor of love in the being of these women is
shrivelled up as a bud that has never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a
duty, or for a woman friend, they find an expression for that sacrifice whose
real aim they deny or overlook, a something which ends often by avenging
itself in a tragic way.
I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire
motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the unborn
generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute selfishness.
This selfishness is often disguised under a great impulse, an impulse which,
like that of the preservation of the species, masters existence. I mean the
impulse of self-protection. But it is just this that should make the

"obligatory" egoism of the modern working woman appear so terrible to
those who are busied with the emancipation of woman.
To talk of the freedom of woman, of her individual right to control her
actions, when she works like a beast of burden to reach a minimum of
existence, to keep from dying of starvation, to talk of the freedom of
women where conditions are such that the free choice of work, for man as
well as for woman, is an empty phrase—to put it mildly, it is senseless. I
will throw some light on the results of freedom by the following
illustration:
When women in England worked in white lead factories, seventy-seven
women were examined in one factory. It appeared in the time covered by
the investigation that there were among this number ninety miscarriages,
twenty-seven cases of still-born children; beside, forty young children died
of convulsions produced by the poisoning of their mothers. The effects of
this occupation were most harmful in the case of women from eighteen to
twenty-three years of age. Lameness, blindness, and other infirmities
resulted from this kind of work.
An English doctor has shown from exact investigations conducted during a
number of years, that the enormous mortality among young children in
factory districts arises chiefly because the child is deprived of a mother's
care a few weeks after birth. A child needs its mother's milk at least six
months, and the mother's milk cannot be substituted by artificial means,
least of all when the substitutes are used with carelessness. In certain textile
factory districts, in Nottingham, for example, where lace is produced, and
where people have complained of the law limiting women's work, out of
each thousand children, two hundred die annually. Mortality in factory
districts is four to five times greater than in country districts; and yet the
death of children is, relatively speaking, a lesser evil. More unfortunate still
is it that those who survive always suffer partial weakness from the lack of
a mother's care at a tender age.
In Silesia, where children and quite young girls are employed in the glass
industry, the work has so distorted their bodily structure that when they bear
children, their sufferings are intense. Such unique material do they offer for

the study of obstetrics, that doctors make pilgrimages to Silesia to learn
from their cases.
Before women have reached maturity, when they can, according to the
advocates of women's rights, protect themselves, they are ruined physically.
If it is said that the facts mentioned above belong to the question of the
protection of children, not to that of the protection of women, the answer
lies close at hand. The physical and moral interest of children and of women
are so mutually related, that they cannot be separated. Crippled women
have children who are stunted at the time of their birth. The burden of toil
they take up with weakened power of resistance and they transmit this
weakness to their offspring. Cause and effect are so intimately associated
here, that they cannot be accurately apportioned between the work of
women and the work of children.
Even the advocates of women's rights must, allow that the limit of their
claims to right is to be found where the right of another begins. They cannot
suppose that the individual right of the woman to control her life should go
so far that a woman could take a piece of a neighbour's property to lay out a
garden, or use for an industrial scheme a part of the water power belonging
to some one else.
Can they not see that woman's individual freedom is limited by the rights of
another, by the rights of the potential child? The potential child has its own
proper rights, its own vital power. This property, the woman has not the
right to encroach upon in advance.
A woman, who from one motive or another, great or small, permanently
keeps outside of the marriage relation, has complete right to ruin herself by
work, provided she does not, as a result of so doing, become a burden to
others through incapacity.
But the woman who looks forward to motherhood as a possibility for
herself, or the woman who is expecting to become a mother, should not,
through an unlimited amount of voluntary work or of work forced upon her
contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for life and work of an unborn
generation, in such a way that she will bring into the world weak, invalid, or
physically incapable children, who will later on be neglected.

It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates of women's rights that their talk
about the individual freedom of the woman to control her career, their
contention that no limitation need restrict woman's power of deciding her
own vocation, because they are married or are mothers, mean the most
crying injury, not only to children, but to women themselves. For the
demand of equality, where nature has made inequality, brings about the
injury of the weaker factor. Equality is not justice. Often it is just the
opposite, the most absolute injustice.
The strongest reasoning will not convince those advocates of women's
rights who discuss woman's labour from the old-fashioned level of
individualism, unaffected by the social feeling of solidarity, which is the
solution offered by our age. But fortunately protective legislation does not
depend on the women who advocate the rights of women. The
workingmen's movement, aided by women and men of all classes who are
active in it, will carry through this legislation. The movement for the normal
working day is steadily gaining ground.
Experience has shown that, because of the greater intensity of the work
done, just as much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a longer time. The
first concern has been the work of children and of younger adults. The
effect of factory life on the health of women themselves, as well as on their
children, has excited general attention. In England first, then in other
European countries, it has become recognised as necessary that a normal
period of work should be laid down for women as well. The programme
was and continues to be threefold:—a maximum working time for women's
work; limitation, or, better still, the cessation of night work on the part of
women; the prevention, too, of the work of women in mines and in certain
other industries dangerous to health; finally the protection of women who
are about to become mothers. In most European countries there is now a
maximum working time fixed at eight to eleven hours. Night work, work in
mines, and extra work, is either forbidden or considerably limited, and a
rest period of three to eight weeks is established for women at childbirth.
From all points of view, an eight-hour working day should be the highest
limit for woman's work. There are more reasons for it in her case than for
man's work. The eight-hour day means not only for the woman as for the
man the possibility of enjoying her life in permanent health; it secures time

for improving recreation. For the married woman it is an indispensable
requirement. Without it her home cannot be kept in order and comfort, her
children cannot be physically cared for; without it she is not able to co-
operate in their education. The normal working day is, therefore, more
necessary for the woman than for the man, because on her, rather than on
him, comes the burden of household work. The dangers of night work, as of
work in mines, are from the standpoint of health and morality so plain, that
no further reason need be urged to defend protective legislation in this case.
But not only the theoretical principles of women's rights are urged against
this legislation. Socialists as well as the advocates of women's rights are
responsible for different objections of a more solid character. It is urged that
legislation will increase the number of unemployed women who, in order to
live, will be forced into prostitution, but it is forgotten that the same result
comes from low wages in many occupations, and that these low wages are
caused by an over-supply of working women. It is said, also, that if
protective legislation hinders or prevents women from working, they will
not be able to care for their children and the children will be employed in
the factory in their stead. The way out of the last difficulty is absolutely
plain: the complete prohibition of all work by children under fifteen years
of age.
It is urged also that if women are hindered by legislation from fulfilling the
demands of their occupation, the result will be, not that they are protected in
their occupation, but that the occupation is protected against them. The
remedy in this case is certainly difficult, but not impossible to find. Let only
the tenth part of the energy now used in agitation for the free right of
women to labour be employed in preparing women for such labour as they
are suited to undertake. But even when this cannot be done protective
legislation carries with it its own corrective. It is always urged that the
occupation will be destroyed by protective legislation. Then new methods
and new machines will be invented to replace cheap labour power. Those
who are protected often themselves complain that they suffer economically
under protective legislation, but a long experience will show them how,
through the reciprocal effects of all factors in production, the temporary
failures will be balanced. A potent remedy for this effect of protective
legislation may be looked for in the assertion, found in the programmes of
all labour parties, of the right of the unemployed to have work, and a fixed

minimum wage. These demands along with that for a normal working day,
in which is included rest at night and rest on Sunday, and other measures for
the protection of workingmen against accident and old age, are the chief
methods by which the labour question, both for men and women, will be
solved. Until these aims are realised Ruskin's judgment on modern
industrialism which kills the real humanity in man holds good both for men
and for women. We make, he says, everything except real men; we bleach
cotton; we harden and improve steel; we refine sugar; we make porcelain
and print books; but to refine a single living soul, to reform it, to improve it
never enters into our reckoning of profit.
The women of the working classes must continue to endure the suffering, to
bear the dangers, to subject themselves to the forces which solidarity in this
great struggle implies. Only under these conditions can men as well as
women elevate themselves, partly by their own combination, partly by the
extension of the principle, more and more coming to be recognised, that
society, through its legislation, can determine the conditions under which its
members work. So will be produced conditions of life and of work worthy
of mankind,—a healthier, stronger, and more beautiful race. In this ever
continuing progress every part is related to every other part.
Unorganised, ordinary and therefore badly paid work, done by woman,
diminishes the wages of man and his opportunity of work. Work in a factory
unfits the woman for the conduct of the household, for her duties as a
mother. In the turmoil, heat, and rush of the factory her nerves are destroyed
and with them her finer emotions. The woman loses not only the right hand,
but also the right heart for family life. Badly conditioned women make
marriage more difficult for the man; through celibacy, his mortality is
increased. Low wages, or times of lack of employment, cause bad
dwellings, bad clothes, and bad nourishment. The tortured or ill-conditioned
woman is not able to prepare anything good with the small amount of
money which the man may earn. From all of this come intemperance and
disease. Through these causes, combined with those already noted, the
population of factory districts degenerates, in republican Switzerland, not
less than in absolutistic Russia.
It is true that such limitations of work in many cases are felt, as well by the
single woman as by the family. The restriction of child labour may bring

immediate discomfort. But all this is a passing evil. It can be corrected, as
soon as it is clearly seen in what direction the advance along all the line is
being made. This kind of progress moves in zigzag fashion. What decides
whether temporary limitation of freedom makes for progress or not is
whether one finds, in turning from the individual, or small groups, to the
great whole, that the last is gaining, that in the future, freedom and
happiness for all will be increased by this temporary limitation of freedom.
In other relations of life it is a just law that he who goes into a game must
abide by its rules. But this rule cannot be applied to that very cruel game
which we call life. We do not go into it of our own will. Children have the
right not to be obliged to suffer for the mistakes and errors of their parents.
How this suffering can be best avoided in case of an inharmonious marriage
must be decided by the different individuals, as a question belonging to
them alone. As I have already shown, change of custom in relation to the
time, age, and motives for marriage is the surest protection for the children,
a protection that will gradually be extended. Under a serious conviction of
woman's duty as a member of her sex, it will be regarded as a crime for a
young wife voluntarily to ill-treat her person, either by excessive study, or
excessive attention to sports, by tight-lacing, or consumption of sweets, by
smoking or the use of stimulants, by sitting up at night, excessive work, or
by all the thousand other ways by which these attractive simpletons sin
against nature, until nature finally loses all patience with them.
It must be demanded of the laws of society that they hinder involuntary
crimes of unprotected women against their feminine nature.
This is the great work of woman's emancipation; everything else compared
with it is non-essential. Through their failure to see this the present
representatives of women's rights are working against progress, though they
themselves apply the word reactionary to all who assert that the only way
by which the woman question as a whole can be solved is through the social
revolution. In this revolution protective legislation is an important factor.
According to my method of thinking, and that of many others, not woman
but the mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so precious
that society advances its own highest well-being when it protects the
functions of the mother. These functions are not limited to birth nor to the

nourishment of the child; but they go on during the whole time of its
training. I believe that in the new society where all women and men alike
will be compelled to work (not children, not invalids, and not the aged)
people will regard the maternal function as so important for the whole
social order, that every mother under fixed conditions, subject to certain
control, during a certain period, and for a certain number of children, will
obtain from society an allowance for education. She will receive this during
the time in which her children require all her care, while she herself is freed
from work outside the home. Naturally this does not exclude the case of
mothers who from one or another reason cannot devote themselves to the
care and training of their children; they can by their own productive work
secure a substitute. But for the majority of women, the proposal made
above would undoubtedly be the real solution of many problems which now
seem insoluble. I do not believe that social development will maintain the
old ideal of the father as the one who takes care of the family. I hope, rather,
that the new conception of having every individual look after himself will
gain more ground. The father will then be, in the real sense of the word, the
educator, when the care for the maintenance of the family does not press
him down to the ground. A woman will then, as mother of the family, not be
in dependence on the man,—a position she feels as humiliating, if as a girl
she earned her own living. People are bound to return to this new form of
matriarchy, when they begin to consider care of the new generation, as the
great business the mother takes over for society. During its progress society
must guarantee her existence. In many cases, the answer of the married
woman who works outside the home would be as follows: That her
happiness would consist in quietly looking after her children, and in being
able to keep house, but that she must have an income that would make her
independent of her husband. A Swedish evening paper, the special organ of
the feminist movement, two years ago started an investigation on the
productive work of married women. The answers, contrary to the
expectations of the paper, were nearly unanimous in showing what dangers
for children, and what interference with household comfort, were caused by
the woman working outside the home. An impartial investigation of the
causes of the increasing brutality of the young would show certainly that
the rapid increase in crime in several countries among the young is caused
partly by their prematurely taking up productive work, and partly by early
lack of home life, the result of the mother working outside the home.

If the world is agreed that children must still continue to be born and that a
home furnishes generally the best means for training them during the first
years of their life, the present consequences of woman's work done outside
the home must cause pessimism; such work must be stopped. After we have
thought over the matter, it is plain that nothing is now more needed than
such plans of social order, such programmes of education, as will give the
mother back to her children and to her home.
Everything that philanthropy now does to heal the injurious and
disintegrating effects of the capitalistic industrial system is on the whole
wasted power. Children's crèches, kindergartens, providing meals for
children, hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all their noble efforts
replace a hundredth part of the life energy, taken directly or indirectly from
the new generation by women working outside the home.
There are some people who expect the problem of domestic life to be
solved by collective institutions which will take care of the children, and
give them meals. Just as brewing, baking, slaughtering, making candles and
clothes, have more and more ceased to be done in the home, much of the
work which now absorbs the greatest part of household activity, cooking,
washing, mending and cleaning clothes, will, I firmly believe, finally be
done by collective effort, by the help of electricity and machines. But I hope
the tendency of man towards individualisation will overcome the tendency
towards impersonal, uniform application of power en masse, in everything
by which the innermost relations of life and private habits are deeply
affected. A strong family life will, I hope, be regarded as the basis for true
happiness and for the development of personality. When women are free
from the barbarous relics of present methods of housekeeping,—the market
basket, the kitchen utensils, the scrubbing brush gone from every house,
electricity everywhere spreading warmth and life,—they will still be forced
to do a certain amount of work. This cannot be avoided even by the help of
the most perfect apparatus and by co-operative methods, provided the house
is not to be replaced by the barrack. And since the custom of keeping
servants will soon cease because, probably, there will be no servants to
keep, all women will be forced to do housework, or find the remedy already
discovered in America where bureaus supply domestic help for a fixed time
for a fixed price. In London, too, there is at present a guild for general
houseworkers who are trained for occupation and work under regularly

established conditions. In the country, not only wives but daughters will be
needed for agricultural labour, when there are no more hired labourers to be
had. This will be a natural corrective against that pressure towards outside
fields of labour, that has taken the daughters in multitudes away from home,
and has crowded and overflowed the cities with them.
Finally if we weigh the economic loss occasioned by the fact that women
after five or ten years' preparation have to give up work or study as a result
of marriage, it is easy to see that the modern work of women has had results
which must soon lead to earnest thought, in balancing up the accounts for or
against the system. From the point of view of the woman herself, from the
children's point of view, from the man's point of view, and finally, from the
productive point of view, it has become pretty plain that society must either
change the conditions of woman's labour or see a progressive disintegration
in home life. Society must either transform the conditions of life and work,
or it will witness the degeneration of the sexes.
All philanthropy—no age has seen more of it than our own—is only a
savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering
makes the air more endurable for passers-by, but it does not hinder the
infection in the sewer from spreading.
Selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation, will perhaps end by forcing the
leaders of society to direct their actions from the social point of view. Then
the woman question will become a question of humanity; then will its
champions perhaps come to see that there can be no enduring good for the
woman, if she works under conditions injurious to men and to children. It
will be seen that the old axiom can be justly applied to the demands made in
the name of woman's individuality; supreme right becomes supreme
injustice. Justice is not to be reached by having the woman work under
conditions which ruin both her and the whole generation physically. In
other respects she must be able to use her free choice, and be educated
enough to make good use of it. Justice consists in protecting innumerable
women, who are not able as yet to protect themselves, against the abuses of
which capital is guilty in employing their labour power.
It is an instructive feature in the history of class conflict, and of the
movement for women's progress, that as women began by driving men out

of certain fields of labour, so now unmarried women try to force married
women from the labour market. In America, where everything goes at full
speed, an association has been founded among unmarried women with this
intention. These and similar phenomena belong to the system of free
competition, the creation of the "leading thought of our time, the right of
the individual to determine his own vocation." Perhaps when the war of
women against women becomes the rule, the women's rights women will
see that the problem of woman's work is more complicated than they
imagine. They have continued to look at it till now only from the point of
view of a woman's right to take care of herself. Perhaps they will then
understand that individualism, apart from the feeling of solidarity, leads to
social conflict, class against class, sex against sex, unmarried against
married, young against old. So it will be seen that only in the transformation
of the whole of society can woman attain her full rights without impairing,
through her advance, the rights of others.
The sooner the women's rights party understands this, the better. Instead of
fighting protective legislation, they should advocate it; instead of regarding
unions and strikes with disfavour, they should help labouring women to
organise unions, and support strikes where strikes are justified.
Our century, which has opened up to women new fields of labour, has made
life very hard for her by forcing her in the competitive struggle. As wives,
as married or unmarried mothers, as divorced women, as widows, women
often not only have the burden of their own support to bear, but they have
frequently the rôle of guardian of a family, working for an invalid or
intemperate husband; for children, or sisters, or aged parents. These women,
whether they belong to those who labour with the brain or with the hand,
are worn out, partly by earning their own living, partly by household tasks.
While the man goes from home to his work, refreshed by rest, the woman
often goes already tired out, and she comes back to the house perhaps to
work at night. It is as clear as day that by so doing she loses her bodily
health and mental equanimity, both needed by her children. It is astonishing
how many working women despite all this have enough energy for
intellectual effort in reading and thinking. They soon see, women like these,
that an occupation is not emancipation. The best that can be said is that it is
only a means to emancipation. Those who work with their hands are not the
worst off in this respect. Bookkeepers, telephone and telegraph operators,

post-office employees, shop girls, waiters in public establishments, and
servants in private houses, who must often serve the public standing, and
who are often deprived of rest at night and on Sunday, are practically
labour's worst slaves. Who can wonder if the possible income obtained by
an immoral life is reckoned by the employer, when he secures for his
establishment, at low wages, the services of attractive young girls? Small
wonder it is that such employees, worried to death in shops, telephone
bureaus, post and telegraph offices, should often be driven to hysteria,
insanity, and suicide.
The advocates of women's rights are not blind to all these incongruities.
They ask equal salaries for men and women, and claim, often with justice,
and often without, that women's work is too inadequately compensated. But
they do not see that they have contributed to the evil by constantly urging
women to work in all possible occupations, and that a low rate of wages and
an overcrowding of all fields of labour is the result. It is far more necessary
to pay attention to these things than to open up new fields of labour to
women, if their vital energy is not to be dried up, if they are not to lose their
youthful freshness and attractiveness prematurely, and their possibilities for
development and happiness as human beings, wives, and mothers.
A loss of freedom accomplished gradually, this is, on the whole, the sad
result of the so-called emancipation of women in our century, if the subject
is looked at broadly, apart from the few thousand women of the upper
classes in good paying positions. For several decades, I have felt strongly
against the importance given by the advocates of women's rights to the
work of women outside of the home, for the reasons I have given above. I
have applied to such work the objection formulated by Feuerbach in these
words: "Mediocrity always weighs correctly, only its weight is false."
Wherever we look, in Europe or America, we find new and injurious results
from the new conditions, from the free activity of women's work through
the development of industry on a large scale, through the transformation of
home work, and the growing conviction on the part of women that
"celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," to quote the words of a
distinguished supporter of woman's rights.

Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in these unhappy results through a
reaction that would again rob the woman of her essential freedom in
relation to her choice of work, and the control of her life.
The line of progress is tending towards a new society, where all will be
compelled to work and all will find work; where all will work moderately
under healthy conditions for an adequate wage. Then neither the unmarried
nor the married woman will lose her strength by exhausting work done to
earn a living, or impair the powers she needs for motherhood. If she
becomes a mother, in most cases she will really rejoice at the possibility
offered to her by society of working for society, as a mother and an
educator.
We are yet very far from such a society, but every social regulation should,
as we have said, be tested as to whether it brings us nearer this ideal or
leads us farther away from it. The question should be asked whether the
direction of thought is encouraged or restricted, that will in the end
transform everything, the conviction I mean that economic production is
here in the world for the sake of men, not, as now, men for the sake of
production; that work is to be done for the sake of freedom, not, as now,
freedom created for the sake of work.
When I tried in my book called The Misuse of the Power of Woman to urge
women to test the consequences of this process, my thesis was as follows:
In our programme of civilisation, we must start out with the conviction that
motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman and the way in
which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we
must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the
happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother.
Or, we must begin with the assumption that motherhood is not essential:
then everything must continue to go on as it is going on now, and work
directed towards external spheres with its satisfaction in the joy of creation,
of ambition, of gain, of enjoyment, of independence, will be more and more
the end towards which women will arrange their plan of life. For this end
they will modify their fundamental habits and remould their feelings. The
naïve belief that every woman, who has the liberty to do so, is following her
own nature, shows a complete ignorance of psychology and history. Some
ideal considered worth striving for, the prevailing view of a period, will

obtain supremacy over nature. This is shown best in the stunted feeling of
motherhood peculiar to the eighteenth century, by the plain results of
mediæval asceticism. By a new ideal innumerable women are now driven
from a life directed inwards to a life directed outwards.
I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her
own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman. But the
opinion held by the feminine advocates of woman's emancipation, in regard
to the nature and the aims of the everyday woman, does violence to the real
nature of most women. It is one of the most remarkable manifestations of
the times that, while women preach about the rights of woman and her will
to work and to act unrestrained by family ties, men like Ibsen, for example,
in When We Dead People Awake, show that the real Fall of Man in life is
transgression of the law of love, meaning that man through this
transgression not only diminishes his personality, but lessens his creative
capacity.
It would appear as though men were approaching the conception of love
once held by women, while women were beginning to regard love as a petty
episode in life compared with what are really its true concerns, an episode
which gives life the colour of a sensual, sentimental, psychological, or
sportsmanlike adventure, an episode which she treats as a game which she
can get into, and just as easily get out of. From this new position in which
extremes meet, suffering, previously undreamed of, must arise. Such results
coming to the emancipated woman will I hope reveal to her the eternal laws
of her own being, laws from which she cannot be freed without destroying
herself.
I would not put the slightest hindrance, however, in the way of a single
isolated woman pursuing her own path freely, if it leads her even to the
most unusual forms of labour and attempts to make a living. But for the
sake of women themselves, for the sake of children, for the sake of society,
I wish men as well as women to think earnestly over the present position of
things. They will see that in the near future, one of two things must be
chosen. Either there must be such a transformation of the way in which
modern society thinks and works that the majority of women will be
restored to motherhood, or the disintegration of the home and the

substitution of general institutions will inevitably result. There is no
alternative.
Undoubtedly it required the whole egoistic self-assertion of woman, all her
efforts towards individuality, her temporary separation from home and from
family, her independent efforts to make a living to convince man and
society of the following truths: that woman is not solely a sexual being, not
solely dependent on man, the home and the family, no matter in what form
these may exist. Only in this way could woman fulfil her destiny as wife
and mother with really free choice. Only in this way could she secure the
right of being regarded as man's intellectual equal in the field of the home
and the family, the recognition that in her way she was just as complete a
being as he.
But it is clear that this fragment of feminine egoism must have a further
consequence. With the rights of sex the feeling of solidarity must be
awakened. The woman must see that her emancipated and developed
human personality will lead to this solidarity by the realisation of her
especial vocation as woman. Women in parliament and in journalism, their
representation in the local and general government, in peace congress and
in workingmen's meetings, science and literature, all this will produce small
results until women realise that the transformation of society begins with
the unborn child, with the conditions for its coming into existence, its
physical and psychical training. It must be the general conviction that the
new instincts, the new feelings, the new thoughts, the new ideas, which
mothers and fathers pass on into the flesh and blood of their children, will
transform existence. When, after many successive generations, the new
spiritual kingdom of this world has arisen, there will come into being these
greater ideas through which life may be renewed.
Until that time secular misdeeds, political injustice, economic struggles,—
all these socially destructive abuses will go on from generation to
generation. Mankind remains the same though its acts may take different
shapes. Thinkers will always find new ideas, scholars new methods and
systems, artists new æsthetic creations, but on the whole everything must
remain the same. Only when woman heeds the message which life
proclaims to her, that, through her, salvation must come—will the face of
the earth be renewed. Oratorical talk of the high task of mothers and of the

great profession of education are empty phrases, until we see that the
possibility of humanity and civilisation winning some day the victory over
savagery depends on the physiological and psychological transformation of
man's nature. This transformation requires an entirely new conception of the
vocation of mother, a tremendous effort of will, continuous inspiration.
Those who believe they can fulfil their duties as mothers and at the same
time can accomplish other valuable work have never made the experiment
of education. The long continued habit of alternately caressing and striking
one's children is not education. It needs tremendous power to do one's duty
to a single child. This by no means signifies giving up to the child every
hour of one's time, but it does mean that our soul is to be filled by the child,
just as the man of science is possessed by his investigations and the artist by
his work. The child should be in one's thoughts when one is sitting at home
or walking along the road, when one is lying down or when one is standing
up. This devotion, much more than the hours immediately given to one's
children, is the absorbing thing; the occupation which makes an earnest
mother always go to any external activity with divided soul and dissipated
energy. Therefore the mother, if she gives her children the share they need,
can devote to social activities only her occasional attention. And for the
same reason she should be entirely free from working to earn her living
during the most critical years of the children's training.
Neither in the upper nor in the lower classes, have I ever heard of any
mother forced to do work of this kind or one engaged in artistic productions
through the stimulus of her talents, who was able to satisfy her children in
the period when they were growing up.
Adele Gerhard and Helen Simon under the title of Motherhood and
Intellectual Work published a very interesting investigation in which I found
my own observations substantiated. The book showed that a mother who
wished to train her children and at the same time engage in an occupation,
or take part in some public activity, could give to neither her whole
personality. The result is a mediocre education for the children and for
herself; mediocre work done with a divided soul. This is allowed to be true
by all of those really conscientious mothers who have maintained a high
aim in their work and in the bringing up of their children. They are
dilettantes in both directions; what they do is half done owing to the effort
to unite two separate fields of work.

From the point of view of women's rights, it is said, in reply to these
opinions of mine, that motherhood can be made infinitely easier by a
natural method of life, that work can be very well combined with it. It is
said that children soon grow out of needing the protection of their mother,
that the mothers can then devote themselves entirely to their work. They
contend besides that motherhood is no unconditional obligation; that people
are fully justified in making different individual arrangements; one woman
wishes to become a mother, another not. The one gets married with the hope
of becoming a mother; the other with the resolution of avoiding maternity.
The third does not marry at all. Attempts to generalise on this matter in
which individual freedom has every right to be recognised, they consider
reactionary. Full freedom for the woman, married or unmarried, to choose
her work and to continue it; full freedom to choose motherhood or to do
without it, this they say is the way to free woman, this is the line of
progress. Here woman is subject to that economic law which has made it
necessary for her to work for her own living. Just as woman's household
work has been superseded by factory work, so too, they say, will the
maternal obligations of woman be fulfilled collectively, and the difficulties
on which the so-called reactionary members of the women's rights
movement base their arguments, will in the future only arise in exceptional
cases. As regards these arguments, I have already shown that I recognise
fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her
own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and
of society collectively.
From this general, not from the individual standpoint, I am trying to
convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the
race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her
physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be
fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained
for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the
new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it, the
completed man—the Superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose
distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day.

CHAPTER III
EDUCATION
Goethe showed long ago in his Werther a clear understanding of the
significance of individualistic and psychological training, an appreciation
which will mark the century of the child. In this work he shows how the
future power of will lies hidden in the characteristics of the child, and how
along with every fault of the child an uncorrupted germ capable of
producing good is enclosed. "Always," he says, "I repeat the golden words
of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as one of these,' and now,
good friend, those who are our equals, whom we should look upon as our
models, we treat as subjects; they should have no will of their own; do we
have none? Where is our prerogative? Does it consist in the fact that we are
older and more experienced? Good God of Heaven! Thou seest old and
young children, nothing else. And in whom Thou hast more joy, Thy Son
announced ages ago. But people believe in Him and do not hear Him—that,
too, is an old trouble, and they model their children after themselves." The
same criticism might be applied to our present educators, who constantly
have on their tongues such words as evolution, individuality, and natural
tendencies, but do not heed the new commandments in which they say they
believe. They continue to educate as if they believed still in the natural
depravity of man, in original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed,
but not changed. The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts
given above, i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the
germ of virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in education the old
rule of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil, instead of the new
method, the system of allowing nature quietly and slowly to help itself,
taking care only that the surrounding conditions help the work of nature.
This is education.
Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by Carlyle
when he said that the marks of a noble and original temperament are wild,
strong emotions, that must be controlled by a discipline as hard as steel.

People either strive to root out passions altogether, or they abstain from
teaching the child to get them under control.
To suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with another
personality continues to be a pedagogical crime common to those who
announce loudly that education should only develop the real individual
nature of the child.
They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is justified.
Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that evil can be changed
into good.
Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for, or
blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the same time,
there is the other certainty, that through progressive evolution, by slow
adaptation to the conditions of environment they may be transformed. Only
when this stage is reached will education begin to be a science and art. We
will then give up all belief in the miraculous effects of sudden interference;
we shall act in the psychological sphere in accordance with the principle of
the indestructibility of matter. We shall never believe that a characteristic of
the soul can be destroyed. There are but two possibilities. Either it can be
brought into subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane.
Madame de Staël's words show much insight when she says that only the
people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in
training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this
means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child
immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as
entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed
by his life. It means to treat the child as really one's equal, that is, to show
him the same consideration, the same kind confidence one shows to an
adult. It means not to influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him
to become but to be influenced by the impression of what the child himself
is; not to treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with
the seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character.
Somewhere Rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature does
not fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of education.
What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of

nature, and recognised that the great secret of education lies hidden in the
maxim, "do not educate"?
Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day methods of
training children. Education is determined to create a beautiful world
externally and internally in which the child can grow. To let him move
about freely in this world until he comes into contact with the permanent
boundaries of another's right will be the end of the education of the future.
Only then will adults really obtain a deep insight into the souls of children,
now an almost inaccessible kingdom. For it is a natural instinct of self-
preservation which causes the child to bar the educator from his innermost
nature. There is the person who asks rude questions; for example, what is
the child thinking about? a question which almost invariably is answered
with a black or a white lie. The child must protect himself from an educator
who would master his thoughts and inclinations, or rudely handle them,
who without consideration betrays or makes ridiculous his most sacred
feelings, who exposes faults or praises characteristics before strangers, or
even uses an open-hearted, confidential confession as an occasion for
reproof at another time.
The statement that no human being learns to understand another, or at least
to be patient with another, is true above all of the intimate relation of child
and parent in which, understanding, the deepest characteristic of love, is
almost always absent.
Parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace is never
greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace under all external
unrest. The child has to enter into relations with his own infinite world, to
conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams. But what does he
experience? Obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole livelong day.
The child is always required to leave something alone, or to do something
different, to find something different, or want something different from
what he does, or finds, or wants. He is always shunted off in another
direction from that towards which his own character is leading him. All of
this is caused by our tenderness, vigilance, and zeal, in directing, advising,
and helping the small specimen of humanity to become a complete example
in a model series.

I have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying" because he
wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished to drag him
into the city. Another child of six years was disciplined because she had
been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,—a natural
appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical examples of
how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a spontaneous
utterance of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the
heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that,
after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might be allowed to go
to hell on Saturday evening to play with the bad little boys there.
The child felt in its innermost consciousness that he had a right to be
naughty, a fundamental right which is accorded to adults; and not only to be
naughty, but to be naughty in peace, to be left to the dangers and joys of
naughtiness.
To call forth from this "unvirtue" the complimentary virtue is to overcome
evil with good. Otherwise we overcome natural strength by weak means
and obtain artificial virtues which will not stand the tests which life
imposes.
It seems simple enough when we say that we must overcome evil with
good, but practically no process is more involved, or more tedious, than to
find actual means to accomplish this end. It is much easier to say what one
shall not do than what one must do to change self-will into strength of
character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please into amiability,
restlessness into personal initiative. It can only be brought about by
recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic or perverse, is as natural
and indispensable as the good, and that it becomes a permanent evil only
through its one-sided supremacy.
The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He forces
upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a
sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity.
Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we strain
at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow the camels of grown
people.

The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine
times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a
mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the
environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education
which is allowed to go on by itself. But educators who, day in and day out,
are consciously transforming the environment and themselves are still a rare
product. Most people live on the capital and interest of an education, which
perhaps once made them model children, but has deprived them of the
desire for educating themselves. Only by keeping oneself in constant
process of growth, under the constant influence of the best things in one's
own age, does one become a companion half-way good enough for one's
children.
To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting one's
feet on a narrow path; it means never placing ourselves in danger of
meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without words
that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. It means the humble realisation
of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are infinite, while the ways of
being useful to him are few. How seldom does the educator remember that
the child, even at four or five years of age, is making experiments with
adults, seeing through them, with marvellous shrewdness making his own
valuations and reacting sensitively to each impression. The slightest
mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least act of injustice or contemptuous
ridicule, leave wounds that last for life in the finely strung soul of the child.
While on the other side unexpected friendliness, kind advances, just
indignation, make quite as deep an impression on those senses which
people term as soft as wax but treat as if they were made of cowhide.
Relatively most excellent was the old education which consisted solely in
keeping oneself whole, pure, and honourable. For it did not at least
depreciate personality, although it did not form it. It would be well if but a
hundredth part of the pains now taken by parents were given to interference
with the life of the child and the rest of the ninety and nine employed in
leading, without interference, in acting as an unforeseen, an invisible
providence through which the child obtains experience, from which he may
draw his own conclusions. The present practice is to impress one's own
discoveries, opinions, and principles on the child by constantly directing his
actions. The last thing to be realised by the educator is that he really has

before him an entirely new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to
think over the things with which he comes in contact. By a new soul he
understands only a new generation of an old humanity to be treated with a
fresh dose of the old remedy. We teach the new souls not to steal, not to lie,
to save their clothes, to learn their lessons, to economise their money, to
obey commands, not to contradict older people, say their prayers, to fight
occasionally in order to be strong. But who teaches the new souls to choose
for themselves the path they must tread? Who thinks that the desire for this
path of their own can be so profound that a hard or even mild pressure
towards uniformity can make the whole of childhood a torment.
The child comes into life with the inheritance of the preceding members of
the race; and this inheritance is modified by adaptation to the environment.
But the child shows also individual variations from the type of the species,
and if his own character is not to disappear during the process of adaptation,
all self-determined development of energy must be aided in every way and
only indirectly influenced by the teacher, who should understand how to
combine and emphasise the results of this development.
Interference on the part of the educator, whether by force or persuasion,
weakens this development if it does not destroy it altogether.
The habits of the household, and the child's habits in it must be absolutely
fixed if they are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that habits are
principles which have become instincts, and have passed over into flesh and
blood. To change habits, he continues, means to attack life in its very
essence, for life is only a web of habits.
Why does everything remain essentially the same from generation to
generation? Why do highly civilised Christian people continue to plunder
one another and call it exchange, to murder one another en masse, and call
it nationalism, to oppress one another and call it statesmanship?
Because in every new generation the impulses supposed to have been
rooted out by discipline in the child, break forth again, when the struggle
for existence—of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the
state—begins. These passions are not transformed by the prevalent
education of the day, but only repressed. Practically this is the reason why
not a single savage passion has been overcome in humanity. Perhaps man-

eating may be mentioned as an exception. But what is told of European ship
companies or Siberian prisoners shows that even this impulse, under
conditions favourable to it, may be revived, although in the majority of
people a deep physical antipathy to man-eating is innate. Conscious incest,
despite similar deviations, must also be physically contrary to the majority,
and in a number of women, modesty—the unity between body and soul in
relation to love—is an incontestable provision of nature. So too a minority
would find it physically impossible to murder or steal. With this list I have
exhausted everything which mankind, since its conscious history began, has
really so intimately acquired that the achievement is passed on in its flesh
and blood. Only this kind of conquest can really stand up against temptation
in every form.
A deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one speaks
of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system of
education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individual development, children are
treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they were
made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents; and as these
aims are best advanced when children become like every one else, people
usually begin by attempting to make them respectable and useful members
of society.
But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in becoming
a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such, while
strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual human being.
The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child by
degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him his
responsibility towards his environment. But in other respects, none of the
individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life will be
suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or others. The
right balance must be kept between Spencer's definition of life as an
adaptation to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's definition of it as the
will to secure power.
In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great rôle, but individual exercise
of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains a fixed form;

through exercise of power, new factors.
Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about
personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in their
offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so they drill
their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts which will have
freedom when they are grown. People still hardly realise how new human
beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly repeat themselves in
the same circle,—the fine young men, the sweet girls, the respectable
officials, and so on. And new types with higher ideals,—travellers on
unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought thoughts, people capable of the
crime of inaugurating new ways,—such types rarely come into existence
among those who are well brought up.
Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. But she also
constantly makes small deviations. In this way different species, even of the
human race, have come into existence. But man himself does not yet see the
significance of this natural law in his own higher development. He wants
the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already stamped with approval to be
reproduced by each new generation. So we get no new individuals, but only
more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or bad-tempered examples of the
genus man. The still living instincts of the ape, double, in the case of man,
the effect of heredity. Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind
than the effort to produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most
valuable. The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what
everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child
tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard results in
subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part of the great mass,
led by the Superman through the strength of his will, a will which could not
have mastered strong personalities. It has been justly remarked that
individual peoples, like the English, have attained the greatest political and
social freedom, because the personal feeling of independence is far in
excess of freedom in a legal form. Accordingly legal freedom has been
constantly growing.
For the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of society, it is
essential that education shall awake the feeling of independence; it should

invigorate and favour the disposition to deviate from the type in those cases
where the rights of others are not affected, or where deviation is not simply
the result of the desire to draw attention to oneself. The child should be
given the chance to declare conscientiously his independence of a
customary usage, of an ordinary feeling, for this is the foundation of the
education of an individual, as well as the basis of a collective conscience,
which is the only kind of conscience men now have. What does having an
individual conscience mean? It means submitting voluntarily to an external
law, attested and found good by my own conscience. It means
unconditionally heeding the unwritten law, which I lay upon myself, and
following this inner law even when I must stand alone against the whole
world.
It is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular one, that it is
original natures, particularly talented beings, who are badly treated at home
and in school. No one considers the sources of conduct in a child who
shows fear or makes a noise, or who is absorbed in himself, or who has an
impetuous nature. Mothers and teachers show in this their pitiable
incapacity for the most elementary part in the art of education, that is, to be
able to see with their own eyes, not with pedagogical doctrines in their
head.
I naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their conventional
morality, no appreciation of the significance of the child's putting into
exercise his own powers. Just as little is this to be expected of those
Christian believers who think that human nature must be brought to
repentance and humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast, must be
tamed with the rod,—a theory which the Bible is brought to support.
I am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and consequently
should cease using old methods of education. This class may reply that the
new ideas in education cannot be carried out. But the obstacle is simply that
their new thoughts have not made them into new men; the old man in them
has neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own soul, and that of
the child, according to the new thoughts.
Those who have "tried Spencer and failed," because Spencer's method
demands intelligence and patience, contend that the child must be taught to

obey, that truth lies in the old rule, "As the twig is bent the tree is inclined."
Bent is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal which
extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience. But the new ideal
is that man, to stand straight and upright, must not be bent at all, only
supported, and so prevented from being deformed by weakness.
One often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude desire for
mastery still alive and breaking out when the child is obstinate. "You
won't!" say father and mother; "I will teach you whether you have a will. I
will soon drive self-will out of you." But nothing can be driven out of the
child; on the other hand, much can be scourged into it which should be kept
far away.
Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as a pre-
condition to a higher training. The child is then in such a high degree
controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure is often the
only language he fully understands. Consequently for some children
discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice of certain
habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely unnecessary
even at this early age, and as soon as the child can remember a blow, he is
too old to receive one.
The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience must
be absolute. If such obedience has become habitual from the tenderest age,
a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child straight. The
dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can only be made effective
when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny atmosphere of home. And if
people refrain from laying the foundations of obedience while the child is
small, and his naughtiness is entertaining, Spencer's method undoubtedly
will be found unsuitable after the child is older and his caprice disagreeable.
With a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently and
immediately. The effort of training should be directed at an early period to
arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions according to
Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits will become
impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.

Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it has
become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some other
discomfort,—discomforts against which crying is the child's only weapon.
Crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this does not master the
will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea that older people
strike small children, when small children cry. This is not an ethical idea.
But when the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to
him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them; if
this isolation is the absolute result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's
mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one
makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable. In both cases the child is silenced
by interfering with his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of
force on his will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will, and
accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a base
emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that combines it with one
of the most important experiences of life. The one punishment keeps the
child on the level of the animal. The other impresses upon him the great
principle of human social life, that when our pleasure causes displeasure to
others, other people hinder us from following our pleasures; or withdraw
themselves from the exercise of our self-will.
It is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to good
behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is repeated, the
child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn that whoever is
disagreeable to others must remain alone. Thus a right application is made
of a right principle. Small children, too, must learn not to touch what
belongs to other people. If every time anything is touched without
permission, children lose their freedom of action one way or another, they
soon learn that a condition of their free action is not to injure others.
It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty Japanese rooms are
ideal places in which to bring up children. Our modern crowded rooms are,
so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. During the year in which
the real education of the child is proceeding by touching, tasting, biting,
feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the cry, "Let it alone." For
the temperament of the child as well as for the development of his powers,
the best thing is a large, light nursery, adorned with handsome lithographs,
wood-cuts, and so on, provided with some simple furniture, where he may

enjoy the fullest freedom of movement. But if the child is there with his
parents and is disobedient, a momentary reprimand is the best means to
teach him to reverence the greater world in which the will of others
prevails, the world in which the child certainly can make a place for himself
but must also learn that every place occupied by him has its limits.
If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child should really
dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming influence. When a
mother strikes a child because he touches the light, the result is that he does
this again when the mother is away. But let him burn himself with the light,
then he is certain to leave it alone. In riper years when a boy misuses a
knife, a toy, or something similar, the loss of the object for the time being
must be the punishment. Most boys would prefer corporal punishment to
the loss of their favourite possession. But only the loss of it will be a real
education through experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an
experience which cannot be too strongly impressed.
We hear parents who have begun with Spencer and then have taken to
corporal punishment declare that when children are too small to repair the
clothing which they have torn there must be some other kind of punishment.
But at that age they should not be punished at all for such things. They
should have such simple and strong clothes that they can play freely in
them. Later on, when they can be really careful, the natural punishment
would be to have the child remain at home if he is careless, has spotted his
clothes, or torn them. He must be shown that he must help to put his clothes
in good condition again, or that he will be compelled to buy what he has
destroyed carelessly with money earned by himself. If the child is not
careful, he must stay at home, when ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat
alone if he is too late for meals. It may be said that there are simple means
by which all the important habits of social life may become a second nature.
But it is not possible in all cases to apply Spencer's method. The natural
consequences occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes
are too slow in their action. If it seems necessary to interfere directly, such
action must be consistent, quick, and immutable. How is it that the child
learns very soon that fire burns? Because fire does so always. But the
mother who at one time strikes, at another threatens, at another bribes the
child, first forbids and then immediately after permits some action; who
does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience, but constantly

gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and just as often in
another, has not learned the effective educational methods of the fire.
The old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to the character a
fixed type rested on its consistent qualities. It was consistently strict, not as
at present a lax hesitation between all kinds of pedagogical methods and
psychological opinions, in which the child is thrown about here and there
like a ball, in the hands of grown people; at one time pushed forward, then
laughed at, then pushed aside, only to be brought back again, kissed till it is
disgusted, first ordered about, and then coaxed. A grown man would
become insane if joking Titans treated him for a single day as a child is
treated for a year. A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as
courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn
courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to
endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment
him and are often the cause of sexual hyperæsthesia. The child's
demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are sincere,
but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special occasions. This
is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are disregarded. Nor
should the child be forced to express regret in begging pardon and the like.
This is excellent training for hypocrisy. A small child once had been rude to
his elder brother and was placed upon a chair to repent his fault. When the
mother after a time asked if he was sorry, he answered, "Yes," with
emphasis, but as the mother saw a mutinous sparkle in his eyes she felt
impelled to ask, "Sorry for what?" and the youngster broke out, "Sorry that
I did not call him a liar besides." The mother was wise enough on this
occasion, and ever after, to give up insisting on repentance.
Spontaneous penitence is full of significance; it is a deeply felt desire for
pardon. But an artificial emotion is always and everywhere worthless. Are
you not sorry? Does it make no difference to you that your mother is ill,
your brother dead, your father away from home? Such expressions are often
used as an appeal to the emotions of children. But children have a right to
have feelings, or not have them, and to have them as undisturbed as grown
people. The same holds good of their sympathies and antipathies. The
sensitive feelings of children are constantly injured by lack of consideration
on the part of grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly
being brought out. But the sufferings of children through the crudeness of

their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there
are few better methods of training than to ask children, when they have
behaved unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for
them to be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer
of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,—
Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only
remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult,
parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without
which a child's life is a constant torment.
As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks
of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts be provoked. Above
all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately
gives away. Gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital for
work or sacrifice. In order to secure for children the pleasure of giving and
the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments, as well as of
replacing property of their own or of others which they may have destroyed,
they should at an early age be accustomed to perform seriously certain
household duties for which they receive some small remuneration. But
small occasional services, whether volunteered or asked for by others,
should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve, without payment,
develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to give away
something, people should not make a pretence of receiving it. This produces
the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of being generous can be
had for nothing. At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real
experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. This
is what is least understood in present-day training. Thus we see reasonable
methods constantly failing. People find themselves forced to "afflictive"
methods which stand in no relation with the realities of life. I mean, above
all, what are still called means of education, instead of means of torture,—
blows.
Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
through association of ideas.

But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has been
superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture, imprisonment,
and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to the conviction that
they were indispensable as methods of discipline. But the child, people
answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up as an animal. Those who
talk in this way know nothing of children nor of animals. Even animals can
be trained without striking them, but they can only be trained by men who
have become men themselves.
Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the
best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road as
humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory, teach
our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practise fetish worship.
If the child is to reproduce all the lower development stages of the race, he
would be practically depressed beneath the level which he has reached
physiologically and psychologically through the common inheritance of the
race. If we have abandoned torture and painful punishments for adults,
while they are retained for children, it is because we have not yet seen that
their soul life so far as a greater and more subtle capacity for suffering is
concerned has made the same progress as that of adult mankind. The
numerous cases of child suicide in the last decade were often the result of
fear of corporal punishment; or have taken place after its administration.
Both soul and body are equally affected by this practice. Where this is not
the result, blows have even more dangerous consequences. They tend to
dull still further the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice
of the person punished. I once heard a child pointed out in a school as being
so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a flogging.
Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had made him
what he was. If statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those who had been
flogged would certainly be more numerous than those who had been
pampered.
Society has gradually given up employing retributive punishments because
people have seen that they neither awaken the feeling of guilt, nor act as a
deterrent, but on the contrary retribution applied by equal to equal brutalises
the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates the victim to exercise
the same violence towards others that has been endured by himself. But

other rules are applied to the psychological processes of the child. When a
child strikes his small sister the mother strikes him and believes that he will
see and understand the difference between the blows he gets and those he
gives; that he will see that the one is a just punishment and the other vicious
conduct. But the child is a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the
same, although the mother gives it a different name.
Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by Comenius, who
compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly
tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands to put
it into tune.
These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating and
confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable fine
processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely related
combinations.
In order to give real training, the first thing after the second or third year is
to abandon the very thought of a blow among the possibilities of education.
It is best if parents, as soon as the child is born, agree never to strike him,
for if they once begin with this convenient and easy method, they continue
to use corporal discipline even contrary to their first intention, because they
have failed while using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of education than
it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's peace.
But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human beings
in other respects, I should like to request them to think over the
development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and
when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept
in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times.
Through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have
been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to the
great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard to awaken
a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a
thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods
of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must go

through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a noble and
complete development.
Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low stage
of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the corporal
punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real preparation begin of
the material from which perhaps later an educator may be formed.
Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible; what
affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of passion is
cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of development blows
are the natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by which
the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower capacities. But it has
since been discovered that the soul may be impressed by spiritual means,
and that blows are just as demoralising for the one who gives them as for
the one who receives them.
The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has as few
moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for this—is only a
cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece of stupidity. It works
against the possibility of elevating the child beyond the level of the beast or
the savage. The educator to whose mind flogging never presents itself, even
as an occasional resource, will naturally direct his whole thought to finding
psychological methods of education. Administering corporal punishment
demoralises and stupefies the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness,
not his patience, his brutality, not his intelligence.
A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first
punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse reminded
him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, '"Yes, to-night I really
have something to tell God," and prayed with deep earnestness, "Dear God,
tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me any more."
Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than
for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. They would then learn to
educate with the head instead of with the hand. And as to public educators,
the teachers, their position could be no better raised than by legally
forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under penalty of final
loss of position.

That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue to
defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a very
elementary conception of their work. They should constantly keep before
them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in dealing with
children. The most frequent as well as the most dangerous of the numerous
mistakes made in handling children is that people do not remember how
they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do not regard and
comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past point of view. The
adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments and other things
which caused him in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced
the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency, burning
indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice, the terrible creations of
his imagination, his absurd shame, his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom,
and tenderness. Lacking these beneficent memories, adults constantly
repeat the crime of destroying the childhood of the new generation,—the
only time in life in which the guardian of education can really be a kindly
providence. So strongly do I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children
are unnatural as well as ignoble that I experience physical disgust in
touching the hand of a human being that I know has struck a child; and I
cannot close my eyes after I have heard a child in the street threatened with
corporal punishment.
Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. As early as
Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man
respects a word more than a blow. The exercise of physical force delivers
the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. A child never
believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge verbally,
that the blows were due to love, that they were administered because they
were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that such a "must" does
not exist, and that love can express itself in a better way.
Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal effort—
these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests. I do not
now refer to the system of flogging employed by miserable people year in
and year out at home, or, particularly in schools, that of beating children
outrageously, or to the limits of brutality. I do not mean even the less brutal
blows administered by undisciplined teachers and parents, who avenge
themselves in excesses of passion or fatigue or disgust,—blows which are

simply the active expression of a tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of
the want of self-discipline and self-culture. Still less do I refer to the
cruelties committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies
are stimulated by their disciplinary power and who use it to force their
victims to silence, as certain criminal trials have shown.
I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and teachers who,
with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard as their duty to the child.
These are accustomed to adduce the good effects of corporal discipline as a
proof that it cannot be dispensed with. The child by being whipped is, they
say, not only made good but freed from his evil character, and shows by his
whole being that this quick and summary method of punishment has done
more than talks, and patience, and the slowly working penalties of
experience. Examples are adduced to prove that only this kind of
punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the habit of lying and the like.
Those who adopt this system do not perceive that they have only succeeded,
through this momentarily effective means, in repressing the external
expression of an evil will. They have not succeeded in transforming the will
itself. It requires constant vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create an ever
higher capacity for the discovery of intelligent methods. The fault that is
repressed is certain to appear on every occasion when the child dares to
show it. The educator who finds in corporal punishment a short way to get
rid of trouble, leads the child a long way round, if we have the only real
development in view, namely that which gradually strengthens the child's
capacity for self-control.
I have never heard a child over three years old threatened with corporal
punishment without noticing that this wonderfully moral method had an
equally bad influence on parents and children. The same can be said of
milder kinds of folly, coaxing children by external rewards. I have seen
some children coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. But in
neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of will increased.
Only when one is able to make the bath itself attractive is that energy of
will developed that gains a victory over the feeling of fear or discomfort
and produces a real ethical impression, viz., that virtue is its own reward.
Wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit or fault by corporal
punishment, a real ethical result is not reached. The child has only learnt to
fear an unpleasant consequence, which lacks real connection with the thing

itself, a consequence it well knows could have been absent. Such fear is as
far removed as heaven from the conviction that the good is better than the
bad. The child soon becomes convinced that the disagreeable
accompaniment is no necessary result of the action, that by greater
cleverness the punishment might have been avoided. Thus the physical
punishment increases deception not morality. In the history of humanity the
effect of the teaching about hell and fear of hell illustrates the sort of
morality produced in children's souls by corporal punishment, that inferno
of childhood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is
the conviction of the superiority of the good established. The good comes to
be seen as more productive of happiness to the individual himself and his
environment. So the child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that
punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the
cause of punishment.
Despite all the new talk of individuality the greatest mistake in training
children is still that of treating the "child" as an abstract conception, as an
inorganic or personal material to be formed and transformed by the hands of
those who are educating him. He is beaten, and it is thought that the whole
effect of the blow stops at the moment when the child is prevented from
being bad. He has, it is thought, a powerful reminder against future bad
behaviour. People do not suspect that this violent interference in the
physical and psychical life of the child may have lifelong effects. As far
back as forty years ago, a writer showed that corporal punishment had the
most powerful somatic stimulative effects. The flagellation of the Middle
Ages is known to have had such results; and if I could publish what I have
heard from adults as to the effect of corporal punishment on them, or what I
have observed in children, this alone would be decisive in doing away with
such punishment in its crudest form. It very deeply influences the personal
modesty of the child. This should be preserved above everything as the
main factor in the development of the feeling of purity. The father who
punishes his daughter in this way deserves to see her some day a "fallen
woman." He injures her instinctive feeling of the sanctity of her body, an
instinct which even in the case of a small child can be passionately
profound. Only when every infringement of sanctity (forcible caressing is
as bad as a blow) evokes an energetic, instinctive repulsion, is the nature of

the child proud and pure. Children who strike back when they are punished
have the most promising characters of all.
Numerous are the cases in which bodily punishment can occasion
irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who administers it,
though he may triumphantly declare how the punishment in the specific
case has helped. Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has injured
them in one way or another, but when they take up the training of their own
children they depend on the effect of such chastisement.
What burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine fawning
flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. It makes the lazy lazier, the
obstinate more obstinate, the hard, harder. It strengthens those two
emotions, the root of almost all evil in the world, hatred and fear. And as
long as blows are made synonymous with education, both of these emotions
will keep their mastery over men.
One of the most frequent occasions for recourse to this punishment is
obstinacy, but what is called obstinacy is only fear or incapacity. The child
repeats a false answer, is threatened with blows, and again repeats it just
because he is afraid not to say the right thing. He is struck and then answers
rightly. This is a triumph of education; refractoriness is overcome. But what
has happened? Increased fear has led to a strong effort of thought, to a
momentary increase of self-control. The next day the child will very likely
repeat the fault. Where there is real obstinacy on the part of children, I
know of cases when corporal punishment has filled them with the lust to
kill, either themselves or the person who strikes them. On the other hand I
know of others, where a mother has brought an obstinate child to
repentance and self-mastery by holding him quietly and calmly on her
knees.
How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how
much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and
stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even where
blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute straightforwardness
and the downright personal courage to show oneself as one is. As long as
the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no perfect honour will be found in
children. So long as the home and the school use this method of education,

brutality will be developed in the child himself at the cost of humanity. The
child uses on animals, on his young brothers and sisters, on his comrades,
the methods applied to himself. He puts in practice the same argument, that
"badness" must be cured with blows. Only children accustomed to be
treated mildly, learn to see that influence can be gained without using force.
To see this is one of man's privileges, sacrificed by man through descending
to the methods of the brute. Only by the child seeing his teacher always and
everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he come himself to
despise force on all those occasions which do not involve the defence of a
weaker person against physical superiority. The foundation of the desire for
war is to be sought for less in the war games than in the teachers' rod.
To defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are brought in
evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they deserved such
discipline in order to be made good. There is no lower example of
hypocrisy in human nature than this. It is true the child may be sincere in
other cases in saying that he feels that through punishment he has atoned for
a fault which was weighing upon his conscience. But this is really the
foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still continues to be
preached as Christian, namely; that a fault may be atoned for by sufferings
which are not directly connected with the fault. The basis of the new
morality is just the opposite as I have already shown. It teaches that no fault
can be atoned for, that no one can escape the results of his actions in any
way.
Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks he must most
frequently punish with blows. But there is no case in which this method is
more dangerous.
When the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the well-
known story of George Washington and the hatchet must appear in it,
accompanied by the remark which a clever ten-year-old child added to the
anecdote: "It is no trouble telling the truth when one has such a kind father."
I formerly divided untruthfulness into unwilling, shameless, and
imaginative lies. A short time ago I ran across a much better division of
lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully conscious untruthfulness which must be
punished, and "hot" lies; the expression of an excited temperament or of a

vigorous fancy. I agree with the author of this distinction that the last should
not be punished but corrected, though not with a pedantic rule of thumb
measure, based on how much it exceeds or falls short of truth. It is to be
cured by ridicule, a dangerous method of education in general, but useful
when one observes that this type of untruthfulness threatens to develop into
real untrustworthiness. In dealing with these faults we are very strict
towards children, so strict that no lawyer, no politician, no journalist, no
poet, could exercise his profession if the same standard were applied to
them as to children.
The white lie is, as a French scientist has shown, partly caused by pure
morbidness, partly through some defect in the conception. It is due to an
empty space, a dead point in memory, or in consciousness, that produces a
defective idea or gives one no idea at all of what has happened. In the
affairs of everyday life the adults are often mistaken as to their intentions or
acts. They may have forgotten about their actions, and it requires a strong
effort of memory to call them back into their minds; or they suggest to
themselves that they have done, or not done, something. In all of these
cases, if they were forced to give a distinct answer, they would lie. In every
case of this kind, where a child is concerned, the lie is assumed to be a
conscious one, and when on being submitted to a strict cross-examination,
he hesitates, becomes confused, and blushes, it is looked upon as a proof
that he knows he has been telling an untruth, although as a rule there has
been no instance of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted confession
from the child that he has lied. Yet in all these complicated psychological
problems, corporal punishment is treated as a solution.
The child who never hears lying at home, who does not see exaggerated
weight placed on small, merely external things, who is not made cowardly
by fear, who hears conscious lies always spoken of with contempt, will get
out of the habit of untruthfulness simply by psychological means. First he
will find that untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a repetition of it,
scorn and lack of confidence. But these methods should not be applied to
untruthfulness caused by distress or by richness of imagination; or to such
cases as originate from the obscure mental ideas noted above, ideas whose
connection with one another the child cannot make clear to himself. The
cold untruth on the other hand, must be punished; first by going over it with
the child, then letting him experience its effect in lack of confidence, which

will only be restored when the child shows decided improvement in this
regard. It is of the greatest importance to show children full and unlimited
confidence, even though one quietly maintains an attitude of alert
watchfulness; for continuous and undeserved mistrust is just as
demoralising as blind and easy confidence.
No one who has been beaten for lying learns by it to love truth. The
accuracy of this principle is illustrated by adults who despise corporal
punishment in their childhood yet continue to tell untruths by word and
deed. Fear may keep the child from technical untruth, but fear also produces
untrustworthiness. Those who have been beaten in childhood for lying have
often suffered a serious injury immeasurably greater than the direct lie. The
truest men I ever knew lie voluntarily and involuntarily; while others who
might never be caught in a lie are thoroughly false.
This corruption of personality begins frequently at the tenderest age under
the influence of early training. Children are given untrue motives, half-true
information; are threatened, admonished. The child's will, thought, and
feeling are oppressed; against this treatment dishonesty is the readiest
method of defence. In this way educators who make truth their highest aim,
make children untruthful. I watched a child who was severely punished for
denying something he had unconsciously done, and noted how under the
influence of this senseless punishment he developed extreme dissimulation.
Truthfulness requires above everything unbroken determination; and many
nervous little liars need nourishing food and life in the open air, not blows.
A great artist, one of the few who live wholly according to the modern
principles of life, said to me on one occasion: "My son does not know what
a lie is, nor what a blow is. His step-brother, on the other hand, lied when he
came into our house; but lying did not work in the atmosphere of calm and
freedom. After a year the habit disappeared by itself, only because it always
met with deep astonishment."
This makes me, in passing, note one of the other many mistakes of
education, viz., the infinite trouble taken in trying to do away with a fault
which disappears by itself. People take infinite pains to teach small children
to speak distinctly who, if left to themselves, would learn it by themselves,
provided they were always spoken to distinctly. This same principle holds

good of numerous other things, in children's attitude and behaviour, that can
be left simply to a good example and to time. One's influence should be
used in impressing upon the child habits for which a foundation must be
laid at the very beginning of his life.
There is another still more unfortunate mistake, the mistake of correcting
and judging by an external effect produced by the act, by the scandal it
occasions in the environment. Children are struck for using oaths and
improper words the meaning of which they do not understand; or if they do
understand, the result of strictness is only that they go on keeping silence in
matters in which sincerity towards those who are bringing them up is of the
highest importance. The very thing the child is allowed to do uncorrected at
home, is not seldom corrected if it happens away from home. So the child
gets a false idea that it is not the thing that deserves punishment, but its
publicity. When a mother is ashamed of the bad behaviour of her son she is
apt to strike him—instead of striking her own breast! When an adventurous
feat fails he is beaten, but he is praised when successful. These practices
produce demoralisation. Once in a wood I saw two parents laughing while
the ice held on which their son was sliding; when it broke suddenly they
threatened to whip him. It required strong self-control in order not to say to
this pair that it was not the son who deserved punishment but themselves.
On occasions like these, parents avenge their own fright on their children. I
saw a child become a coward because an anxious mother struck him every
time he fell down, while the natural result inflicted on the child would have
been more than sufficient to increase his carefulness. When misfortune is
caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a rule, enough to prevent a
repetition of it. If it is not sufficient blows have no restraining effect; they
only embitter. The boy finds that adults have forgotten their own period of
childhood; he withdraws himself secretly from this abuse of power,
provided strict treatment does not succeed in totally depressing the level of
the child's will and obstructing his energies.
This is certainly a danger, but the most serious effect of corporal
punishment is that it has established an unethical morality as its result. Until
the human being has learnt to see that effort, striving, development of
power, are their own reward, life remains an unbeautiful affair. The
debasing effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great cruelties

produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or success sets the
value to deeds and actions.
A complete revolution in this crude theory of value must come about before
the earth can become the scene of a happy but considerate development of
power on the part of free and fine human beings. Every contest decided by
examinations and prizes is ultimately an immoral method of training. It
awakens only evil passions, envy and the impression of injustice on the one
side, arrogance on the other. After I had during the course of twenty years
fought these school examinations, I read with thorough agreement a short
time ago, Ruskin's views on the subject. He believed that all competition
was a false basis of stimulus, and every distribution of prizes a false means.
He thought that the real sign of talent in a boy, auspicious for his future
career, was his desire to work for work's sake. He declared that the real aim
of instruction should be to show him his own proper and special gifts, to
strengthen them in him, not to spur him on to an empty competition with
those who were plainly his superiors in capacity.
Moreover it ought not to be forgotten that success and failure involve of
themselves their own punishment and their own reward, the one bitter, the
other sweet enough to secure in a natural way increased strength, care,
prudence, and endurance. It is completely unnecessary for the educator to
use, besides these, some special punishments or special rewards, and so
pervert the conceptions of the child that failure seems to him to be a wrong,
success on the other hand as the right.
No matter where one turns one's gaze, it is notorious that the externally
encouraging or awe-inspiring means of education, are an obstacle to what
are the chief human characteristics, courage in oneself and goodness to
others.
A people whose education is carried on by gentle means only (I mean the
people of Japan), have shown that manliness is not in danger where children
are not hardened by corporal punishment. These gentle means are just as
effective in calling forth self-mastery and consideration. These virtues are
so imprinted on children, at the tenderest age, that one learns first in Japan
what attraction considerate kindliness bestows upon life. In a country where
blows are never seen, the first rule of social intercourse is not to cause

discomfort to others. It is told that when a foreigner in Japan took up a
stone to throw it at a dog, the dog did not run. No one had ever thrown a
stone at him. Tenderness towards animals is the complement in that country
of tenderness in human relationship, a tenderness whose result is observed,
among other effects, in a relatively small number of crimes against life and
security.
War, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing more than
different expressions of the tiger nature still alive in man. When the rod is
thrown away, and when, as some one has said, children are no longer boxed
on their ears but are given magnifying glasses and photographic cameras to
increase their capacity for life and for loving it, instead of learning to
destroy it, real education in humanity will begin.
For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment
can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant an
example as Japan, I should like to mention a fact closer to us. Our
Germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. It was
introduced with Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into a religious
duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were intelligent men who
flogged their children once a week as a part of spiritual guardianship. I once
asked our great poet, Victor Rydberg, and he said that he had found no
proof that corporal punishment was usual among the Germans in heathen
times. I asked him whether he did not believe that the fact of its absence
had encouraged the energetic individualism and manliness in the Northern
peoples. He thought so, and agreed with me. Finally, I might note from our
own time, that there are many families and schools, our girls' schools for
example, and also boys' schools in some countries, where corporal
punishment is never used. I know a family with twelve children whose
activity and capacity are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of
duty alone. Corporal punishment is never used in this home; a determined
but mild mother has taught the children to obey voluntarily, and has known
how to train their wills to self-control.
By "voluntary obedience," I do not mean that the child is bound to ask
endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them before he obeys. A good
teacher never gives a command without there being some good reason, but
whether the child is convinced or not, he must always obey, and if he asks

"why" the answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as children, must
obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided. The great
necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood. This can be done without
harsh means by training the child, even previous to his birth, by cultivating
one's self-control, and after his birth by never giving in to a child's caprices.
The rule is, in a few cases, to work in opposition to the action of the child,
but in other cases work constructively; I mean provide the child with
material to construct his own personality and then let him do this work of
construction. This is, in brief, the art of education. The worst of all
educational methods are threats. The only effective admonitions are short
and infrequent ones. The greatest skill in the educator is to be silent for the
moment and then so reprove the fault, indirectly, that the child is brought to
correct himself or make himself the object of blame. This can be done by
the instructor telling something that causes the child to compare his own
conduct with the hateful or admirable types of behaviour about which he
hears information. Or the educator may give an opinion which the child
must take to himself although it is not applied directly to him.
On many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part of the elder
person is an excellent punishment, if the indignation is reserved for the right
moment. I know children to whom nothing was more frightful than their
father's scorn; this was dreaded. Children who are deluged with directions
and religious devotions, who receive an ounce of morality in every cup of
joy, are most certain to be those who will revolt against all this. Nearly
every thinking person feels that the deepest educational influences in his
life have been indirect; some good advice not given to him directly; a noble
deed told without any direct reference. But when people come themselves
to train others they forget all their own personal experience.
The strongest constructive factor in the education of a human being is the
settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its duty. Openheartedness,
industry, straightforwardness at home develop goodness, desire to work,
and simplicity in the child. Examples of artistic work and books in the
home, its customary life on ordinary days and holidays, its occupations and
its pleasures, should give to the emotions and imagination of the child,
periods of movement and repose, a sure contour and a rich colour. The pure,
warm, clear atmosphere in which father, mother, and children live together

in freedom and confidence; where none are kept isolated from the interests
of the others; but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest;
where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are willing to help
one another when necessary,—in this atmosphere egoism, as well as
altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just
freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of
possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of
the generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its
distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep
secrets of existence, behind the visible, tangible, world of sense, the more
will each new generation of children show a more refined and a more
consistent mental life. It is impossible to attain this result under the torture
of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We need new
homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new
souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we
now can not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will
have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The
conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so
radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in
future generations. This transformation can be helped by the training of the
present, by casting aside the withered foliage which now covers the
budding possibilities of life.
The house must once more become a home for the souls of children, not for
their bodies alone. For such homes to be formed, that in their turn will
mould children, the children must be given back to the home. Instead of the
study preparation at home for the school taking up, as it now does, the best
part of a child's life, the school must get the smaller part, the home the
larger part. The home will have the responsibility of so using the free time
as well on ordinary days as on holidays, that the children will really become
a part of the home both in their work and in their pleasures. The children
will be taken from the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the
home. The mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life
to the children. Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer
will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.
Such was the training of Old Scandanavia; the direct share of the child in
the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life of our

Scandanavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at twelve
years of age), unity, character, and strength. Things specially made for
children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings, support given to
all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially prepared for children,
—these are the fundamental defects of our present day education. An
eighteen-year-old girl said to me a short time ago, that she and other girls of
the same age were so tired of the system of vigilance, protection,
amusement, and pampering at school and at home, that they were
determined to bring up their own children in hunger, corporal discipline,
and drudgery.
One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial
environment; the environment in which children and young people of the
present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for the
realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and responsibility,
instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the school, the object of
another's care.
What is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is to be
assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do conscientiously,
habits of work arranged for week days and holidays without oversight, in
every case where the child can help himself. Instead of the modern school
child having a mother and servants about him to get him ready for school
and to help him to remember things, he should have time every day before
school to arrange his room and brush his clothes, and there should be no
effort to make him remember what is connected with the school. The home
and the school should combine together systematically to let the child suffer
for the results of his own negligence.
Just the reverse of this system rules to-day. Mothers learn their children's
lessons, invent plays for them, read their story books to them, arrange their
rooms after them, pick up what they have let fall, put in order the things
they have left in confusion, and in this and in other ways, by protective
pampering and attention, their desire for work, their endurance, the gifts of
invention and imagination, qualities proper to the child, become weak and
passive. The home now is only a preparation for school. In it, young people
growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on
their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of giving

something in return. Then people are surprised at a youthful generation,
selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions
before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions,
which in earlier generations were a beautiful custom among the young.

To restore this custom, all the means usually adopted now to protect the
child from physical and psychical dangers and inconveniences, will have to
be removed. Throw the thermometer out of the window and begin with a
sensible course of toughening; teach the child to know and to bear natural
pain. Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is painful
but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable. Repress the
egoistic demands of the child when he interferes with the work or rest of
others; never let him either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of
grown people; take care that the servants do not work against what the
parents are trying to insist on in this and in other matters.
We must begin in doing for the child in certain ways a thousand times more
and in others a hundred thousand times less. A beginning must be made in
the tenderest age to establish the child's feeling for nature. Let him live year
in and year out in the same country home; this is one of the most significant
and profound factors in training. It can be held to even where it is now
neglected. The same thing holds good of making a choice library,
commencing with the first years of life; so that the child will have, at
different periods of his life, suitable books for each age; not as is now often
the case, get quite spoilt by the constant change of summer excursions, by
worthless children's books, and costly toys. They should never have any but
the simplest books; the so-called classical ones. They should be amply
provided with means of preparing their own playthings. The worst feature
of our system are the playthings which imitate the luxury of grown people.
By such objects the covetous impulse of the child for acquisition is
increased, his own capacity for discovery and imagination limited, or rather,
it would be limited if children with the sound instinct of preservation, did
not happily smash the perfect playthings, which give them no creative
opportunity, and themselves make new playthings from fir cones, acorns,
thorns, and fragments of pottery, and all other sorts of rubbish which can be
transformed into objects of great price by the power of the imagination.
To play with children in the right way is also a great art. It should never be
done if children do not themselves know what they are going to do; it
should always be a special treat for them as well as their elders. But the
adults must always on such occasions, leave behind every kind of
educational idea and go completely into the child's world of thought and

imagination. No attempt should be made to teach them at these times
anything else but the old satisfactory games. The experiences derived from
these games about the nature of the children, who are stimulated in one
direction or another by the game, must be kept for later use.
Games in this way increase confidence between children and adults. They
learn to know their elders better. But to allow children to turn all the rooms
into places to play in, and to demand constantly that their elders shall
interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species of
pampering common to the present day. The children become accustomed to
selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant educational effort
brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. If children were free in
their own world, the nursery, but out of it had to submit to the strict limits
imposed by the habits, wills, work, and repose of parents, their
requirements and their wishes, they would develop into a stronger and more
considerate race than the youth of the present day. It is not so much talking
about being considerate, but the necessity of considering others, of really
helping oneself and others, that has an educational value. In earlier days,
children were quiet as mice in the presence of elder persons. Instead of, as
they do now, breaking into a guest's conversation, they learned to listen. If
the conversation of adults is varied, this can be called one of the best
educational methods for children. The ordinary life of children, under the
old system, was lived in the nursery where they received their most
important training from an old faithful servant and from one another. From
their parents they received corporal punishment, sometimes a caress. In
comparison with this system, the present way of parents and children living
together would be absolute progress, if parents could but abstain from
explaining, advising, improving, influencing every thought and every
expression. But all spiritual, mental, and bodily protective rules make the
child now indirectly selfish, because everything centres about him and
therefore he is kept in a constant state of irritation. The six-year-old can
disturb the conversation of the adult, but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed
about eight o'clock, even when he, with wide open eyes, longs for a
conversation that might be to him an inspiring stimulus for life.
Certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order, nourishment and
sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily movement, are concerned, can be
made the foundations for the child's conceptions of morality. He cannot be

made to learn soon enough that bodily health and beauty must be regarded
as high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious to health and
beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. In this sphere, children must be
kept entirely independent of custom by allowing the exception to every rule
to have its valid place. The present anxious solicitude that children should
eat when the clock strikes, that they get certain food at fixed meals, that
they be clothed according to the degree of temperature, that they go to bed
when the clock strikes, that they be protected from every drop of unboiled
water and every extra piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable
slaves of habit. A reasonable toughening process against the inequalities,
discomforts, and chances of life, constitutes one of the most important bases
of joy of living and of strength of temper. In this case too, the behaviour of
the person who gives the training, is the best means of teaching children to
smile at small contretemps, things which would throw a cloud over the sun,
if one got into the habit of treating them as if they were of great importance.
If the child sees the parent doing readily an unpleasant duty, which he
honestly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a parent endure trouble or an
unexpected difficulty easily, he will be in honour bound to do the like. Just
as children without many words learn to practice good deeds when they see
good deeds practised about them; learn to enjoy the beauty of nature and art
when they see that adults enjoy them, so by living more beautifully, more
nobly, more moderately, we speak best to children. They are just as
receptive to impressions of this kind as they are careless of those made by
force.
Since this is my alpha and omega in the art of education, I repeat now what
I said at the beginning of this book and half way through it. Try to leave the
child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as possible; keep away all crude
and impure impressions; but give all your care and energy to see that
personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity and in its nakedness, shall all
be means of training the child.
Make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for self-
control, proportionate to the special stage of their development, neither
greater nor lesser demands than on adults. But respect the joys of the child,
his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an adult. Education
will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely harder art, than the
education of the present day, with its artificialised existence, its double

entry morality, one morality for the child, and one for the adult, often strict
for the child and lax for the adult and vice versa. By treating the child every
moment as one does an adult human being we free education from that
brutal arbitrariness, from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have
transformed him. Whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit
alone, or whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the
result is alike deplorable. As a rule both classes know equally little of the
feelings and needs of their children. The one class are happy when the
children are like themselves, and their highest ambition is to produce in
their children a successful copy of their own thoughts, opinions, and ideals.
Really it ought to pain them very much to see themselves so exactly copied.
What life expected from them and required from them was just the opposite
—a richer combination, a better creation, a new type, not a reproduction of
that which is already exhausted. The other class strive to model their
children not according to themselves but according to their ideal of
goodness. They show their love by their willingness to extinguish their own
personalities for their children's sake. This they do by letting the children
feel that everything which concerns them stands in the foreground. This
should be so, but only indirectly.
The concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the home, its
habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their sound
development, must stand in the foreground. But at present, in most cases,
children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are sacrificed to the
chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will without possessing real
freedom; they live under a discipline which is spasmodic in its application.
When one daughter after another leaves home in order to make herself
independent they are often driven to do it by want of freedom, or by the
lack of character in family life. In both directions the girl sees herself forced
to become something different, to hold different opinions, to think different
thoughts, to act contrary to the dictates of her own being. A mother happy in
the friendship of her own daughter, said not long ago that she desired to
erect an asylum for tormented daughters. Such an asylum would be as
necessary as a protection against pampering parents as against those who
are overbearing. Both alike, torture their children though in different ways,
by not understanding the child's right to have his own point of view, his
own ideal of happiness, his own proper tastes and occupation. They do not

see that children exist as little for their parent's sake as parents do for their
children's sake. Family life would have an intelligent character if each one
lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to do the same.
None should tyrannise over, nor should suffer tyranny from, the other.
Parents who give their home this character can justly demand that children
shall accommodate themselves to the habits of the household as long as
they live in it. Children on their part can ask that their own life of thought
and feeling shall be left in peace at home, or that they be treated with the
same consideration that would be given to a stranger. When the parents do
not meet these conditions they themselves are the greater sufferers. It is
very easy to keep one's son from expressing his raw views, very easy to tear
a daughter away from her book and to bring her to a tea-party by giving her
unnecessary occupations; very easy by a scornful word to repress some
powerful emotion. A thousand similar things occur every day in good
families through the whole world. But whenever we hear of young people
speaking of their intellectual homelessness and sadness, we begin to
understand why father and mother remain behind in homes from which the
daughters have hastened to depart; why children take their cares, joys, and
thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the old and the young generation are
as mutually dependent as the roots and flowers of plants, so often separate
with mutual repulsion.
This is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple
bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the first
class; the latter torment their children in a naïve way, while the former are
infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is a mother of the
upper class one of those artists of home life who through the blitheness, the
goodness, and joyousness of her character, makes the rhythm of everyday
life a dance, and holidays into festivals. Such artists are often simple
women who have passed no examinations, founded no clubs, and written no
books. The highly cultivated mothers and the socially useful mothers on the
other hand are not seldom those who call forth criticism from their sons. It
seems almost an invariable rule that mothers should make mistakes when
they wish to act for the welfare of their sons. "How infinitely valuable," say
their children, "would I have found a mother who could have kept quiet,
who would have been patient with me, who would have given me rest,
keeping the outer world at a distance from me, with kindly soothing hands.

Oh, would that I had had a mother on whose breast I could have laid my
head, to be quiet and dream."
A distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her well-thought-out
plans for her children fail—those children in whom she saw the material for
her passion for governing, the clay that she desired to mould.
The writer just cited says very justly that maternal unselfishness alone can
perform the task of protecting a young being with wisdom and kindliness,
by allowing him to grow according to his own laws. The unselfish mother,
she says, will joyfully give the best of her life energy, powers of soul and
spirit to a growing being and then open all doors to him, leaving him in the
broad world to follow his own paths, and ask for nothing, neither thanks,
nor praise, nor remembrance. But to most mothers may be applied the bitter
exclamation of a son in the book just mentioned, "even a mother must know
how she tortures another; if she has not this capacity by nature, why in the
world should I recognise her as my mother at all."
Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous
system in a state of irritation. They make work hard and play joyless,
whenever they take a part in it. At the present time, too, the school gets
control of the child, the home loses all the means by which formerly it
moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life. The school, not
father and mother, teaches children to play, the school gives them manual
training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at pictures, to read aloud,
to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures
accustom youth in the cities more and more to outside life, and a daily
recreation that kills the true feeling for holiday. Young people, often, have
no other impression of home than that it is a place where they meet society
which bores them.
Parents surrender their children to schools in those years in which they
should influence their minds. When the school gives them back they do not
know how to make a fresh start with the children, for they themselves have
ceased to be young.
But getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is very interesting to
observe a face that is getting old. What time makes out of a face shows
better than anything else what the man has made out of time. Most men in

the early period of middle age are neither intellectually fat nor lean, they are
hardened or dried up. Naturally young people look upon them with
unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that there is such a thing as eternal youth,
which a soul can win as a prize for its whole work of inner development.
But they look in vain for this second eternal youth in their elders, filled with
worldly nothingnesses and things of temporary importance.
With a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future plans and they
go out in the world in order to choose their spiritual parents.
This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man must sow a
hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of children.
When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight and
size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on its young
mother, I began to think about the education of my future children. Then as
now my educational ideal was that the children should be happy, that they
should not fear. Fear is the misfortune of childhood, and the sufferings of
the child come from the half-realised opposition between his unlimited
possibilities of happiness and the way in which these possibilities are
actually handled. It may be said that life, at every stage, is cruel in its
treatment of our possibilities of happiness. But the difference between the
sufferings of the adult from existence, and the sufferings of the child caused
by adults, is tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign himself to the
sufferings imposed upon him by adults and the more impatient the child is
against unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more certainly
will he some day be driven to find means to transform for himself and for
others the hard necessities of life.
A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition into child's
nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence for it, wrote as follows:
"Where we behold children we suspect there are princes, but as to the kings,
where are they?" Not only life's tragic elements diminish and dam up its
vital energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence for the
sources of life which meet them in a new being. Fathers and mothers must
bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. Until they
see that the word "child" is only another expression for the conception of
majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child

sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not
understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this
new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the
stars.
The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in the
wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like white
blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father should see in
his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with his own best
powers, and then the child will come to his own; not to the right of asking
others to become the plaything of his caprices but to the right of living his
full strong personal child's life along with a father and a mother who
themselves live a personal life, a life from whose sources and powers the
child can take the elements he needs for his own individual growth. Parents
should never expect their own highest ideals to become the ideals of their
child. The free-thinking sons of pious parents and the Christian children of
freethinkers have become almost proverbial.
But parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their own ideals
which is the same thing as making children idealists. This can often lead to
a quite different system of thought from that pursued by the parent.
As to ideals, the elders should here as elsewhere, offer with timidity their
advice and their experience. Yes they should try to let the young people
search for it as if they were seeking fruit hidden under the shadow of leaves.
If their counsel is rejected, they must show neither surprise nor lack of self-
control.
The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since
posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth in
the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its forefathers.
It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of
their daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate of the human race;
we must carefully treat the fine threads in the child's soul because these are
the threads that one day will form the woof of world events. We must
realise that every pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the
child's soul will extend its influence through centuries and centuries in ever
widening circles. Through our fathers, without our will and without choice,

we are given a destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own
being. Through our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain
measure, as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race.
By a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing the whole
process in the light of the religion of development, the twentieth century
will be the century of the child. This will come about in two ways. Adults
will first come to an understanding of the child's character and then the
simplicity of the child's character will be kept by adults. So the old social
order will be able to renew itself.
Psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. I will not go back to those
artists in education called Socrates and Jesus, but I commence with the
modern world. In the hours of its sunrise, in which we, who look back,
think we see a futile Renaissance, then as now the spring flowers came up
amid the decaying foliage. At this period there came a demand for the
remodelling of education through the great figure of modern times,
Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for realities. In his
Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of Gurson, are found all of the
elements for the education of the future. About the great German and Swiss
specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi,
Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak. I will only mention that
the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Kant and others,
took the side of natural training. In regard to England it is well known that
John Locke in his Thoughts on Education, was a worthy predecessor of
Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in its intellectual, moral, and
physical relations, was the most noteworthy book on education in the last
century.
It has been noted that Spencer in educational theory is indebted to
Rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said what the great German
authorities, whom he certainly did not know, said before him. But this does
not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Absolutely new thoughts are very
rare. Truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by being
pronounced again from the depth of the ardent personal conviction of a new
human being.

That rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other subjects, are
constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows among other things that
reasonable, or practically untried education has certain principles which are
as axiomatic as those of mathematics. Every reasonable thinking man must
as certainly discover anew these pedagogical principles, as he must discover
anew the relation between the angles of a triangle. Spencer's book it is true
has not laid again the foundation of education. It can rather be called the
crown of the edifice founded by Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the great
German specialists in pedagogy. What is an absolutely novel factor in our
times is the study of the psychology of the child, and the system of
education that has developed from it.
In England, through the scientist Darwin, this new study of the psychology
of the child was inaugurated. In Germany, Preyer contributed to its
extension. He has done so partly by a comprehensive study of children's
language, partly by collecting recollections of childhood on the part of the
adult. Finally he experimented directly on the child, investigating his
physical and psychical fatigue and endurance, acuteness of sensation,
power, speed, and exactness in carrying out physical and mental tasks. He
has studied his capacity of attention in emotions and in ideas at different
periods of life. He has studied the speech of children, association of ideas in
children, etc. During the study of the psychology of the child, scholars
began to substitute for this term the expression "genetic psychology." For it
was found that the bio-genetic principle was valid for the development both
of the psychic and the physical life. This principle means that the history of
the species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth substantiated
in other spheres; in philology for example. The psychology of the child is of
the same significance for general psychology as embryology is for anatomy.
On the other hand, the description of savage peoples, of peoples in a natural
condition, such as we find in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology or Weitz's
Anthropology is extremely instructive for a right conception of the
psychology of the child.
It is in this kind of psychological investigation that the greatest progress has
been made in this century. In the great publication, Zeitschrift für
psychologie, etc., there began in 1894 a special department for the
psychology of children and the psychology of education. In 1898, there

were as many as one hundred and six essays devoted to this subject, and
they are constantly increasing.
In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many distinguished
pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and others. In Germany
this subject has its most important organ in the journal mentioned above. It
numbers among its collaborators some of the most distinguished German
physiologists and psychologists. As related to the same subject must be
mentioned Wundt's Philosophischen Studien, and partly the
Vierteljahrschrift für Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie. In France, there was
founded in 1894, the Année Psychologique, edited by Binet and Beaunis,
and also the Bibliotheque de Pedagogie et de Psychologie, edited by Binet.
In England there are the journals, Mind and Brain.
Special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological
apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. In Germany
the first to be founded was that of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig.
France has a laboratory for experimental psychology at Paris, in the
Sorbonne, whose director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America
experimental psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894, there were
in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental psychology and
four journals. There should also be mentioned the societies for child
psychology. Recently one has been founded in Germany; others before this
time have been at work in England and America.
A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's laboratory in
Heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain can do
in the way of work and impressions.
An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the modern
school system, will be able to get along without originally creative men,
because the receptive activities of modern man will absorb the co-operative
powers of the brain to the disadvantage of the productive powers. And even
if this were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a
physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease filing down
man's brain by that sandpapering process called a school curriculum.
A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological
science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal

who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the field
of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called technical
exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like, are not, as they
are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental overstrain by change in
work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue. All work, he finds, done
under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic whether one regards the quantity
produced or its value as an exercise. Rest should be nothing more than rest,
—freedom to do only what one wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear,
he proves, following Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal
discipline, threats, and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods
are to be rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of
energy. He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by
strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the
character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary terrorising is
avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear calmly and quietly
the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.
Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school children have won international
recognition. In Sweden they have supplied the most significant material up
to the present time for determining the influence of studies on physical
development and the results of intellectual overstrain.
It is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get
acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be
freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those
absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical
maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking human beings in
schools and in homes, education.

CHAPTER IV
HOMELESSNESS
From time to time the present age is criticised, as if its corruption contrasted
with the moral strictness of earlier periods. Such charges are as crude and as
groundless as is most of the same kind of criticism that is common to every
generation of man's history. They have been repeated ever since man began
to strive consciously for other ends than the momentary gratification of his
undisciplined impulses.
One need only to consult the men of the present generation and the still
living representatives of the past generation, to be assured that bad conduct
at school is not characteristic of our time. Let any one read the account of
life at universities in earlier periods when the younger students were of the
same age as schoolboys in high schools and it will soon be plain that the
cause of the evil is not modern literature nor modern belief.
The really direct causes of this difficulty must be looked for in human
emotions. This side of the question I do not intend to discuss here. It can
only be solved by an expert in psychology and physiology; by one who,
along with this capacity, is a pedagogical genius. There might not be
sufficient material for such a task, even if an individual could be found able
to put together the original elements in the systems of Socrates, Rousseau,
Spencer, and give them life. Under no other condition could a real
contribution be made adequate to meet the requirements of the present day
in the field of education. My intention is only to make some remarks on the
secondary cause of the evil, for not sufficient attention has been devoted to
this side of the problem. The cause I have in view is the increasing
homelessness of all branches of society. Living with one's parents as
children do who go to school in the city is not the same as living at home.
Family life in the working classes is unsettled by the mother working out of
the house. In the upper classes the same result is produced by the constantly
increasing pressure of social pleasures and obligations.

Formerly it was only the husband and father whom outside interests took
from the home. Now the home is deserted by the wife and mother also, not
alone for social gatherings but for clubs for self-improvement, meetings,
lectures, committees; one evening after another, just at the time which she
should be devoting herself to her children who have been occupied in the
morning at school.
The ever-growing social life, the incessant extension of club and out-of-
door life, result in the mother sending her children as early as possible to
school, even when there is nothing but the conditions above mentioned to
prevent her from giving the children their first instruction herself. As a rule
the present generation of mothers who have had school training could do
this quite well, in the case of children who do not need the social stimulus
of the school. Indeed before the school time begins, and in the hours out of
school, children are as a rule taken by a maid servant to walk or to skate and
so on. Children of the upper classes in most cases receive just as much,
perhaps more, of their education from the nursery maid or from the school
than from the mother. The father need not be mentioned at all, for as a rule
he is an only occasional and unessential factor in the education of the child.
Many will say by way of objection, that at no time has so much been done
for the education of children as at present; that parents were never so
watchful over the physical and psychical needs of the children; that at no
time has the intercourse between children and parents been so free; at no
time have schools been so actively at work.
This is true but much of this tends to increase the homelessness of which I
am speaking. The more the schools develop the more they are burdened
with all the instruction for children, the more hours of the day they require
for their demands. The school is expected to give instruction even in such
simple matters as making children acquainted with their national literature,
and handwork, which mothers could do perfectly well, certainly as well as
our grandmothers. The greater the attention given at school to such
essentially good things as gymnastics, handwork, and games, the more
children are withdrawn from home. And even when at home, they are
hindered by lessons and written exercises from being with their father and
mother, on those exceptional occasions when the parents are at home. If we
take into consideration the way in which the modern school system uses up

the children's time, and present social and club life take up the time of
parents, we come to the conclusion I began with, that domestic life is more
and more on the decline.
The reforms that must be demanded from the schools in order to restore the
children to the home cannot be discussed now, since it is my intention to
deal here only with those matters which must be reformed by the family
itself, if reforms at school are to really benefit the young.
Reforms of this kind have been made in schools but mothers complain that
children have too little work at home or too few hours at school; that they,
the mothers, absolutely do not know how they can keep the children
occupied in so much free time.
What may justly be considered the great progress in the family life of the
present day, the confidential intercourse between parents and children, has
not taken an entirely right direction. The result has been that children have
been permitted to behave like grown people, sharing the habits and
pleasures of their parents, or that the parents have ceased to live their own
life. In neither of these two ways can a deep and sound relation between
children and parents be produced.
We see on the one side a minority of conscientious mothers and fathers,
who in a real sense live only for the children. They mould their whole life
for the life of the children; and the children get the idea that they are the
central point of existence. On the other side, we see children who take part
in all the life and over-refinements of the home. They demand like adults
the amusements and elegancies of life; they even give balls and suppers at
home or in hotels for their school companions. In these social functions, the
vanity and stupidity of adults are conscientiously imitated.
Then we require from these boys and girls, when they reach a time of life in
which the passions awake, a self-control, a capacity of self-denial, a
stoicism towards temptations to which they have never been trained, and
which they have never seen their parents exercise.
Most homes of the upper classes have not the means to keep up the life that
is lived in them. By the money of creditors, or by an exorbitant profit made
at the cost of working people, or by careless consumption of the very

necessary savings to be laid by for hard times, or against the death of the
family provider, a luxurious style of living is maintained. But even when in
rare cases there is real ability to live in this way, parents would not do it, if
the best interests of the children were taken into account.
Elders may speak of industry as much as they like; if the father's and
mother's work for children has no reality about it, the parents would do best
to be silent. The same must be said of warnings and arbitrary prohibitions to
children concerning the satisfaction of their desire for enjoyment, if the
parents themselves do not influence the children by their own example.
On the other hand there are just as disturbing consequences when
industrious parents conceal their self-denial from their children, when they
deprive themselves in the effort to spare their children the knowledge that
their parents are not in a position to clothe them as well as their companions
or to give them the same pleasures. Least of all is home life successful in
helping children through the difficulties of their earlier years, when
discipline has killed confidence between them and their parents, when they
become insincere from want of courage and careless from want of freedom;
when parents present themselves to the children as exceptional beings,
asking for blind reverence and absolute subjection. From such homes in old
days fine men and women could proceed, but now extremely seldom.
Young people recognise in our days no such requirements; confidential
intercourse with parents has robbed them of this nimbus of infallibility.
Homes which send out men and women with the strongest morality, with
the freshest stimulus to work, are those where children and parents are
companions in labour, where they stand on the same level, where, like a
good elder sister or an elder brother, parents regard the younger members of
the household as their equals; where parents by being children with the
children, being youthful with young people, help those who are growing up,
without the exercise of force, to develop into human beings, always treating
them as human beings. In a home like this nothing is especially arranged for
children; they are regarded not as belonging to one kind of being while
parents represent another, but parents gain the respect of their children by
being true and natural; they live and conduct themselves in such a way that
the children gain an insight into their work, their efforts, and as far as
possible into their joys and pains, their mistakes and failures. Such parents

without artificial condescension or previous consideration gain the
sympathy of children and unconsciously educate them in a free exchange of
thought and opinions. Here children do not receive everything as a gift;
according to the measure of their power they must share in the work of the
home; they learn to take account of their parents, of servants, and one
another. They have duties and rights that are just as firmly fixed as those of
their parents; and they are respected themselves just as they are taught to
respect others. They come into daily contact with realities, they can do
useful tasks, not simply pretend that they are doing them; they can arrange
their own amusements, their own small money accounts, their own
punishments even, by their parents never hindering them from suffering the
natural consequences of their own acts.
In such a home a command is never given unless accompanied at the same
time with a reason for it, just as soon as a reason can be understood. So the
feeling of responsibility is impressed upon the children from the tenderest
age. The children are as seldom as possible told not to do things, but such
commands when given are absolute because they always rest on good
reasons, not on a whim. Mother and father are watchful, but they do not act
as spies on their children. Partial freedom teaches children to make use of
complete freedom. A system of negative commands and oversight produces
insincerity and weakness. An old illiterate housekeeper who earned a living
by taking school children to board was one of the best educators I have ever
seen. Her method was loving young people and believing in them—a
confidence that they as a rule sought to deserve. Moreover a good home is
always cheerful, its affection real, not sentimental. No time is wasted in it in
preaching about petty details or prosing. Mother and sisters do not look
shocked when the small boy tells a funny story or uses strong language. A
joke is not regarded as evidence of moral corruption, nor keen views as an
indication of depravity. Liveliness, want of prudishness, which can be
combined, so far as the feminine part of the household is concerned, with
purity of mind and simple nobility, are characteristics for which there can
be no substitutes. In such a household concord prevails, the young and old
work, read, and talk together, together take common diversions; sometimes
the young people, sometimes their elders, take the lead. The house is open
for the friends of the children; they are free to enjoy themselves as

completely as possible but in all naturalness without allowing their
amusements to change the habits of the home.
It is told of the childhood of a great Finnish poet, Runeberg, that his mother
when she invited the young guests of her son to dance as long as they could,
added, "When you are thirsty, the water cooler is there, and by it hangs the
cup"; and more delightful dances, the old lady who told the story never
remembered to have seen. This old-fashioned distinction, the courage to
show oneself as one is, is absent from modern homes, and lack of courage
has resulted in lack of happiness.
The simple hospitable homely pleasures that have now been superseded by
children's parties, lesson drudgery, and by parents living outside of the
home must come back again if what is bad now is not to become worse.
Evil is not to be expelled by evil; it is to be overcome by good. If the home
is not to be again sunny, quiet, simple, and lively, mothers may go out as
much as they like to discuss education and morality in the evening. There
will be no real change. Mothers must seriously perceive that no social
activity has greater significance than education, and that in this nothing can
replace their own appropriate influence in a home. They must make up their
minds to real reform, such reforms as those introduced by a lady in
Stockholm; burdened though she was with social engagements and public
obligations, she refused to accept any invitation except on one day of the
week, in order to spend her evenings quietly with her children. How long
will the majority of mothers sacrifice children to the eternal ennui and
vacuity of our modern social and club life?
There is no intention here to recommend that social life and public activities
shall be deprived of the influence of experienced and thinking mothers. But
I only wish to point to the cases of overstrain now caused by the stress of
excessive sociability and outside activity. This kind of over-exertion, more
especially, injures the home through the mother. In our day as in all other
periods, be our opinions in other respects what they may, pagan, Christian,
Jewish, or free thinking, a good home is only created by those parents who
have a religious reverence for the holiness of the home.

CHAPTER V
SOUL MURDER IN THE SCHOOLS
Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a
penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the
reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter
finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where each
point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the
inadequate means at the reformer's command.
The modern school has succeeded in doing something which, according to
the law of physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once existent matter.
The desire for knowledge, the capacity for acting by oneself, the gift of
observation, all qualities children bring with them to school, have, as a rule,
at the close of the school period disappeared. They have not been
transformed into actual knowledge or interests. This is the result of children
spending almost the whole of their life from the sixth to the eighteenth year
at the school desk, hour by hour, month by month, term by term; taking
doses of knowledge, first in teaspoonfuls, then in dessert-spoonfuls, and
finally in tablespoonfuls, absorbing mixtures which the teacher often has
compounded from fourth- or fifth-hand recipes.
After the school, there often comes a further period of study in which the
only distinction in method is, that the mixture is administered by the
ladleful.
When young people have escaped from this régime, their mental appetite
and mental digestion are so destroyed that they for ever lack capacity for
taking real nourishment. Some, indeed, save themselves from all these
unrealities by getting in contact with realities; they throw their books in the
corner and devote themselves to some sphere of practical life. In both cases
the student years are practically squandered. Those who go further acquire
knowledge ordinarily at the cost of their personality, at the price of such
qualities as assimilation, reflection, observation, and imagination. If any
one succeeds in escaping these results, it happens generally with a loss of

thoroughness in knowledge. A lower grade of intelligence, a lower capacity
for work, or a lower degree of assimilation, than that bestowed upon the
scholar by nature, is ordinarily the result of ten or twelve school years.
There is much common-sense in the French humourist's remark. "You say
that you have never gone to school and yet you are such an idiot."
The cases in which school studies are not injurious, but partially useful, are
those where no regular school period has been passed through. In place of
this there was a long period of rest, or times of private instruction, or
absolutely no instruction at all, simply study by oneself. Nearly every
eminent woman in the last fifty years has had such self-instruction, or was
an irregularly instructed girl. Knowledge so acquired, therefore, has many
serious gaps, but it has much more freshness and breadth. One can study
with far greater scope and apply what one studies.
Yet it is still true to-day that, however vehemently families complain about
schools, they do not see that their demands in general education must
change, before a reasonable school system, a school system in all respects
different from the prevailing one, can come into existence. The private
schools, few in number, that differ to a certain extent from the ordinary
system are swallows that are very far from making a summer. Rather they
have met the fate of birds who have come too early on the scene.
As long as schools represent an idea, stand for an abstract conception, like
the family and the state, so long will they, just as the family and the state,
oppress the individuals who belong to them. The school no more than the
family and the state represents a higher idea or something greater than just
the number of individuals out of which it is formed. It, like the family and
the state, has no other duty, right, or purpose than to give to each separate
individual as much development and happiness as possible. To recognise
these principles is to introduce reason into the school question. The school
should be nothing but the mental dining-room in which parents and teachers
prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must
have the right to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the
parents have the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by
it, the food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must
be driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the

individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans
will be drawn up in vain.
But just as certain simple chemical elements are contained in all
nourishment, there are certain simple elements of knowledge that make up
the foundation of all higher forms of learning. Reading and writing one's
own language, the elements of numbers, geography, natural science, and
history, must be required by the schools, as the obligatory basis for
advanced independent study.
The elementary school beginning with the age of nine to ten years, I regard
as the real general school. The system of instruction must assume that the
children have breadth, repose, comprehensiveness, and capacity for
individual action. All these qualities are destroyed by the present "hare and
hound" system and by its endless abstractions. Such are the results of
course readings, multiplicity of subjects, and formalism, all defects that
have passed from the boys' schools into the girls' schools, from the
elementary schools into the people's schools. They too are burdened by all
these faults, which, though deplored by most people, can only be cured by
radical reform.
The instruction must be arranged in groups, certain subjects placed among
the earlier stages of study while others are put aside for a later period. And
in this connection it is not sufficient to consider the psychological
development of the child. Certain subjects must be assigned to certain times
of the year.
The courses in these schools must come to an end at about the age of fifteen
or sixteen. From them our young people can pass either into practical life,
or go on to schools of continuation and application. It would be desirable to
adopt the plan recommended by Grundtvig, that one or more vacation years
should follow, before studies are taken up again. Girls, especially, would
then come back to their studies with strengthened bodily powers and an
increased desire for knowledge. It is now a common experience that the
desire to learn, even in the case of talented young people, becomes
quiescent, if they go on continuously with their studies, as they often do,
from the sixth to the twentieth year and longer.

To mark out the courses of such a school would offer tremendous
difficulties. But these difficulties will not be found insuperable, after people
have agreed that the souls of children require more consideration than a
school programme.
Among objections coming from parents, may be heard the following: That
while the state refuses to take initiative in school reform, no one would dare
to embark on a road which makes the future of their children so uncertain.
In the meantime children must be allowed to learn what all others learn.
When the state has taken the first step, the parents would be willing they
say to follow with remarkable eagerness.
What, I ask, has been always the right way to carry out reforms? There must
be first an active revolt against existing evils. This particular revolt is yet
not sufficiently supported, especially on the part of parents. The children
themselves have begun to feel the need of protest, and, if not earlier, I hope
that when the present generation of school children become fathers,
mothers, and teachers, a reform will come about.
No one can expect a system to be changed, until those who disapprove of it
show that they are in earnest, show that they are taking upon themselves the
sacrifices necessary to protect themselves from the unhappy results of the
system. Families complain of the excessive aggregation of subjects, and yet
they constantly burden the school with new subjects, even when these
subjects are things the family can undertake itself. While families complain
of overstrain, but make no use of the elective system in schools, where it
has been introduced, while parents are willing to risk nothing to realise their
principles, we cannot wonder that the state does not embark on reforms of
any kind.
There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school."
While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one
another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the
training for their future life is a bad one—a life in which the common work
and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's
ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school for a
special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in the high sense
of the word, and besides no school in which people learn for life.

I have therefore always warmly held that the school should be no boys', no
girls' school, no elementary and no people's school, but should be a real
general or public school as in America, where both sexes, the children of all
grades of society, will learn that mutual confidence, respect, understanding,
by which their efficient co-operation in the family and state may be made
possible. The common school, so arranged, is perhaps the most important
means to solve definitely the problem of morality, the woman question, the
marriage question, the labour question, in less one-sided and more human
ways. From this point of view the establishment of the common school is
much more than a pedagogical question; it is the vital question of our social
order.
Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of
a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be done is
to break the wall down. The school, as described above, is the first breach
in this wall.
A school like this would be like leaven. The many never reform the few; it
is the few who gradually introduce reforms for the many. Because the few
have strong enough dissatisfaction with present defects, courage great
enough to show their disgust, a belief in the new truths real enough, they
are ready to prepare the ground for the future.
Such a school must be guided by the same principle which has humanised
morality and law in other spheres. It must consider individual peculiarities.
Personal freedom will thus have as few hindrances as possible to obstruct it.
The rights of others must not be approached too close. The limits, where the
rights of others can be affected, must be maintained, even enlarged.
This humanising process will be introduced into the schools, when scholars
are no longer regarded as classes, but each individual for himself. The
schools will then commence to fulfil one of the many conditions necessary
to give young people real nourishment and so develop them and make them
happy.
Such a school life will make its first aim to discover in early years
uncommon talent, to direct such talent to special studies.

Secondly, for those who lack definite talent, a plan of study will be
arranged, in which their individuality too can be developed, and their
intellectual tension increased. This condition is, if possible, more important
than the first, for unusual talents are accompanied by greater power of self-
conservation. Ordinary or lesser talented people, i.e., the larger majority, are
rather confused by a plurality of studies and are much easier impaired, as
personalities, by the uniformity of the prevailing system.
The rights of unusually gifted people, and those of other classes too, can be
considered when, as mentioned above, the school curriculum is so arranged,
that certain subjects are studied during part of the school year, another class
of subjects during another part. Moreover, certain subjects are to be studied
at different times, not finished once for all.
The instruction must be so arranged that real independent study, under the
direction of the teacher, will be the ordinary method. The presentation of
the subject by the teacher will be the exception, a treat for holidays, not for
every day.
The instruction too must take the scholar to the real thing, as far as possible,
not direct him to report about the thing. Such a school must break up
absolutely the whole system of lecturing, arranged in concentric circles. In
certain cases, it must return to the methods of the old-fashioned school,
which concentrated its attention on humanistic study. But dead languages
should not be the subjects around which its studies should centre.
Early specialisation must be allowed, where there are distinct individual
tendencies for such work;
Concentration on certain subjects at certain points of time;
Independent work during the whole period of school;
Contact with reality in the whole school curriculum;—these must be the
four corner-stones of the new school.
But the time is far distant still, when government schools will begin to build
on this basis. What follows is meant, therefore, to apply, not to the great
revolutions of school systems indicated above, but deals with improvements
to take place at present.

Learning lessons should be assigned to school hours as in France. Children
should have an entirely free day in the week; study at home should be
confined to the reading of literary works, tales of travel, and the like, which
teachers can recommend in combination with the studies pursued at school.
Tasks done at home are inconvenient; they do not increase the
independence of the scholar; they are prepared as a rule with excessively
free and often unwise help from the parents. At school such work would be
done as a rule without help; besides, it is individual and quickly finished.
In the school, time can be taken for study selected at the scholar's free
choice. It can be arranged for in the following way. Take a class of about
twelve scholars; in larger classes no reasonable or personal method of
instruction is possible. There may be three scholars with distinct tastes, one
for history, one for languages, one for mathematics. There may be two
without any distinct talent for mathematics or languages. The other seven
may have ordinary capacities. The first three must, during the whole term,
apply themselves specially in certain hours, set aside for independent study,
each in his chosen subject. The first will read some historical work on the
periods taken up in the history class; the second will devote this time to
mathematics; the third will read the books in foreign languages, mentioned
in the language course. The other seven with ordinary gifts can devote this
time to ordinary reading and handwork. In this way all will get some
portion of history, mathematics, and languages, but those who are specially
interested will have the opportunity of going deeper into the subject. If one
of the three gifted scholars shows a great inclination for and a ready
comprehension of all three subjects, he should study by himself at home,
provided the more thorough study of one subject does not impair work on
the other. The two who have special difficulty in mathematics or languages
could either substitute one subject wholly for the other, or in those periods
remain away from school, or, finally, the hours used by gifted scholars for
individual study beyond the requirements of the common course could be
devoted by these to work, under the teacher's supervision, in the course
common to the whole class.
To carry out this plan, there is need of such concentration of subjects as I
have mentioned; there should be never more than one or at most two main
subjects—history, geography, natural science—studied at once. Moreover

no more than one language should be studied at the same time; practice in
those already learnt is to be acquired by literary readings, written résumés,
and conversation.
Another kind of concentration is necessary. Not every subject should be
split up into subdivisions but history should be made to include literary
history, church history, etc. In geography at the early stage, a part of natural
science should be included, and the history of art combined with both.
Another not less important method implied in concentration is in all general
courses to direct one's attention to the main questions, and to sacrifice the
mass of details. Detailed work should not have been incorporated, as
indispensable for general culture (from generation to generation), during the
constant growth of the contents of knowledge.
In regard to instruction, methods now popular should be forced out of the
field. The two obligatory features, the careful hearing of lessons by the
teacher, and the equally careful preparation of the next lesson, must be
changed for other methods according to the age of the scholar, the special
character of the subject, and of the scholar himself; or according to the
particular stage of the subject. At one time the teacher should give an
attractive, comprehensive account of a period, a character, a land, a natural
phenomenon. Another time it will be enough to give a simple, introductory
reference to the reading of one or more works on the subject, best of all an
original authority. Sometimes he should require an oral account of what he
has said, or what has been read; sometimes this should be done in writing.
When the lesson is filled with many facts the scholar should write them
down in the hour; another time he should summarise them from memory.
An assigned amount too can be gone through along with the teacher's
explanation; on another occasion, the assignment need not be gone over at
all, but the scholars could show their capacity to understand it and
comprehend it without assistance. Occasionally the task might be done in a
short time from one day to another, sometimes it might take a longer period.
But this work would, as has been said, take place ordinarily in the school.
Purely literary readings and books of a similar type must be assigned for
work at home, to be done during a considerable length of time. For we all
know that the reading which has made a deep impression on us was only
what was read freely; reading for which we ourselves could set the time,

place, and inclination. And since, in this case, the important thing is the
impression, not the knowledge, freedom is more important than in other
subjects. Individual initiative can be furthered by having the teacher, as is
done in France, explain in passing all words and subjects in a poem difficult
to understand. The teacher too should now and then, by reading poetry
aloud, stimulate the desire of the scholar to learn more of the same poet. A
poem has the greatest effect when it is presented unexpectedly. When a
history lesson is ended there should be read aloud a passage from an
historical poem. Scholars do not forget either the poem, or the episode
handled in it, even if they forget everything else. But test questions, used in
the period of literature-study, go in at one ear and out at the other.
A teacher who wishes to use this concentrated system in detail, that rests on
the intelligent co-operation of the scholar, will naturally find that the
method is to be derived from the personality of the teacher himself. I think
the teacher of history should not take up the prehistoric period, but should
give the scholar some good popular work on it and let him go to a museum;
he should then require a written essay, to be illustrated by the scholar with
drawings of characteristic types of archæological specimens. In the same
way, he could give a comparative view of the same period among other
people. Then, if there were a scholar especially anxious to learn, he could
put in his hands a work about the primitive condition of man. Every teacher,
man or woman, can easily think out, for the subjects they teach, analogous
methods. The teacher of geography who is talking about Siberia can give
some good general description of it to all the scholars for their private
study. Those particularly interested would be recommended to read a
narrative of travels in Siberia, Dostojewsky's Out of the Dead House, and so
on. If the teacher of history were taking up Napoleon, he could read in the
French hour a work like Vigny's Servitude et Grandeur Militaire. For the
Dutch War of Independence, Motley's history, Goethe's Egmont, and
Schiller's Don Carlos could be read. A whole book could be written on
plans like these, with indications how the different fields of knowledge
could supplement one another, how history, geography, literature, and art
could be intertwined just as on the other side geography and natural science.
Similarly it would show how different teachers could be of use to one
another in communicating to their scholars a fuller knowledge.

I should like to propose an hypothesis for discussion and examination that I
have formulated, after a wide experience in story-telling, both as a listener
and as a narrator. If I might put together in a statement, without intending to
prove it, the result of my experience in the subject named, I should say that
the mental food which is most attractive for the child, also gives the most
nourishment. This is the fact that the physiology of our day has proved in
the case of the organic existence of the child. Pedagogy is beginning,
consciously or unconsciously, to apply it to the mental sphere, yet without
daring to hold that nature is so simple, that need and inclination can be so
nearly related. Naturally, it cannot be maintained that what is most
attractive for children's stories should constitute their whole training, as
physiology maintains that what tastes most agreeable to the child, for
example sugar, should form his sole nourishment.
What every story-teller finds as specially attractive to children, is the epic
smoothness, the clear comprehensiveness of the tale, its consistent
objectivity. Every narrative which will win the attention of the child,
whether it be from Scandinavian, classical, or biblical history, must have
these characteristics of the tale. There are hardly any story-tellers who so
completely absorb children as old nurses. They never forget any picturesque
trait in the tale, they always give the same broad, full narrative. They tell
their stories without explanations and without applications, with the real
direct feeling of the child for grasping the subject. Everything which
disturbs the smooth flow of the narrative, above all, when the narrator puts
himself outside of it by indulging in a joke, strikes the child as a profound
incongruity. Children are always more or less artistic in their nature, in the
sense that they desire to receive an impression in its purity, not as a means
to something else. They wish through the story to go through a real
experience; at the same time they will say "No," if they are asked whether
they would prefer to hear a real history to a story. This apparent
contradiction can be explained in this way: the tale presents reality, as
reality is conceived of by the naïve fancy of early ages, and is in just the
form in which the imagination of the child can receive it.
In telling stories, we find, besides, that what attracts children is the narrative
of actions; in this roundabout way they get hold of emotions and
sentiments. The development of the child—this is a truth which has to be
worked out before it can really be taken in—answers in miniature to the

development of mankind as a whole. And it follows from this that children
combine idealism and realism, as epic national poetry does. Great, good,
heroic, supernatural traits affect them most; but only in a concrete shape
sensibly perceived, with the richness of the power which comes from life,
without any adaptation to our present conceptions.
We can test this by telling a real folk-lore tale, and Anderson's version of it.
With a few exceptions children are unanimous in calling the first type the
most beautiful.
Besides what is attractive for lively children, with sound appetites, is
quantity, but in no way multiplicity.
First of all they ask whether the story is long after they have begun to hope
that it is beautiful. They are glad to hear the same story innumerable times;
they have an unconscious need for thorough assimilation, just as soon as
what is given to them harmonises with their stage of development. This is
true of all subjects. I know children who detest the "choice stories" from the
Bible, with which their morning prayers are commenced, but who read the
New Testament as a story-book. In this respect, all small children are like
great ones, the artists. The imagination of children requires full, entire, deep
impressions, as material for their energies that are incessantly creating and
reconstructing. And if their sound feeling has not been disturbed by a
dualism foreign to them it brings them with remarkably sure instinct to
choose the sound, pure, and beautiful, and to reject the unsound, hateful,
and crude. Finally, we find in story-telling that children much prefer
continuity of impressions though they are said to express preference for
change. We never hear children say, "Now tell a funny story, the one before
was too gloomy." But if we commence telling gloomy stories they want one
after another of the same type. If we had begun telling amusing stories, they
never tire of laughing. The changeableness of children in playing, reading,
and working is not so general a characteristic of childish nature as is
believed. It is true only of children whose readings and games are not
adapted to their nature and inclinations. Changeableness is, in a certain way,
nature's self-defence against what is unconsciously injurious.
As to comic narratives, it is found in story-telling that the child has the most
keen sense for the humour of a situation. On the other hand they have

hardly a trace of feeling for the humour that rests on deep intellectual
contrasts, least of all for humour of the ironical type. If a narrative out of
their own world is really to make impression on them, it must be like a tale,
full of life, with action and surprises, broad and naïve in its style, without
any noticeable aim. All the children's books which children through their
life recollect and by which they are impressed, are those that at least in one
way or another fulfil these conditions. The rest give other impressions, but
even so they become no more harmless than arsenic wall-paper covered by
fresh undyed layers. As to the humour of children, it can be easily tested.
We can tell them the most comic psychological children's stories; ninety-
nine out of a hundred they will declare to be terribly stupid, while a simple
history presenting a funny situation doubles them up with laughter.
Children do not feel drawn to abstract things; this is an old truth, whose
correctness is established best by story-telling. All virtues and qualities, no
matter how well concealed they may be, are very quickly pronounced
stupid by children. For fables, children have seldom any taste, least of all
for essays. The introduction of a fox or a bear into the story or in a real
adventure makes the story-teller the dearest friend of children. But the most
lively and childish essay on the bear or the fox leaves them cold, unless it is
made real by some personal experience in the country or by a visit to a
zoölogical garden. This truth is so recognised and proved from so many
points of view, that I will simply say here that experience in story-telling
gives additional evidence of it. Children show, in listening to stories, a
finely developed sensitiveness to all attempts to descend to, or to adopt, the
standpoint of the child, to everything that is artificial in the narrative. In
intercourse with children, especially with those who represent progressive
methods, can be seen how the reaction against the old lesson and hidebound
methods has produced an artificial naïveté, a richness of illustrations, and a
liveliness that children soon feel as something specially prepared for them,
something not quite real. This way of partially giving to children their own
imaginative power puts them to sleep, even when it succeeds at first in
giving them a good entertainment in their lessons. For the illustrations and
comparisons, as well as the consequences which another has thought out for
them, obstruct the initiative of the child; besides they are all soon forgotten.
It is the same with playthings; those they make themselves give
inexhaustible pleasure, while those that are ready made only confer joy

once or twice. They are shown and then broken in pieces in order to extract
the clockwork, for this is the only possible way for the child to do
something with it himself. Instruction is beginning to resemble children's
playthings and children's books; it is too complete, too richly illustrated. It
hinders individual free voyages of discovery of the imagination. Even good
illustrations are often injurious; but we do not intend to speak at length on
this subject. As a matter of fact children often feel themselves deceived by
illustrations.
The reserve in a story is also a property that attracts the child. Its pictures
are indicated with a few definite but repeated details. The imagination is
allowed to fill the picture with colours. The uniformity, the rhythm, and the
symmetry, all qualities belonging to the folk-lore tale, are for the child
extremely absorbing. They enjoy such repetitions as "the first, second, and
third year" and so on, quite like the refrain in rhyme and poetry.
But all these observations lead to a final result. The present reading-book
system is neither the most attractive for children, nor does it best supply
them with what they want. Instead of epic smoothness and unity, reading-
books bring a confused mixture of all kinds, nursery rhymes, religious
teaching, poetry, natural history, and history. Occasionally there comes a
tale or a real poem, standing apart distinctly from its neighbours, in tone
and in comprehensiveness. Instead of clear impressions, children get
through the reading-book a disturbing jumble; instead of objectivity, they
get instructive children's stories; instead of poetry, edifying versification;
instead of action, reflection; instead of much of one thing, a little of
everything; instead of continuity of impressions, constant change; instead of
concrete impressions of life, essays; instead of naïve tales, things written
down to their level.
I ask what is the result of this reading-book system on the development of
the child from six to sixteen years old?
What, in general, is the result on the development of character when one
flits from impression to impression, nipping in flight at different things,
letting one picture after another slip away, making no halt anywhere?
As to the effect on adults, immediate answers can be given. These answers
are so unfavourable that they do not need to be repeated. But, should a

principle which applies to the adult be less suitable for the child? It really
applies much more to the child. Adults generally have some work, some
occupation, some one centre around which they can arrange manifold
events, change may often be advantageous for them; but the whole school
day of the child is change; the way the child absorbs knowledge is by the
teaspoonful. Is not this condition enough to urge us to work with all our
might against the system of diffusion wherever it is unnecessary?
In reading-books diffusion is not necessary; in foreign languages, as in his
own tongue, the interest of the child is much more stimulated by a book
than by a reader; his vocabulary is increased. But even if this were not the
case, what the child gains through reading-books, in quick readiness in the
mother tongue or in foreign languages, does not compensate for the loss
their use signifies in development in the way already mentioned.
The schools deal improperly with the mental powers of youth, through their
lack of specialising, of concentration, in their depreciation of initiative, in
their being out of touch with reality.
High schools and colleges are absolutely destructive to personality. Here,
where only oral examinations should take place from time to time, where all
studies should tend to be individual, the hunger of the scholar for reality is
hardly satisfied in any direction. Nothing is done to help his longing to see
for himself, to read, to judge, to get impressions at first-hand, not from
second-hand reports.
Certainly here, too, the direction of the teacher is necessary. He can
economise superfluous work by clarifying generalisations; he can criticise a
one-sided account in order to complete the picture fully himself. Often the
teacher must excite interest by a vigorous account from his own point of
view; by a fine psychological study, he can illustrate a complex historical
picture. He will help the scholar to find laws, governing the phenomena
which he has come to know by his own experiments, or he can suggest
comparisons which lead to such experiments. Here, also, oral and written
exercise must have great weight.
But the end of all instruction in college, as in the school, should not consist
in examinations and diplomas; these must be obliterated from the face of
the earth. The aim should be that the scholars themselves, at first hand,

should acquire their knowledge, should get their impressions, should form
their opinions, should work their way through to intellectual tastes, not as
they now do, taking no trouble themselves, but being supposed to acquire
these gifts through interesting lectures given by the teacher on five different
subjects, heard every morning while the students are dozing, and soon
forgotten. Facts slip away from every one's memory, quickest from the
memory of those who have learned according to the dose and teaspoonful
system. But education happily is not simply the knowledge of facts, it is, as
an admirable paradox has put it, what is left over after we have forgotten all
we have learnt.
The richer one is in such permanent acquisitions, the greater the profit of
study. The more subjective pictures we have; the more numerous our
vibrating emotions and associations of ideas are; the more we are filled with
suggestively active impressions;—so much the more development we have,
won by study for our personality. The fact that our students acquire so little,
even if they have passed through every school with excellent marks, is a
serious injustice they feel during their whole life. The beautifully
systematised, ticketed, checkerboard knowledge given by examinations
soon disappears. The person who has kept his desire for knowledge and his
capacity for work by his free choice and by his independent labor can easily
fill out the gaps left by this method of study in the knowledge he has
acquired.
Only the person who by knowledge has obtained a view of the great
connected system of existence, the connection between nature and man's
life, between the present and the past, between peoples and ideas, cannot
lose his education. Only the person who, through the mental nourishment he
has received, sees more clearly, feels more ardently, has absorbed
completely the wealth of life, has been really educated. This education can
be gained in the most irregular way, perhaps around the hearth or in the
field, on the seashore or in the wood; it can be acquired from old tattered
books or from nature itself. It can be terribly incomplete, very one-sided,
but how real, personal, and rich it appears to those who for the period of
fifteen years in school have ground out the wheat on strange fields, like
oxen with muzzled mouths! Our age cries for personality; but it will ask in
vain, until we let our children live and learn as personalities, until we allow
them to have their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own

knowledge, form their own judgments; or, to put the matter briefly, until we
cease to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping
later on in life to revive it again.

CHAPTER VI
THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE
I should like to set down here briefly my dreams of a future school, in
which the personality may receive a free and complete self-development. I
purposely say "dreams," because I do not want any one to believe that I am
pretending in the following outline to give a reformed programme for the
present time.
My first dream is that the kindergarten and the primary school will be
everywhere replaced by instruction at home.
Undoubtedly a great influence has proceeded from that whole movement
which has resulted, among other things, in the Pestalozzi-Froebel
kindergartens, and in institutions modelled after them. Better teachers have
been produced by it; but what I regard as a great misfortune, is the
increasing inclination to look upon the crèche, the kindergarten, and the
school as the ideal scheme of education. Every discussion dealing with the
possibilities of women working in public life exalts the advantage of freeing
the mother from the care of children, emancipating children from the
improper care of their mothers, and giving women possibilities of work
outside of the home. Mrs. Perkins Stetson proposes as a compromise, that
every mother, pedagogically qualified, shall take care of a group of children
along with her own. But what her own children will receive under such
conditions is sufficiently shown in the case of those poor children who grow
up in educational institutions presided over by their parents; and also by the
experience of the poor parents who are not able under these conditions to
look after their own children.
The crèche and the kindergarten were and continue to be a blessing
undoubtedly for those innumerable mothers who work outside of their
homes and are badly prepared for their duties. Some type of kindergarten
will perhaps be necessary under particular circumstances as a partial
substitute for the home, as, for example, when a child has no companions to
play with, or when the mother herself is disinclined or not able to educate

the child. This incapacity is ordinarily the result of an extremely nervous
temperament, caused by weak will or depression.
Mary Wollstonecraft's remarks, made more than a hundred years ago, still
call for our approval. "If children are not physically murdered by their
ignorant mothers, they are ruined psychically by the inability of the mother
to bring them up. Mothers, in those first six years that determine the whole
development of the child's character, turn them over to the hands of
servants, whose authority is often undermined by the way in which they are
treated. Then children are passed on to school to control the bad behaviour
which the vigilance of the mother could have prevented, and which she
controls with means that become the basis for all kinds of vices." But
because such cases are still frequent and because there will always be
mothers incapable of bringing their children up, it would be a premature
assumption to believe that the majority of women cannot be trained to
become parents, if the development of the woman has this end in view. One
of the tasks of the future is the creation of a generation of trained mothers,
who among other things will emancipate children from the kindergarten
system. Children are handled in crowds from two and three years up, they
are made to appear before the public in crowds, made to work on the one
plan, made to do the same petty, idiotic, and useless tasks. In this way, we
believe at the present time that we are forming men, while actually we are
only training units. Any one who remembers how, as a child, he played on
the beach or in the wood, in a big nursery or in an old-fashioned attic, or
has seen other children playing in these surroundings, will know how such
unrestrained play deepens the soul, increases the capacity for invention, and
stimulates the imagination a hundredfold more than children's games and
occupations devised by the arrangement, and promoted by the interference,
of elder persons. Adults are accustomed to amuse children in crowds, a
custom which comes from intellectual vulgarity, instead of leaving them
alone to amuse themselves. Besides this system encourages children to
produce what they do not need, and leads them to imagine that they are
working by so doing. Children should be taught to despise all the numerous
unnecessary things which put life on a false level and make it artificial.
They should be taught to try to simplify it, to aim for its supreme values;
this should be the end of education. The kindergarten system is, on the

contrary, one of the most effective means to produce the weak dilletante and
the self-satisfied average man.
If there is any further need for the kindergarten in the near or distant future,
let it be a place where children may have the same freedom as cats or dogs,
to play by themselves, and for themselves, to think out something of their
own, where they can be provided with means to carry out their own plans,
where they have companions to play with them. A sensible woman may be
near at hand to look on or to supervise, but only to interfere when the
children are likely to hurt themselves. Let her draw something for them
occasionally, tell them a story, or teach them an amusing game, but
otherwise let her be apparently quite passive and yet untiringly active in the
observation of the traits of character and of disposition which play of this
free type reveals. In like manner the mother should observe the play of
children, their treatment of their companions at play, their inclinations, and
collect as much material as she can but interfere as little directly as
possible. The mother finally by this constant, many-sided, strenuous, yet
passive kind of observation gets a knowledge of the child that is partially
exact. One being never learns to know another being entirely, not even
when that being has received its life from the other, not even when that life
is daily renewed by the other being, in order to reach the full happiness of
spiritual motherhood. It has been well said that as people regard the birth of
a child as the sign of physical maturity, the education of a child is regarded
as a sign of psychical maturity. But through lack in psychological insight,
most parents remain their whole life immature. They can have the best
principles, the most zealous fidelity to duty, combined with absolute
blindness to the nature of children, the real causes of their actions, and the
different combinations of different characteristics.
Take some examples of the worst blunders of this type; the small child is
often called vain who studies, full of interest, his own identity in the glass;
the child who, from fear or confusion at a hard or incomprehensible
question, does not answer or obey is called stubborn; the child that cannot
explain his actions in those small things which adults every day entirely
forget is looked upon as lying; and even before the child has a conception of
the right of property, when he pilfers, he is called thievish. The child who
says that he knows that he is naughty, and wants to be naughty, is called
obdurate and impertinent, while this statement is really a self-confession

and shows a character to which one may appeal with the best results. The
child, sunk in thought, who forgets the small things of daily life, people call
thoughtless. Even when a child is really selfish and is really lying or lazy,
these characteristics are treated as if they were something individual, while
actually they are caused often by some serious fault which must be dealt
with. These characteristics can proceed from a good quality which may be
destroyed, if the fault is not treated suitably.
But even parents who now observe their children with more psychological
insight than was used in earlier times are not able to study them, if their
children go to school and kindergarten at an early age. This want of insight
produces mistakes which often cause deep antagonisms between children
and their parents, the sort of thing which now embitters so many
households. Only fathers and mothers who reverence the individuality of
their children, and combine with this feeling a careful observation of them
through their whole life, are able to avoid this typical fault of our own time.
People expect to gather grapes from thistles, instead of being satisfied with
haws. Parents must see that they cannot create where there is no material to
be created. But they must be capable of developing the characteristics
which they discover in the nature of their children. This work they must
undertake with optimism and resignation, for it represents the teaching of
real psychological study. This will stop those efforts, painful alike for
children and parents, that are applied in directions which offer no reward to
effort.
But the study of the psychology of the child, begun at its birth, continued in
its play, its work, its rest, means a daily comparative study, and requires the
undivided attention of one person. It can only be done by a person who has
charge of but a few children; in a crowd it is impossible. It is all the more
impossible because children in a crowd resemble one another more or less;
and this makes observation more difficult.
The kindergarten is only a factory. Children learn in it to model, instead of
making mud pies according to their own taste. This process is typical of
what these small atoms of humanity go through themselves. From the first
floor of the factory the objects that have been turned out there are sent to
the next floor above, the school; and from this they then go out put up in
packages.

The aim of school training is to carry out, with all its might, production by
quantities that expresses the demands of our time in all spheres. The
invention of individual school methods may reduce the influence of
"canned education."
As long as there are large cities, poor children in them must be able to
obtain the possibilities of country children. Their playthings must be made
out of the world which surrounds them. The obligations of their own home
must supply them with work. This is altogether different from the play work
of the kindergarten that has no connection with the seriousness of reality. A
wise mother or teacher will adopt from the kindergarten system just so
much as will enable her to teach children to observe nature and their
surroundings; will take from it what enables her to make them combine
their activity with some useful end; their amusement with some kind of
knowledge.
The Froebel dictum, "Let us live for the children," must be changed into a
more significant phrase, "Let us allow the children to live." This, among
other things, means "let them be emancipated from the burden of learning
by heart," from the forms of system, from the pressure of the crowd, in
those years while the quiet, secret work of the soul is as vital for them as the
growing of the seed in the earth. The kindergarten system is opposed to this;
it is forcing up the seed to life on a plate, where it looks very pretty, but
only for the time being.
The school with its esprit de corps opens the way public lack of conscience.
Modern society manages thus to reproduce the crimes of every past period;
manages too, to reproduce them through men who are conscientious in their
own private life. For those without consciences, who lead criminal
movements, would never be able to put the masses of people in motion,
unless they were just masses and nothing more; unless they were made to
follow collective laws of honour, collective patriotic feelings, collective
conceptions of duty. The child learns to be obedient to his school, to be
loyal to his comrades, just as later on in life he learns these qualities as they
are presented in his university, his student society, and his profession. All of
this he learns sooner than to reverence his conscience, his feeling of right,
his individual impulse. He learns to wink at, pardon, and disguise the sins

committed by his own circle of companions, his own club, and his own
country.
This is the way the world produces its "Dreyfus Affairs," its Transvaal
Wars. If the aim is to create men and not masses, we should follow the
educational programme of the great statesman Stein—"to develop all those
impulses on which the value and strength of mankind depend." This is only
possible when the child is taught, at the earliest age, the freedom and danger
of his own choice, the right and responsibility of his own will, the
conditions and duties of being put to the test himself. All of these elements
of character are unconsciously opposed by the kindergarten; the home alone
can develop them. The highest result of education is to bring the individual
into contact with his own conscience. This does not mean that the
individual cannot experience by degrees the happiness and the necessity of
being a factor in the service of the whole, first in his home, then among his
companions and in his country, and finally in the world. The difference is
this: in the first case the man is a living cell, co-operating and building up
living forms; in the other he is a piece of cut stone used in artificial
construction.
Both for the development of individuality, as well as for the cultivation of
the emotions, the home is to be preferred to the kindergarten and to the
school. In the limited small circle of the home the emotional element can be
deepened and tenderness can be developed, by the acts called for in the
realities of domestic life. The kindergarten first, and then the school, free
children from their natural individual obligations and put in their place
demands that can only be fulfilled en masse. The child enters into a number
of superficial relations. This situation tends to make his emotions
superficial; here is the great danger of beginning school life at a tender age.
On the other hand a one-sided home life brings with it the danger of
concentrating the emotions to an excess. Education at home in the years
when the emotions become harmonious and receive their decisive training
is just as important for the child as is later on a pleasant sociable life with
others of the same age, after the twelfth year is passed. All intellectual
cultivation done according to the most excellent method, all social feelings,
are worthless unless they have as their basis an individual development of
the emotions. Somewhere in our body we must have a heart, to act as a real

balance against our head. Only the man who has learnt to love a few, deep
enough to die for them, is able to live profitably for the many.
I should like to see not only the kindergarten but the preparatory school
transferred to the home. There things can be considered that are never taken
into account in a general school. The child need not have the nourishment
he does not want, and which he does not need, at the time he now generally
receives it. In the home school, one child can put off reading to a later age,
another can be taught reading early. The desire for action in one child can
be satisfied; the book-hunger of the other encouraged. Bodily development,
the desire to make a real acquaintance with external nature can be
considered in home work, play, and out-of-door activities. Then we can
begin to teach when the child himself asks for teaching; that is, when he
wishes to hear or do something in which knowledge alone can assist him.
The child can twice as easily learn at ten years, under these conditions, what
he now learns at eight; at eight what he now learns at six, if he comes to his
study with developed powers of observation and an eager desire for action.
Schools can never attain a full insight into the peculiar character of
personality, into the ways in which knowledge must be placed before
different individuals, into the right time for taking a subject or giving it up.
The home school must be considered the ideal method where the child
studies with a small group of well-selected companions. Individuality can
be considered, plans of study and courses can be neglected. Through such
neglect only, is a real living instruction possible. The advantages the
modern school has over the home are hardly worth discussing. The order of
the school, its method, system, and discipline, so much praised by its
advocates as advantages, are, from my point of view, nothing but
disadvantages. Habits of fulfilling duties, or work, orderly and punctual
activity, that belong to a sound education, can be attained in the home
school through far less artificial means. Of course it is urged as another
advantage of the school that the school child becomes a member of a small
community where he learns social duties. But the home is the natural
community where the child, in full seriousness, learns the real social duties
of readiness to help, and readiness to act, while the present-day school
artificially replaces that domestic social education, of which the child is
now robbed by studies at school and preparation at home. The real value of
school life among companions can be had from the home school without its

ordinary dangers. These dangers are not only evil influences, but, more than
anything else, that collective process of reaching a standard of stupidity, due
to the pressure of public opinion that comes from association in masses.
The fear of common opinion, of being laughed at, is created in the receptive
years of childhood, so open to such influences. The slightest deviation in
dress, or taste, is criticised unsparingly. If an investigation were conducted
on the sufferings of children through the tyranny of their fellows, a tyranny
which sometimes takes harsher, sometimes milder forms, it would upset the
prejudice that the usefulness of the school in this respect cannot be
replaced.
Besides there is the levelling pressure of a uniform discipline, which stunts
personality from above, while life with school companions restricts it on all
sides. Every criticism on this formal pedantry is met with the answer, "In a
school it is absolutely impossible to permit children to do what can be done
in the household; only fancy if all children in the school were to sharpen
their lead pencils or erase words in their exercises." There is no need to
insist further on this point. Hundreds of petty rules must exist, we are told,
for the sake of discipline. And even if the rules could be reduced to a fourth
of their present cubic contents, even the best schools would still feel the
pressure of uniformity. The more this pressure is resisted by individuals, so
much the better.
Education in the first years must aim to strengthen individuality. The whole
of biographical literature supplies an almost uniform proof of the
importance of not commencing too early the levelling social education of
the school. Early attendance at school is one of the reasons why we so
frequently meet, as Dumas says, so many clever children, and so many
stupid adults.
Almost all great men and women, who have thought and created for
themselves, have received either no education in school at all, or have gone
to school at a rather later period, with longer or shorter interruptions, or
have been trained in different schools. In most cases it was an accident,
some living point of view, a book read in secret, a personal choice of
subject that gave these exceptional beings their training. In this respect
Goethe's education was ideal, considered apart from some pedantry due to
his father's influence. At his mother's work-table he learnt to know the

Bible; French he learnt from a theatrical company; English from a language
master, in company with his father; Italian, because he heard his sister being
taught the language; mathematics from a friend in the household, a study
which Goethe applied immediately, first in cardboard diagrams, later in
architectural drawings. His essays he prepared in the form of a
correspondence in different languages between different relatives, scattered
in various parts of the world. Geography he eagerly studied in books of
travel in order to be able to give his narrative local colour. He knocked
about with his father, learnt to observe different kinds of handwork, and
also to try himself small experiments of his own skill.
But some one may say, all men are not geniuses, and accordingly the
majority without distinct talent need the school. Is it possible that the
connection between originality and irregular attendance at school is merely
accidental? How often does the school sin in its watering down of
originality! As for unoriginal people, the argument urged here is an
application of the biblical axiom, that from him who has nothing even the
little will be taken away. I mean the individual who has no distinct
personality will be forced in the school to give up the little that he can call
his own. The old-fashioned school where a few subjects were learnt by
heart, where the teachers were often badly prepared, where the students
could go to sleep or pretend to learn, where the courses were simple and
attention concentrated on Latin, seems barbarous to us. But it had less
danger for the personality than the present-day school with its thorough
preparation, its interest in readings, its perfected methods, its capital
instructors who take every little stone out of the student's road, and prepare
as much delightful intellectual nourishment as possible, sometimes even in
a cooked-up form. This "good school" with its over-insistence on versatility
is responsible for the nervousness of our day. Its general intellectual apathy
has caused the negativeness of our times.
The quietest, most obedient child is thought the best pupil, that is, the most
impersonal individual is the model. So we see how the school confuses its
conception of values. The more the soul and body are passive, are willing to
be controlled and receptive, so much the better are the results from the
school standpoint. Mischievous children, obstinate characters, one-sided
and original natures, are always martyrs at school because of their desire for
action, their spirit of opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-

going, amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own
individual tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get
good certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the
first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced into
shape—or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a pebble on
the seashore. It is struck by one wave after another, day by day, term by
term; on they come—forty-five minutes for religious instruction, the same
period for history, then French, then sloyd, then natural history; the next day
new subjects in new, small doses. In the afternoon, there is preparation at
home, and writing exercises, previously arranged and marked out, then
corrected with care, and the prepared readings made the basis of
questioning by the most approved methods, the mother having at home first
gone over them with the child. These powerful billows stupefy the brain,
and take the edge off the souls of both teacher and scholar. Even the most
active teachers move along fettered by requirements and prejudices,
unconditional necessities and methodical principles. Only occasionally is a
soul saved from this fate by total skepticism. Some exalt this pettifogging
professionalism to a plan of salvation, others are untiringly busy in
changing details, in discussing minor improvements. Every real
thoroughgoing reform affecting the principle, not the methods alone, goes
to pieces, because it conflicts with the system supported by the state. It
fails, through the obedient acceptance of the system on the part of parents,
through the incapacity of teachers to look at the whole results of the system,
through their disinclination to all radical methods of improvement.
The school, like the home and society, in general should aim to fight more
vigorously and more successfully the influences belittling life, and should
further its development towards ever higher forms. This end is opposed by
the modern schools. It is a gross mistake to hold up their excellent material
and their number as proofs of popular culture. How the people are educated
in the schools, how the material is used, what subjects are pursued in them
are the momentous questions.
Goethe's saying that "fortune is the development of our capacities" is as
applicable to children as to adults. What these capacities are can be
determined soon in the case of the talented child; his future can be secured
by obtaining for him the possibility of such a development. But there are
common capacities, proper to every normal human being, and from their

development, fortune too can be the outcome. Among such capacities is
memory, which modern man has nearly destroyed. "We throw ashes," says
Max Muller, "every day on the glowing coals of memory while men of past
ages could retain in their minds the treasures of our present literature." To
these capacities belong, among others, power of thought, not in the sense of
philosophic thinking, but in the simpler use of the word, gifts of
observation, ability to draw conclusions and to exercise judgment. Of the
common universal human faculties the emotions suffer most at the hand of
the modern school.
One of the fundamentally wrong pedagogical assumptions, is that
mathematics and grammar develop the understanding. This is only true after
a higher stage is reached in these courses. But there is no one who seriously
maintains that, so far as nature or man is concerned, he has used directly or
indirectly, in a single observation, conclusion, or exercise of judgment, the
theses, hypotheses, statements, problems, the rules and exceptions, of
mathematics and grammar, with which his childish brain was burdened. I
have heard from mathematicians and philologians the same heresy that I am
proclaiming, that mathematics and grammar, when they are not pursued as
sciences, must be reduced to a minimum. Provided a person has
mathematical talent, the study of mathematics is naturally agreeable,
through the development of a capacity in a certain direction. If one has the
gift for languages, the same is true of linguistic study. But without such
special talent, these subjects have no educational value, because the powers
of observation, drawing conclusions, exercising judgment, are just as
undeveloped as they were before the mathematical problem was solved or
the grammatical rules learned.
Life—the life of nature and of man—this alone is the preparation for life.
What the world of nature and the world of man offers in the way of living
forms, objects of beauty, types of work, processes of development, can, by
natural history, geography, history, art, and literature, give real value to
memory; can teach the understanding to observe, to judge and distinguish;
can train the feeling to become intense, and through its intensity combine
the varying material in that unity which alone is education. In brief, real
things are what the home and school should offer children in broad, rich,
and warm streams. But the streams should not be taken off in canals and
dammed up by methods, systems, divisions of courses, and examinations.

I never read a pedagogical discussion without the fine words "self-activity,
individual development, freedom of choice," suggesting to me the music
which accompanies the sacrificial feasts of cannibals. The moment these
words are used, limitations and reservations are introduced by their
advocates. Their proposed application is ludicrously insignificant, in
contrast with the great principle in the name of which they urge these
changes. And so the pupil continues to be sacrificed to educational ideals,
pedagogical systems, and examination requirements, that they refuse to
abandon. The everlasting sin of the school against children is to be always
talking about the child.
The sloyd system (manual dexterity, handwork, artistic production) has
certain good results on children. Accordingly the sloyd must be introduced
into the school, and all must be made to share the advantages of this
training; but there are children for whom the sloyd is as inappropriate and
as useless a requirement as learning Latin. The child who wants to devote
himself to his books should be no more forced to take up the sloyd, than the
child who is happy with his planing table should be dragged to literature.
All talk about "harmonious training" must be given the place where it
belongs—in the pedagogical culinary science. Certainly harmonious
development is the finest result of man's training, but it is only to be
attained by his own choice. It implies a harmony between the real capacities
of the individual, not a harmony worked up from a pedagogical formula.
The results from the school kneading trough with its mince-meat processes
are something quite different.
Isolated reforms in the modern school have no significance; they will
continue to have none, until we prepare for the great revolution, which will
smash to pieces the whole present system and will leave not one stone of it
upon another. Undoubtedly a "Deluge" of pedagogy must come, in which
the ark need only contain Montaigne, Rousseau, Spencer, and the modern
literature of the psychology of the child. When the ark comes to dry land
man need not build schools but only plant vineyards where teachers will be
employed to bring the ripe grapes to the children, who now get only a taste
of the juice of culture in a thin watery mixture.

The school has only one great end, to make itself unnecessary, to allow life
and fortune, which is another way of saying self-activity, to take the place
of system and method.
From the kindergarten period on the child is now, as has been said, a
material moulded, sometimes by hostile, sometimes by friendly hands. The
mildest, the apparently freest methods produce uniformity by insisting on
the same work, the same impression, the same regulations, day by day, year
by year. Besides in the school, classes are never arranged according to the
child's temperament and tendency, but according to his age and knowledge.
So he is condemned in deadly tediousness to waste an infinite amount of
time while he is waiting for others.
The very earliest period of instruction should use the power the child has
for observation and work. These capacities should be made the means of his
education, the standard for using his own observation. If the power of
observation is vigorous, no general rules are to be drawn, but only
particular ones. One child must read, play, or do handwork in a different
degree to another. One can at an early age, the other only at a later period,
take advantage of the education to be obtained from going to museums or
from travel (the best of all travel is tramping). The indispensable elements
will be reduced to their lowest measure; for what any one man needs to be
able to do, in order to find himself at home in life, is not considerable. The
minimum is to read well, to spell properly, to write with both hands, to copy
simple objects, so that one learns picture writing just as alphabet writing.
This skill is quite different from artistic gifts. Besides there must be
instruction in looking at things geometrically, the four simple rules of
arithmetic and decimal fractions, as much geography as will help one to use
a map and a time-table, as much knowledge of nature as will give one a
fundamental conception of the simplest requirements of hygiene; and
finally, the English language, in order to put one in touch with the
increasing intercourse in the great world. Through these requirements the
child will be endowed with what he needs, in order to find himself at home
in the world of books and of life. Let there be added to these the ability to
darn a stocking, sew on a button, and thread a needle.
Only the indispensable should be the obligatory foundation of further
culture, which is only the trimming on a simple garment. The trimming

receives its entire value because the individual has prepared it himself; it
must not be made by a machine according to a model prepared in a factory.
What is mentioned here supplies the same basis for all, but children should
be able to throw themselves into the pastoral life of the Old Testament, into
the life of the Greek and Scandinavian gods and heroes, into the life of
popular legends and national history; but this should be done only through
the books which they get for their amusement. At the present time all of
these things are made pure subjects of study!
Assume, then, that this foundation is laid. The school of the future, which
will be a school for all, will advance general education, but the plan it
follows will be adapted to every individual. In the school of my dreams
there will be no report books, no rewards, no examinations; at graduation
time examinations will be arranged for but they will be oral. In them
detailed knowledge will not be considered; education as a whole will
determine the decision of the examiners, who will personally accompany
the children in the open air in order to become quietly acquainted with what
they know of mankind, of past and present history.
And the education which will make the training aim at this end will be
diametrically opposed to that given by the teacher of the present day. The
teacher will be required to make his own observations, he will guide the
scholar in the choice of books, and show him how to work. But he will not
give first his own observation, judgment, and knowledge in the form of
lectures, preparations, and experiments. Occasionally he will without giving
notice ask for an oral or written account of work, and so ascertain how
thoroughly the scholar has gone into the subject. At another time, when he
knows that the scholar is prepared for it, he will give a general treatment, a
comprehensive review of the subject, a stimulating and stirring impression,
as a reward for independent work. Finally, when the scholar wishes it, he
will examine him formally, but his real work will be to teach the scholar to
make his own observations, to solve his own problems, to find his own aids
to study in books, dictionaries, maps, etc., to fight his way through his own
difficulties to victory and so reach the only moral reward for his trouble
with broadened insight and increased strength.

The scholar who sits down and listens to, or looks at, the demonstration or
experiment of the teacher does not learn to observe, nor does he whose
exercise book is corrected with painful accuracy learn to write; nor does the
one who pedantically carries out the system of models in the sloyd system
learn to make articles fit for every-day use. The student must make his
investigations himself, he must find the mistakes himself when their
presence is indicated to him, he must himself think out the objects brought
before him. Above all, the separate errors must not be corrected except
when they are so constant and serious that they waste time. But the scholar
himself must try to find out the correct and complete method of work and of
expression. This is what training, what education is.
Text-books will be attractive and virile, the "Reader" will disappear, the
complete books in the original (the text may be revised if it is filled with
confusing details) will be placed in the hands of children. The school library
will be the largest, most beautiful, and important room; lending books in the
schools will be an essential part of the curriculum.
The future school of my dreams will be surrounded by large gardens,
where, as in already-existing schools in some places, the feeling for beauty
will be directly encouraged. The individual scholars will arrange the
flowers in the school and at home. They will take them home in order to
adorn the window garden, and every schoolroom in winter will have a
garden of this kind. This will be the natural method of making the simplest
of all esthetic enjoyments a universal need. But taste must not be developed
by instruction in the art of arranging flowers; this is to be attained only by
pointing out those that have been arranged in the most beautiful way. In this
as in all other things, self-help is essential.
Natural dexterity will be attained by book-binding, turning, and other kinds
of handwork, also by gardening and play. Such training has far greater
educational value than the systematic types. The purposelessness and the
uniformity of these are the terror of youth. Gymnastics should only be used
on days when the weather makes bodily exercise in the open air impossible;
they can certainly be made more living by being connected with physiology
and hygiene, just as mathematics can be made real by being combined with
handwork and drawing. But nothing can equal the value of movement in the
open air.

Besides its garden, the future school will have its hall. Outside it will have a
playground for dancing and really free play—I mean the kind of play where
children, after they have learnt the game, are left to themselves. Games
constantly accompanied by a teacher make play a parody.
The development of beauty will become the aim of physical instruction as it
once was with the Greeks, not simply physical strength.
Through different kinds of hand and garden work, the child will be spared
from a number of requirements in mathematics and physics, because he will
in many things make discoveries himself. In the methods of school
drudgery the child learns that a seed grows by warmth and moisture. In real
training, the child himself sows the seed and sees what happens to it; this
system is followed I believe in many schools, but only as proofs of a given
abstract statement. The mistake of the modern school is really just here; it
illustrates its course of instruction by, as it were, over-charging the child's
attention, instead of giving him time and opportunity to originate for
himself.
In the future school-building, there will be no class-rooms at all, but
different halls with ample material provided for different subjects, and, by
the side of them, rooms for work where each scholar will have a place
assigned to him for private study. Common examinations will only take
place when several scholars are ready and willing, anxious to be examined
on the same subject; and each student can ask for the examination
independent of the rest.
In every room, on the outside of the building, architecture and decoration
will form a beautiful whole; and the artistic objects, detached from the
building, for the adornment of the school will be partly originals, partly
casts and copies of famous originals.
The sense for art will not be awakened by direct artistic instruction, either
in the school or when visiting museums. Classes can perhaps get such
knowledge when taken around museums; but love for art can only be
gained when the scholar is surrounded by art; when he can absorb it in
peace and freedom. Let this quiet progress be anticipated by instruction—I
don't mean the admiring criticism of the teacher himself, which he in
passing expresses without explanation or questioning—and the inevitable

result is troubling the water of a living well. Interference here, as in all
other cases, destroys the individual pleasure of discovery. Constantly being
taken about really impairs the capacity for seeing for oneself. In art, in
literature, and in religion, all instruction is a mistake until the young mind
has chosen some part of it as an object to be known. Knowledge destroys,
feeling creates, life. But the roots of feeling are easily injured.
As to visits to museums under the direction of a teacher, they are only of
use when the scholar has previously made, on his own account, his own
discoveries. To these he should be stimulated by the teacher. When
occupied in the study of Greek history, he will be asked for a description of
Greek sculpture that is to be found in such and such a museum. When
lectures are given on the Dutch War of Independence, Dutch pictures will
be described. Only after the scholar has used his own eyes, and formed his
own judgments, will a synthesis of his experiences under external guidance
be of use. The same holds good of natural-history, historical, and
ethnographical museums. Taking children around in herds produces very
slight results unless they have been put in the way of noticing things by
themselves.
Among the books of the school, the best literature in the original and in
good accessible translations should be found. Works should be at hand
capable of giving aid to those who have artistic interests. There is no greater
fault in modern education than the care spent in selecting books for
different ages. This is essentially an individual matter, and can only be
decided by the choice of the child himself. A general crusade against all
children's books, and freedom for the young to read great literature, is
essential to the sound development of the modern child. What is too old for
him may be set aside according to the taste of the child himself. Suppose at
the age of ten years, the child is absorbed in Faust (I know such cases); the
child then gets at this age an impression for life that does not prevent him
receiving from the same poem another impression at twenty years, or again
another at thirty or forty years. The so-called dangers in standard literature
are, for the child, almost nil. Incidents that excite adults, his calm feelings
pass over entirely. And even if children reach the emotional period of youth,
only rarely does the plain downright expression of a great mind about
natural things stain the imagination, falsify reality, and spoil taste. It is the

modern romance, women's novels, just as much as French novels, that do
this.
Children cannot in these days, even if parents are unreasonable enough to
wish it, be kept in ignorance. Crude or stolen impurity gets a greater power
over a mind that has not absorbed respect for the absolute seriousness of
natural processes. This reverence is sure to come from education, and
through the impressions of standard literature and first-class art.
Veiling this subject is apt to lead astray and to vulgarise. To those who can
be harmed in this way the Bible is as suggestive as any of the crudities of
modern literature. In the temperament which quietly accepts natural things
as a matter of course, is laid the foundation of real purity, and only through
real purity can life, like art and literature, become great and sound.
In the works of great minds, one meets an infinite world in which the erotic
element is only one factor. This gives them great repose. Moreover
imagination must have nourishment outside of itself; otherwise it will live
upon its own product. Its nourishment should be what is most readable. The
child's mind should be first fed on legends and then on great literature. This
should be all the more insisted on because great literature often remains
unread, when modern literature in its varied types begins later on to be
absorbing.
To be able to use one's eyes in the worlds of nature, man, and art, to be able
to read good things—these are the two great ends to which home and school
education should direct their course. If the child has these capacities, he can
learn almost everything else himself. I may remark in passing, that a sound
development of the imagination has not only an æsthetic but an ethical
significance. It is really the foundation for active sympathy all round.
Numerous cruelties are committed now by people who have not sufficient
imagination to see how their acts affect others.
In my dreamed-of school, founded along these lines, there is perfect
freedom in selecting subjects. The school offers the subjects, but it forces
no one to take them. English, German, French, natural science,
mathematics, history, and geography are taught. The mother tongue is
practiced fluently in speaking, reading, and writing. But in this case
grammar is superfluous both for general education and for using a

language; it belongs to scientific study, not to general culture. Grammar
should be applied in the case of foreign languages, only so far as it is
absolutely necessary to appreciate the literature. This is the sole aim general
culture has in view. Those who wish to speak the languages fluently, and
write them correctly, must attain facility by continual study. Those who
have mastered the literature very easily learn the rest. Those who are
familiar with the literature of a foreign language, write it, even with the
mistakes they make, better than the person who has put together a perfectly
correct composition according to grammatical rules. After the child, in his
language study, has made enough progress to understand a fairly easy book,
he ought to work through one book after another, with the help of a
dictionary and explain in his own language extempore what he reads. In this
way is laid the foundation of a knowledge of literature, not the ready-made
opinions of the histories of literature. Both in their own and in foreign
literatures, the young must be lead to reality, not, as now, to its copy; to the
sea, not to the water pipe. While the teacher is directing the study of
language, he should try at the same time to help the scholar to a definite
choice of books, and his choice should if possible be brought into relation
with other subjects. So he will recommend literature connected with
historical, scientific, or geographical study. Afterwards he will give a
general analysis, and will read a passage aloud, or will encourage the
scholar to read some favorite poem. But all poetry mongering—such as
hacking a poem to pieces by divisions into strophies and sections—is to be
forbidden.
Since childhood is the best time for securing the familiar use of languages,
after parents and teachers agree which scholars shall take up languages,
children so selected will study English and French, each for two years
successively, then let them have two years of German, or reverse this
arrangement. In this way a language will always be studied with other
subjects, never three languages together. It is really only possible to take in
a language, as a possession to be kept through the future, and never lost, by
giving to it alone two years of really thorough study.
Scholars who want to continue their drawing or learn any kind of
handwork, can combine it with the study of the main subjects. Chorus
singing should be practised every day for the whole year, indoors and in the
open air. It should be treated as a means of expressing the feelings, not as an

introduction for developing musical capacities, though for that matter
singing can give a lead to the discovery of musical talent.
As to the four principal subjects, history, geography, natural science, and
mathematics, they should not be studied at the same time. The shallow
multiplicity of the present system is a burden to all; it works like the "water
torture" on talented individuals. It wears out their desire to learn, their
initiative, their individuality, their joy of living. Those under this torture
never get a breathing spell, are never able to do thorough work, and so
become superficial.
In my ideal school, mathematics will be learnt in winter, as it is suitable for
the cold and clear winter air. In spring and in autumn, nature, out of doors,
in nature itself, will be studied, not each department of nature as a special
subject. An insight into geology, botany, and the animal world will be
attained in their close natural union. The scholar will learn separate objects
through the actual observation of life. In the text-book of life they will gain
in its broad outlines a combined sketch of what they have acquired through
intellectual processes. On rainy days they will construct for themselves in
writing and in drawing a general sketch of what they have seen. General
culture does not mean knowing the number of stamens or the number of
articulations of a hundred flowers or skeletons. What educates and acts on
the feelings and imagination, on thought and character, too, for that matter,
is observing and combining natural phenomena; the ability to follow the
laws of life and development in the natural world about us. The last member
in the scheme of development is man. So the study of man from the
standpoint of physiology and hygiene, should come last; consideration for
the psychology of the child, urges too, that the foundation for the
knowledge of organic nature, physics, and chemistry, should complete the
educational structure.
As in natural sciences we are beginning to give up false methods, and make
the student return to the same subject, with a broader point of view, in the
same way the child should at certain periods devote his attention to history
and geography, and then leave them entirely alone. The endless circle, the
drudgery, the repetitions, all looking to examinations as the end, will with
the examinations be abolished. It is a matter of experience that the small
details of all subjects slip from the memory two months after examinations.

Most educated men have no recollection of the detailed knowledge they
acquired in school, while the general impressions of that period still
influence soul, heart, character, and will. This experience will be used, not
as is done now, simply recognised as a common one.
In my school the scholar interested in history will apply himself to it in the
winter months; will read works about it, while others are devoting
themselves to mathematics or geography. In spring these two classes of
students can share in the excursions without active participation in the
studies, while those who are inclined to natural science will draw, make
collections, and use the microscope. One group can by studying geography
bring themselves into contact with the life of nature and the life of man. So
they will be led next year to study history in winter and to take part in
science study during the spring and autumn. All these different
combinations are to be thought out by parents, teachers, and scholars; they
can only be indicated here. The final principle is that only two subjects can
be studied at the same time. After the scholar has acquired from these all the
education he can absorb at this stage, these subjects will be dismissed and
taken up again by those who wish to specialise in one direction or the other.
Instead of the separation of subjects that divides interest and strength in our
present schools, in the new ones the chief aim will be concentration. In
history, the space devoted to work will be limited to the amount demanded
by present-day culture. History will then be the only subject suitable for
general intellectual training,—the history of man's development. It will
bring out the great principles of ethnography and sociology, of political
economy, the lives of great men, the history of the church, art, and
literature. In scientific study and in teaching mathematics, the men
prominent in science and in discovery will find a place. Geography brings
up points of view related to almost every study, and experience already
acquired gives good reason for making this subject the centre of all
instruction.
What are the results of the present-day school? Exhausted brain power,
weak nerves, limited originality, paralysed initiative, dulled power of
observing surrounding facts, idealism blunted under the feverish zeal of
getting a position in the class—a wild chase in which parents and children
regard the loss of a year as a great misfortune. After the examinations have
been passed and the year gone by, the best students realise the need of

beginning their studies in a living way at almost every point. The majority
of students are unable to read even a paper with any real profit, and those
who are given a book in a foreign language to which they have devoted
innumerable hours, very seldom understand it completely, unless the
language instruction of the school has been supplemented at home. The
incapacity to observe for one's self, to get at the bottom of what is observed
and reflect upon it, is constantly more remarkable, as a result of the
preparation system at school, even when this is aided by the mothers
hearing lessons at home. The late Professor Key said that it was his
experience, as teacher in a medical institution, that scholars in school were
incapable of seeing, thinking, or working. I have heard the same
observation made in Stockholm lately in a government office, that the
young men were incapable of taking up practical duties in which they
should have shown the knowledge they were supposed to have after the fine
examination they had passed. The system then does not serve even
secondary ends; to all the higher aims of human existence it is directly
opposed.
In the course of a hundred years or so, experience of this sort will cause the
downfall of the system. Then, perhaps, these dreamed-of schools will arise.
In them, the youth will learn first of all to observe and to love life, and their
own powers will be consciously cultivated as the highest values in life. By
mixing children of all classes together, the upper class, provided it still
exists, will get that "colouring of earnest character which it now lacks," as
Almquist said long ago; the lower classes will get the polish, that general
cultivation they now lack. Through these schools, where common training
is given to all, the natural circulation between all classes will be furthered.
The aristocrat's son and the workingman's son will change places, if nature
has made the first adapted for the position of the second, and vice versa.
Through these schools the country child will always be able to grow up in
the country, and need not be sent for educational purposes into the city,
provided there are still great cities. Finally boys and girls will enjoy in them
all the advantages of co-education, without the particular capacities of each
being forced into the uniformity of a common examination system.
After the children all over the country have been educated to about fifteen
years of age, in such real common schools, some working more with the
brain, others with their hands, the application schools will begin—schools

for classical studies, for exact, for social or æsthetic sciences; for
handicrafts and handwork; for different professions and state positions;
schools with different principles and methods, schools which can produce
manifold differing forms of training and individuality. Education then,
instead of being as now, the creator of servile souls, the devotees of
formalism, or of characters who hate all forms in a spirit of revolt, will
bring fresh personal powers to intellectual and material culture alike, to the
sciences and the inventive faculties, to artistic talent and to the whole art of
life. It will awaken and encourage capacity to find out new scientific
methods, to think youthful thoughts, to make clever discoveries. Educated
human beings will apply to the whole sphere of culture their experience in
their own experiments, their own activity, their own efforts; for all of which
the school and the home will have already laid the foundation.
In the school, the painful restlessness of the present "to get somewhere" will
disappear entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere of my school, the
young generation will be trained to believe that the most important thing for
man is not to do something, but to be something. It may be harsh to say that
common natures are reckoned by what they do, noble natures by what they
are; yet it is a deep truth, forgotten in this century of activity, in this age of
woman. But it is bound to be remembered in the century of contemplation,
in the century of the child.
These principles will be applied, too, perhaps, in the field of practical work.
Machines and electricity accomplish work that can give no creative
enjoyment; handwork will be again a portion of man's happiness; we shall
live through a second Renaissance, the renewal of the personal joy which
the man of earlier times experienced when the artistic moulding, when the
rich, coloured tapestry, the beautiful piece of carving came from his own
hand. The present school system leads to the fabrication of unnecessary
articles by the dozen. It does not lead to a true love and appreciation of
professional work, that love and appreciation from which, in the great
period of art, artistic production organically arose.
The present system, in all fields of study, limits the natural capacity of the
child in the concentration, the combination, and development of its powers.
When it produces its best results, it turns children at the close of their
school years into pocket encyclopedias, representing humanity's progress

and knowledge. Only when such results as these cease to be called a
harmonious development, will it be conceded that the school can and
should have no other meaning than to give the child a preparation for
continuing, through his whole life, the work of training and education. Only
then will the school become a place where individuals get learning to last a
lifetime, not as now, even when the best face is put upon it—where they are
impoverished for life. Through the victory of these convictions alone will
each individual get his rights at school; both the person who does not want
to study, as well as the one who does. Consideration will be given to the
individual who has to have books as means of training and to the other case
where the activity of the eye and hand is required as a means to the same
end. It will be a place for the person with practical talent and for the
theorist, for the realist as well as for the idealist. Both classes can freely do
what they can do best; the members of each class will often feel tempted to
test their powers by doing what the other class is able to do. One-sidedness
will be corrected naturally, not, as it is now, mercilessly flattened out
through the steam-roller methods of the "harmonious ideal of training."
To supply workers in these future schools, new normal schools must be
provided. Patented pedagogy will give place to a type of teaching which
considers the individual. Only the person who naturally or by training can
play with children, live with children, learn from children, is fond of
children, will be placed in the school to develop there for himself his
individual methods. Positions will be given only after a year's trial. When
this period is passed the teachers will not be tested by the examiner alone,
one who has followed the instruction given by them during the year, but the
children themselves will also be heard from on this question. Of course, no
absolute value can be assigned to the judgment of children, but nevertheless
it has a really great importance. The instinct of the child chooses with
astonishing accuracy what is first-class. But what, in the case of the child,
has this character? This question has been answered by Goethe, "The
greatest fortune of the earth's children is personality alone."
At the present time objectivity in instruction is exalted, but every great
educator has achieved success by being entirely subjective. The teacher
should be a lover of truth. Therefore he should never force a resisting object
to serve his own views. As a result of this attitude, the more subjective he
is, the better. The fuller and richer he communicates to the children the

essence and power of his own view of life and his own character, so much
the more will he forward their real development, provided, however, that he
does not force upon them his opinions with the claim of infallibility. In this
as in all other matters, the young should be allowed to exercise free choice.
The teachers of both sexes in my school will have short hours of work, a
long time to rest, and a large salary; that is, they will have the possibility of
a continuous development. The limit of their service will be twenty years.
After this period, they will become members of a school jury composed of
parents and teachers, or they will assist in final examinations, as censors.
These will be conducted as indicated above, in such a way that each censor
shall pass a summer either at home or abroad, in company with young
people, not more than five in number. By living with them the censor will
be able to measure their capacity for absorbing an education; he can direct
them in the choice of a profession. By a "Socratic" communication of
practical wisdom, he will supply a substitute for the Confirmation
Instruction which will no longer be given. The psychological value of this
instruction is not to be actually found in what one learns from it, but in the
direction of the mind to the serious questions and pursuits of life, in the
awakening of ethical self-development, which is the factor of supreme
importance in passing from childhood to youth. In this way the young will
be initiated into the art of life. I mean by this the art of making one's own
personality, one's own existence, an object of artistic interest and pursuit.
The initiation will be conducted by a wise man, or by a woman who has
kept her youthfulness, so that she understands the joys and pains of the
young, their play and their seriousness, their dreams and aspirations, their
faults and their dangers—leaders who can give indirect suggestions how
young people should play their own melodies in the orchestra of life.
My school will not come into existence while governments make their
greatest sacrifices for militarism. Only when this tendency is overcome, a
point in development will be reached, where one can see that the dearest
school programme is also the cheapest. People will realise that strong
manly brains and heart have the greatest social value. I have already said
that this is no reform plan for the present that I am outlining here, only a
dream for the future. But in our wonderful existence dreams are becoming
at last actual realities.[1]

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Since I wrote the above, there have been founded in England, France,
also in Norway, reformed schools, working more or less in the direction I
have outlined.

CHAPTER VII
RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
At the present moment the most demoralising factor in education is
Christian religious instruction. What I mean by this is principally catechism,
Scripture history, theology, and church history. Even earnest Christians have
said, regarding the ordinary instruction in these subjects, that nothing shows
better how deeply religion is rooted in man's nature than the fact that
"religious education" is not able to destroy religion.
But beside this, I believe that even a more living, a more actual instruction
in Christianity injures the child. Children should bring themselves by
themselves to live in the patriarchal world of the Old Testament; indeed, in
the world of the New Testament as well. This can be done best in the form
of children's Bibles. These works will be treasured by children; they will
find in them infinite material for nourishing the imagination and the
emotions. But this can only be done by allowing children to read the Bible
undisturbed, without the need of pedagogical or dogmatic explanation. At
home this book, like other children's books, should be only talked about and
explained when the child requests it. It should never be treated as a school
book or appear on the school desk. If the child gets impressions in this way
from the Bible, freed from all other authority, apart from the subjective one
of the impressions themselves, the myths of the Bible will no more
contradict the rest of his instruction, than the Scandinavian story of creation
or the Greek legends of the gods.
But the most dangerous of all educational mistakes in influencing humanity,
is due to the fact, that children are now taught the Old Testament account of
the world as absolute truth, although it wholly contradicts their physical and
historical instruction. Besides children learn to regard the morality of the
New Testament as absolutely binding, while its commands are everywhere
seen to be transgressed by the child, the moment he takes his first step into
life. Our whole industrial and capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of
the Christian command to love one's neighbour as one's self. The
capitalistic axiom is that every man is nearest neighbour to himself.

The eyes of children are here and in similar cases, clear-sighted in their
simplicity. At a tender age they are able to observe whether their
surroundings are in living accord with Christian teaching. From a four-year-
old child, with whom I was talking about Jesus' commandment to love one
another, I received the reply, "If Jesus really said so, Papa is no Christian."
Before long the child gets into conflict with his instructors and with the
commands of Christianity. A small child in a Swedish city took the word of
Jesus about charity to heart. Not only his playthings, but his clothes he gave
to the poor; his parents cured, by corporal punishment, this practical type of
Christianity. A teacher who was impressing on a small girl in a Finnish city
the commandment to love one's enemies, received as an answer that this
was impossible, for no one in Finland could love Bobrikoff.
I know the sophism used in both cases to overcome the invulnerable logic
of the child; but I also know how these sophisms make hypocrisy so natural
among Christians, that it is now unconscious. It would take a new
Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences. Everywhere Rousseau's words
hold true, "The child gets high principles to direct him, but he is forced by
his surroundings to act according to petty principles, every time he wishes
to put the high ones into practice." He goes on to say people have
innumerable "ifs" and "buts," by which the child has to learn that great
principles are only words, that the reality of life is something quite
different.
The dangerous thing is not that the ideal of Christianity is high; it comes
from the fact that every ideal in its essence is unattainable. The nearer we
get to it the more lofty it is. This is the characteristic of every ideal. But the
demoralising feature in Christianity as an ideal is, that it is presented as
absolute, while man as a social being is obliged to transgress it every day.
Besides he is taught in his religious instruction, that as a fallen being he
cannot in any case attain the ideal, although the only possibility of his living
righteously in temporal things, and happily in the world to come, depends
on his capacity for realising it.
In this net of unsolvable contradictions, generation after generation has seen
its ideal of belief obscured. Gradually each new generation has learned not
to take its new ideal seriously. As to the cowardly or braggart concessions
to the idiocies of fashion, and the follies by which people are ruined in

order to live according to their position, among other psychological grounds
for man's lack of steadiness must be placed, as its ultimate cause, the
following: The child, along with religion, has breathed in the conviction
that opinions are one thing, actions another. This experience goes through
the whole of life, even in the case of those who have lost the conviction that
the Christian religion is absolute. The free-thinker is married, has his
children baptised, and allows them to be confirmed, without considering
whether he is forced to it by his own wish, or the wish of doing like other
people. The republican sings the royal hymn, sends loyal salutations by
telegraph, accepts decorations,—but I must break off, otherwise I should
have to enumerate all the small acts of insincerity to one's self, of which the
daily life of most people consists, and which are defended under the name
of non-essentials; I could never get to the end. This is not the way the
Christian martyrs thought who might have freed themselves from death by
casting a few grains of incense on the emperor's altar. Two grains of
incense,—what an unimportant matter, thinks the modern man, and with
quiet conscience he daily sacrifices to many gods in whom he does not
believe.
How illogical Protestantism is too, and yet for so long it possessed a
spiritually educative power, while its dualism was unsuspected, while one
with full sincerity gave to holiday and work day its due share. But now that
a new Protestantism is come to life within the fold of Protestantism, this
method of speaking in two voices is deeply demoralising.
Piece by piece has been torn down that system of teaching which the
Catholic church built up, so wonderfully adapted to the psychological needs
of the majority of people. It formed its fundamental creeds, just as they still
remain, on the deepest experiences of mankind. But Protestantism is ever
looking back from the results of its own handiwork.
In home, in the school, in the high school, during military service, in office
work, everywhere passive dependence is insisted on under the name of
discipline, discretion, faithfulness to duty. And like all the fine words, by
which the living souls of men are turned into the slaves of discipline, these
terms exalt esprit de corps, and pass over really serious faults. Discipline
means subordinating one's self to every crude force. Only when all
Protestants really become actual Protestants, and refuse to receive the

greatest good of life, their religion, through authority, will they begin even
in social and political questions to attain an independent opinion of their
own. As teachers and leaders, they will secure for school children, and for
students, for officers and for officials, the freedom in word and deed that is
the right of the citizen and the man. Men and women, who in their private
life are strictly honourable, have learnt, in general questions, to put their
thoughts, their acts, under the command of a leader, and above all they have
learnt to do this in the name of religious belief.
The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the
essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the power to
express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these give man a new
share of civilisation and culture. As long as education and social life do not
consciously forward this kind of courage, power, and will, the world will
remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity, crudeness, force, and
selfishness, no matter whether radicals or conservatives, the democratic or
aristocratic elements, have the upper hand.
The most demoralising of all principles of belief was the discouraging
teaching that human nature was fallen and incapable of reaching holiness by
its own effort—the teaching that one could only come through grace and
forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with temporal and eternal things.
For those below the ordinary level, this position of grace produced spiritual
stagnation, not to speak of the business people, who daily allowed the blood
of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in the score of morality. Only those
who were naturally superior increased in holiness on being convinced that
they were children of God in Christ. Mankind, on the whole, showed the
deep demoralisation of a double morality. This dualism commenced as soon
as the first Christians ceased to expect the return of Jesus,—an expectation
which brought their life into real unity with his teaching. But this double
morality has for nineteen hundred years retained man's soul and the social
order in practical heathenism. Although some pure and great spirits really
received aid from Christianity in their longings for infinity, and although in
the Middle Ages many strong hearts tried seriously to realise its teaching,
yet the majority of mankind lived and lives still in wavering irresolution.
This is the result of having no place to anchor to while the citizens of
antiquity had an ethic, which could be translated into reality and could turn
them into sincere, steadfast personalities.

Since nineteen hundred years have proved that there is no possibility, in a
humanly constructed society, of living according to the teaching of Jesus, as
a practical, infallible rule of holiness, man can escape this immoral
duplicity only in one way: the way already travelled over by many separate
individuals, who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou not, thyself,
completed all, O holy glowing heart!" In other words, these individuals
have become convinced that Christianity is the product of humanity. Just as
little as any other product of humanity does it exhaust absolute and eternal
truth.
When men cease to teach their children belief in an eternal providence,
without whose will no sparrow falls from the roof, they will be able, instead
of this, to imprint on the minds of children the new religious conception of
the divinity of a world, proceeding according to law. The new morality will
be built on this new religious idea. It will be filled with reverence for the
absolute conjunction of cause and effect—a connection which no grace can
remove. Man's actions will really be directed by this certainty. He will not
rock himself to sleep in any sort of hope, based on providence or a
reconciliation, able to defer surely fixed effects. This new morality,
strengthened by the realities of life, admits of logical consequences. No
single command of this teaching needs to remain an empty phrase. In its
system, too, there will be a place to apply all the eternal profound words
uttered by Jesus or by other great human souls. These words will ever
furnish further material for application, which is the same as saying
material for self-application. Yet the application will be worked out in
complete freedom. Each word will be used as furnishing the material just
suited to that style which men wish to apply to the architecture of their
personality. Yet neither the words nor the examples of one or the other
teacher will be taught as absolutely binding.
The soul of the child will not be stained by tears of repentance for sins nor
by the fear of hell. It will not be stained by a realism without ideas and
without ideals, by the contemptuous mistrust, which the mouldering effects
of fine words leave behind, like cold damp spots. The weak, as well as the
strong, will progress in the happy and responsible belief in their own
personality, as their only source of help. The pulse of their purpose will be
strong and warm with red blood. They will not be forced to humility; they
will not accept even equality with all others, or with any other one. On the

contrary they will be strengthened in their right, to give their own individual
stamp to their joys, their sufferings, and their works. They will be warned to
do their best because it is their own; to seek their highest good, by drawing
their own boundaries at the place where the rights of others begin.
While the home and the school make compromises between two opposed
views of life, people obtain from neither of them any real good for the
education of children. I have already shown how in one and the same
school religious instruction and a certain amount of knowledge and love for
nature as well as history can be communicated. In one and the same school
the course of natural development and history can be taught in connection
with instruction in religious history. In this instruction Judaism and
Christianity will receive the first place. So the reverence and love children
were wont to acquire for the personality and morality of Jesus, previously
obtained in the Bible, can be increased. Guided by sincere and serious
purposes one can select either plan. But, during religious instruction, to
make Moses and Christ the absolute teachers of truth, and in the hours
devoted to natural history, to expound Darwinism, cause more than
anything else that want of logic, that moral laxity and flaccidity that can
effect nothing and want nothing. Everything I have learnt, since these words
were written, has strengthened a hundred fold my previous convictions that
the most essential thing is not, what kind of view of life we have—this may
be important enough too—but that we have enough capacity of faith to
appropriate for ourselves some view of life, enough force to bring it to
reality in life. But nothing works more depressingly on the ethical energy of
growing generations than the dualistic view of life, received at the present
time at school. The school too must exercise its choice; there must be no
compromise between two schemes of education and two views of life, if the
strength of will and the power of faith in young people is not to be broken.
The question of a compromise is in this case not a question of application; it
is a most important question of principle in education.
Since I set down these words, many points of view have been brought out in
this connection. One which made a sensation when it was published, in
1890, was Professor Dodel's book, Moses or Darwin? The author showed
how deeply Darwinism was implanted in science and in civilisation; how
popular education was restricted, because it was kept remote from the
scientific views of the present day and forced into the circle of ecclesiastical

ideas. Religious instruction is simply a crime against the psychological law
of development. For children are taught by a theological system to think
about abstract conceptions, while they are in no condition to do it. The
worst is, he said, that in high schools the theory of development is now
taught as scientific truth, while in the common schools, built and
maintained by the same government, the myth of the Mosaic story of
creation continues to be taught, in the sharpest contrast with what science
and living nature teach the child. This is an immoral and dishonest state of
affairs that must be brought to an end.
It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional
element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his own
personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to sacrifice
himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to the acts we
hold as ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon the soul and can no
longer be the connecting link of all factors in our conduct, earnest men are
abandoning it more and more, influenced by purely religious reasons. Such
men should not have their children brought up as Christians, under the
excuse that the child requires Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in which
adults are not agreed about what the child needs, we should try to get, not
from adults but from children themselves, some information about their real
needs. In this way we can learn that the child himself begins at a very early
period to be concerned with the eternal riddles of mankind, to be troubled
with the questions of whence and whither. At the same time one discovers
that the sincere and honest childish nature is opposed to the Christian
explanation of the world, until the child's sincerity is dulled and he either
takes without question what is taught, or in his own soul denies what his
lips must repeat, or finally allows his heart to be possessed by the only
nourishment offered to his religious needs.
My own recollections of childhood caused me to make observations of the
religious ideas of children at an early period. I have now before me
comprehensive accounts of this investigation, going back twenty-five years.
I recollect my own fierce hate against God, when I, at the age of six years,
heard of the death of Jesus being caused by God's demand for an
atonement, and at ten years I recall my denial of God's providence, when a
young workman died far away from his wife and his five children, to whom
his existence was so necessary. My brooding about the existence of God

took on this occasion the form of a challenge. I wrote in the sand, "God is
dead." In doing so I thought, If there is a God, he will kill me now with a
thunderbolt. But since the sun continued to shine, the question was
answered for the time being; but it soon turned up again. I had no other
religious instruction than reading the Bible on Sunday, preaching on
Sunday, and reading from the catechism, which, by the way, was never
explained. Yet the New Testament belonged to my play books; I learnt in it
to love Jesus as profoundly as other great personalities of whom I read. But
during the confirmation period, I received explanations of the Bible; in
them every point, every name in the Gospel was explained, every sentence
made the basis of hair-splitting distinctions, to show the fulfilment of
prophecies and the edifying hidden meaning of every word, that formerly
seemed so simple. The dogma of the Trinity for example was shown to be
contained in the second verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad discovery
for me, that the living book of my childish heart and my childish
imagination could be so stone dead. That religious indifference is a frequent
result of religious instruction, that spiritual maladies come from the desire
to convert the souls of children, numerous proofs can be given. I have heard
children of six years speak with holy horror of their four-year-old brother
who dug with a spade on Sunday. On the other hand I have heard a six-year-
old child who was dragged in one day to three church services ask after
reflection whether it was not more tolerable to go to hell immediately.
The Judaic Christian conception of a creative and sustaining providence,
which gives the fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely opposed to
all that experience and evolution teaches us about existence, that one cannot
even conceive of the possibility of holding both ideas theoretically at the
same time. Much less can one practically unite them by the paste of
compromise. The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does not allow himself
to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth then let us not speak to
children about life at all—life in its unity and diversity, its manifold creative
acts, its process of continuous creation, its eternal divine subjection to law.
But this means that it is impossible to save the Christian God for children,
after the child begins to think about this God, in whom he is taught blind
confidence. Nor can the child be prepared in this way for the new
conception of God with its religious, its uniting and elevating power, I mean
for the conception of a God whose revealed book is the starry heavens, and

whose prophetic sight is in the unfathomable sea, and in the deeps of man's
heart, the God who is in life and is life. Nothing shows better how imperfect
is the real belief of modern thinkers, than the fact that they always teach
their children a system which they do not wish to live by spiritually
themselves, but which they hold as indispensable for the moral and social
future of the child.
When we pass from the conception of providence to the conception of sin,
we find in children the same natural logic. A small girl, an only child,
asked: "How could God allow his only child to be killed? You could not
have done it to me!" And a small boy said, "It is a very good thing for us
that the Jews crucified Christ, so that nothing happened to us." These are
both poles of an emotional and a practical way of looking at the Atonement.
Within them all similar circumferences are drawn. To a more comic and
naïve sphere of ideas belongs the proposal of a small girl to call the Virgin
Mary God's wife. Also there is the story of a boy who spoke in school of
Our Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the Trinity.
From the classes in Bible history and catechism, there are innumerable
examples of children reading the words incorrectly, and misunderstanding
the ideas they stand for. A boy, warned to keep the lamps burning, answered
contentedly, "We have petroleum gratis." Another, asked whether he would
like to be born again, said, "No, I might be turned into a girl." These are
typical examples. There is an anecdote of a child, who, on being consoled
with the statement that God was in the dark near her, asked her mother to
put God out and light the lamp. Another child, seeing the pictures of the
Christian martyrs in the arena, cried out sympathetically, "Look at that poor
tiger; he hasn't got a Christian." These are a few out of a mass of examples,
typical of the explanation given by children to the religious ideas they
receive, notions forcing them into a world of ideas which they either accept
in a material sense, or by which they are absolutely nonplussed.
The childish circle of ideas is revealed by anecdotes of this kind, or by the
comment of a small girl who asked when she heard that she had been born
about eleven o'clock at night, "How could I have remained out so late?"
These examples show that such conceptions as original sin, the fall of man,
regeneration and salvation, are first necessarily meaningless words, and
afterwards terribly difficult words. In my whole life fear of hell never

absorbed my attention for five minutes, but I know children and grown
people who are martyrs to this terror. I know children too who, when belief
in hell was presented to them in school as absolutely necessary, bewailed
that their mother had said she did not believe in hell, and therefore thought
she must be very wicked.
We are certainly a long way off from those times when, to use the
picturesque expression of an historian of civilisation, "The fear of the devil
constantly darkened the life of men, as the shadow of the sails of a windmill
darkens the windows of the miller"; far from the times, too, when divine
persons constantly revealed themselves to the believer, and when miracles
belonged just as really to the daily habits of thought as to-day they are
disregarded even by the believer. But so long as belief in the devil,
providence and miracles is upheld in religious instruction, it will be
impossible for the sunshine of the civilised view, which is the scientific as
opposed to the superstitious view, to penetrate the darkness where the
bacilli of cruelty and insanity are nurtured.
The ideas children form of heaven are generally fine examples of childish
realism. A child thought his brother could not be in heaven, because he
would have to climb a ladder, and so would be disobedient, for he had been
forbidden to climb one. A girl asked, when she heard that her grandmother
was in heaven, whether God was sitting there and holding her from falling
out. These are a few of the many proofs of the child's sense of reality, that
leads to mistaken answers here, as in so many other instances. If it is said
by way of protest that the childish imagination needs myths and symbolism,
the answer is an easy one. We cannot and should not rob the child of the
play of imagination, but play should not be taken in earnest. It is not to be
wondered at that children construct for themselves realistic ideas about
spiritual things. This practice is no more to be opposed, than any of the
other expressions of the life of the child's soul. But when these false ideas
are presented as the highest truth of life, they must disturb the sacred
simplicity of the child.
I know children in whom the origin of unbelief is to be traced to the words
of Jesus, that everything asked for by the believing heart will be received. A
small child, locked up in a dark room, prayed that God might show people
how badly he was being treated, by causing a lamp of precious stones to be

lit in the dark. Another asked to have a sick mother saved; another prayed
by the side of a dead companion that she might rise again. For all these
three, the experience of having their most believing, most fervent prayer
unanswered, was the great turning point in their spiritual life. I can
authenticate from my own experience and the experiences of others the
ethical revolt which the cases of injustice in the Old Testament—for
example God's preference of Jacob over Esau—occasion in a healthy child.
The explanations offered in this case and in others like it fill the child with
silent contempt. When the child ends in finding that adults themselves do
not believe the religion they teach, the childish instinct for belief and for
reverence, that capacity which is the real ground for all religious feeling, is
injured for life.
I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines of the pious literature written
for children, with their stories of conversion and holiness. Parents are able
to protect their children from them. I speak here only of that way of looking
at the world, which is forced on children with or against the will of their
parents. This degrades their conceptions of God, of Jesus, of nature. These
conceptions, the child if left to himself can develop simply or powerfully. It
is this way of looking at the world that causes unnecessary suffering and
dangerous prejudices. The inclination of the child to deep religious feeling,
sound faith, and ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened by an ability
to draw the standards of life as freely from the Bible as from the world's
literature. The same result will be produced by books on other religions,
like Buddhism, from the great religious personalities who illustrate the
struggle for an ideal, and from such children's books as show like efforts in
a healthy form. No child has the slightest need of the catechism or theology
for his religion or for his training; no other church history is needed than
that connected with the general history of the world. In this last study the
chief stress should be laid in teaching on the errors, in order to impress on
the young the conviction, that all new truths are called by their
contemporaries "errors." In other words these "errors" are the best negative
material man has for discovering the truth.
Working over and explaining the contradictions met with by the child in
such religious instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to the preparation
for a true life, in which people have to put up with innumerable
contradictions. But this personal work injures neither the piety nor the

soundness of the child's soul. Such injuries come rather from irritating
pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual fanaticism, from deceits of the
reason, barrenness of soul, or perverted feeling of right, all of which are the
notorious results of Christian training and Christian instruction, given
according to the usual methods of the present day. For the present as well as
for the future, a child will be able to solve more easily these spiritual
problems if his fine feeling for right and his quick logic have not been
dulled by the dogmatic answers to those eternal problems, that place him in
as much difficulty as the thinker.
Kant exposed long ago the most serious injuries of the kind of religious
instruction which still prevails. He showed that by making the church's
teaching the basis of morality, improper motives were assigned to action. A
thing must be avoided, not because God has forbidden it, but because it is in
and for itself wrong. Man must aim at good, not because heaven or hell
awaits the good or the bad, but because good has a higher value than evil.
To this point of view of Kant there must be added the truth, that a position
is ethically weakening, when man is presented as incapable of doing good
by his own power. So he is told in this as in all other cases, he must be
humble and trust in God's help. Confidence in our strength and the feeling
of our own responsibility have a strong moral influence. The belief that man
is sin-laden, without chance of change, has led him to remain where he is.
If the future generation is to grow up with upright souls, the first condition
of such growth is to obliterate from the existence of children and young
people, by a mighty scratch of the pen, the catechism, Bible history,
theology and church history.
We must bow down before the infinities and mysteries of our earthly
existence and of the world beyond. We must distinguish between and select
real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of mankind, of
man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the whole race a rich
and strong personality. We must look to great models. We must reverence
the divine and the regular in the course of the world, in the processes of
development of man's mind. These are the new lines of meditation, the new
religious feelings of reverence and love, that will make the children of the
new century strong, sound, and beautiful.

These changes will destroy that idea of God that combines "God help us"
with our victories, that has increased the national lust for conquest, the
passion for mastery, the instinct of gain. It will be felt that mixing up God in
the standards of human passions is blasphemous. People will see, that
patriotism, nourished on egoism and ambition, is the most godless thing
because the most inhuman of all the life-perverting sins with which man
outrages the holiness of life.
Intellects which can now pass over the contradiction between Christianity
and war, which can even derive strength and consolation from them, have
been depraved by the ideas forced upon mankind through thousands of
years. Nothing more can be expected from men of such brains, than that
they should die in the wilderness, without ever obtaining a sight of the
promised land.
But the brains of children can be protected from the most unholy of all
mental misconceptions, from the superstition that the patriotism, and the
nationalism, which injures the rights of others, have something in common
with ideas about God.
Let children be taught that national characteristics, the use of force, the
right of independent action, is as essential for a people as for an individual,
that it is worth every sacrifice. Let them be taught that, on their appreciation
of the nature of their country, of its life in the past and in the present,
depends their own development. Let them be taught to dream beautiful
inspiring dreams of the future of their country, of their own work, as the
necessary foundation of this future.
They should be taught at an early age to understand the deep gulf between
patriotic feeling and the egoism which is called patriotism. This is the
patriotism in whose name small countries are oppressed by great countries,
in whose name nineteenth-century Europe has armed itself under the
stimulus of revenge, in whose name the close of the century witnessed the
extension of violence in north and south, in west and east.
Militarism and clericalism, both principles presenting authority as opposed
to individual standards of right, are ever closely combined; but they are not
what they are called. They are not patriotism and religion. These two words
involve a sense of common citizenship, of freedom, of justice, exalted

above the narrow sphere of the individual, of the interests of class, of the
interests of one's own country. Such are the principles which unite different
groups within a land in great interests common to all, just as they unite
different peoples in great vital questions common to all. But militarism and
clericalism oppress freedom by the principles of authority, oppress the idea
of individual development, by that of discipline, oppress the feeling of
common weal by the desire for glory and war, oppress the feeling for right
by the feeling for military honour. In Germany under the badge of
Christianity and militarism, the civil rights of the citizen, his claims for
social freedom, have been seriously menaced. Hypnotised by these
principles many members of the Russian, French, and English nations,
respectable as they are individually, have gloated over the deeds of
unrighteousness committed by their respective governments.
All this will go on; people will continue to be burdened to the ground by
ever increasing military preparations. The rights of the small nations will be
constantly encroached upon by the larger ones, even after the present world
powers, like those that have preceded them, have broken down under the
burden of their own expansion. It will continue to be so, until mothers
implant in the souls of their children the feeling for humanity before the
feeling for their country; until they strive to expand the sympathies of their
children to embrace all living things, plants, animals, and men; until they
teach them to see, that sympathy involves not only suffering with others but
rejoicing with others, and that the individual increases his own emotional
capacity, when he learns to feel with other individuals and with other
peoples. It will go on, as it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their
children the certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national
interests, treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned.
The moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony
between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in
the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of God
is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the idea of the
soldier will be ennobled. It will no longer be identified with blind obedience
and limited class courage. The word will come to mean a man and a fellow-
citizen with the same civilised interests, the same conception of law, the
same need of freedom, the same feeling for honour, as all other fellow-
citizens. The soldier will be a defender of his fatherland, whose character

will have no other warlike traits, than those called forth for the protection of
sacred human and civil rights.
Self-defense, personal or national, will be imprinted on the child as the first
of duties, not as it is represented in the commands of Christianity. Or to
speak more accurately the child has this instinctive feeling; all that need be
done is not to confuse this instinct. The child understands quite well, that
evil men, when not resisted, become lords over the property of others. He
knows that the low and the unrighteous get the victory, and that right-
thinking and high-minded people are sacrificed by unrighteous and low-
thinking people. The impulse to resistance is the first germ of the social
feeling for righteousness, and by this feeling will the unreflecting judgment
of the child be led also in the study of history. The child never doubts that
William Tell was right, even when, in his instruction in religion, he has been
definitely taught obedience to the powers that be, that come from God.
Every straight childish soul applauds Andreas Hofer, despite his
uncompromising conflict with lawful authority. With his natural directness
the child cuts off all sophisms; at least all children do who are not
irrevocably stupefied by Christian principles.
To conclude what I have said against religious instruction, I will add a
statement of a ten-year-old child, made after three years struggling with the
catechism and biblical history: "I do not believe any of this, but I hope,
when men are some day wise enough, each person may have his own belief,
just as each one has his own face."
This small philosopher in these words hit unconsciously upon the most
serious spiritual injury done by religious instruction. It forces on man's
mind a special view of the world, like a conventional mask on a man's face.
But freedom and the rights of the soul's life can only be secured by its own
reflections. The soul itself must work out that assurance of belief in which
man can live and die. For generations the great spiritual dangers of mankind
have been caused by looking backwards to find the ideal and the truth, by
regarding both as once for all given, as absolutely limited.
As soon as a child becomes conscious of himself he should feel that he is a
discoverer with infinities before him. The king's son, in the realm of life,
will no longer do menial service as a prodigal son in a foreign land. With

the whole power of his will, he can repeat those old words, "I will arise and
go to my father."
When Jaquino di Fiori in the Middle Ages preached of the Kingdom of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, till his hair became as silvery grey as
the leaves of the olive tree, he compared these three realms with the nettle,
the rose, and the lily, the light of the stars, the sunlight, and the sun.
In all the ends of the world this preaching is being heard now. But that
dream of a Third Kingdom, pure as the lily, warm as the sun, can only be
realised in the temper of the child who looks for life and happiness, who
brushes away joyously and frankly the clouds of man's fall and man's
humiliation.
Without becoming as little children, men cannot enter into the Third
Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, the Kingdom of the human
spirit.

CHAPTER VIII
CHILD LABOUR AND THE CRIMES OF
CHILDREN
Leaving aside questions of heredity and kindred topics, and considering
only the conditions under which the child is born, developed, and reared, it
is terrible to contemplate the misfortunes which happen to children through
lack of insight on the part of their mothers. Doctors are never tired of telling
what malformations tight-lacing causes. How many children in the first year
of their life become blind through neglect. We only mention here some of
the troubles which crude ignorance or lack of conscience on the part of the
mothers inflict on themselves or on their children. There must be noticed
too the uncertainty and the want of system in the care of children that come
from such ignorance. A thorough improvement in all these things is not to
be expected until women have secured universal suffrage, and until they, at
the same age in which men serve their years of military service, are legally
obliged to pass through a period of training lasting just as long, devoting
themselves to the care of children, hygiene, and sick nursing. No other
exceptions must be made, except those which exempt a man from military
service. Such duties done for one's country would come for many women
just at the time in which their interest in the subject is awakened by
marrying or the thought of marrying. This training would give a profounder
meaning to their thoughts on this subject. But even women who never
become mothers themselves would in this way learn certain general
principles of psychology, hygiene, and care of the sick, that they might
make use of afterwards in every station of life. Further, I look for increasing
limitations of the right of parents over children. Such limitations I mean as
those which have forbidden the exposure of children, have imposed
penalties for child murder, for cruelty towards children, and the laws which
have enforced obligatory attendance at school. In England there are
organisations which investigate the treatment of children at home and which
prevent cruelties against them. Mothers who forget their duties can be
reported and punished with imprisonment; neglectful fathers can be made to

support their children, etc.; and where parents show themselves hopelessly
incompetent children can be taken from them by law. In the different states
of Germany there are also laws which allow children to be taken from
parents who, through misuse of that relationship, injure the child's spiritual
or bodily welfare. Children receive this so-called compulsory training in
cases, too, where it is necessary to preserve them from moral destruction.
The compulsory training may be carried out either in a suitable family or in
institutions; it continues up to the eighteenth year. A notable provision is
that which places the supervision over such children, in the hands of
women.
An increased extension of the right of society in this direction is one of its
most important provisions for self-protection, and is just as legitimate a
limitation of individual freedom, as the laws to prevent the extension of
contagious diseases. Unfortunately such regulations are often made
ineffective by red tape. The parents or guardians of the neglected child must
be admonished; the unruly child must be warned, and if this is not
sufficient, the law provides that it must be disciplined. All of these provisos
are absolutely senseless in such cases. By such warnings bad parents are not
instructed in the art of training their children, nor is an incorrigible child to
be led by admonitions to change its character, if he is left in the
surroundings which have caused his degeneration. By corporal punishment
administered in the presence of witnesses, a child already accustomed to
cuffs and blows is made more hardened and shameless. A person with only
a superficial knowledge of the subject, enough to understand the causes
which produce such parents and such children, soon realises that he is
concerned in each detail with the infinite horizon of the social question. It is
clear for example that low wages, combined with the work of women and
children, are the main factors in poor dwellings, insufficient food, and bad
clothing. The fact that the wife works out of the house causes the neglect of
the children and the home. The lodging-house system is the result of the
lack of dwellings; want of comfort at home causes the husband to frequent
saloons and public houses. All these factors, taken together, cause
immorality and intemperance; these last again produce those physical and
mental diseases to which children are often heirs at their birth.
Leaving out of discussion the notion that by God's help the battlefields are
covered with torn, maimed beings, with whose destroyed brains

innumerable thoughts and feelings are extinguished which could have
enriched humanity, I know no more abnormal idea than the custom of
people speaking of a guardian angel when a chance has kept two children
from an accident. Where is this guardian angel in the innumerable other
cases of misfortune: when children remain alone because their mother must
go to work and they fall out of the window or into the fire? When they lose
their eyesight in dark cellars? When they are pressed to death because in
miserable lodgings they have to share a bed with their parents? When the
parents are drunk and the children lose their lives? Where is this guardian
angel when parents murder their children, from religious fanaticism or
disgust of life: when the children themselves, tired of life or through fear of
parental cruelty, take their own lives? Where are these protective angels on
the occasions when they are most wanted?—in the narrow streets of great
cities, in the great industrial centres where lack of sunlight, of pure air, and
of all the other primary conditions for the development of soul and body,
undermines the bodily strength and efficiency of children before their birth?
To see the hand of Providence in an accidental case of preservation, while
the same Providence is released from all share in natural occurrences, from
all part in the terrible phenomena of society, that fill every second of the
earth's existence with terror, is a relic of superstition to be overcome if man
is to be filled with a sense of obligation to conditions he must master and
mould. Modern man is ever becoming more and more his own Providence;
he has already protected himself against fire by fire engines and fire
insurance; against the sea by life-saving stations; against smallpox and
cholera, diphtheria and tuberculosis, he has found other means of defence.
The blind belief that death is dependent on God's will man is losing by the
witness of statistics which declare that duration of life increases with
improved sanitary condition; which show that when disease or summer heat
mows down the children of the poor in dark tenements the rich man can
preserve his own children in his healthy, light dwelling.
Every man who has his heart in the right spot does not wait for an angel, but
rushes to save a child from danger. But the superstitious belief of the
majority of people in God's Providence perhaps will cause the same man to
regard with complete apathy conditions by which millions and millions of
children are yearly sacrificed. Doctors know that the destruction caused by
bacteria is insignificant, as compared with pauperism as a cause of disease.

Mothers who have over-exerted themselves, drunken fathers, bad dwellings,
like those where the poor dry out newly built houses for the rich, induced
by the low rate of rents, insufficient nourishment, inherited diseases,
especially syphilis, too early work,—all this shows its result in the
emaciated, shrivelled, ulcerated bodies of children who occasionally are
cured of their momentary disease in hospitals, but cannot be freed from the
results of the conditions of life under which they were born and brought up.
The efforts of doctors will be in vain while they, like the other factors in
society, do not devote their whole energy to avoiding diseases, instead of
healing them. What they can now do in the way of prevention is but a
palliative in comparison with the incurable evil which flourishes in
abundance. The situation will remain as it is so long as hygiene does not
receive the same attention in society as the soul. This solicitude may take
the form of religious edification, or intellectual enlightenment, but it
remains nothing but a cut flower, stuck in a dust heap.
It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to show from criminal statistics that
degenerate children are the creation of society itself. By allowing them to
be forced into "the path of virtue," by punishment, society behaves like a
tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then beats him because he cannot
by himself find his road.
The categorical imperative for the social consciousness at the present
moment, is an effective legislation for the protection of children and
women.
Wherever industry is developed, the woman is taken away from the home,
the child from play and school. In the period of guilds, women and children
worked in the house, and in the workshop of the husband. But since the
factory system has constantly restricted the household work of woman,
industrial occupations on the scale of modern capitalism can satisfy its
needs for cheaper work by woman's work. This like children's work has
forced down in many places the pay of adult workmen. The pay with which
a married man can care for his family by his work is now divided among
several members of the family. As long as special work required great
personal bodily strength or developed manual dexterity, it fell as a rule to
the men, not to women or children. But the natural protection of women and
children disappeared with the introduction of machinery. In many cases

working a machine required neither strength nor dexterity. In other cases,
like cotton spinning or mining, delicate fingers were more valued because
they were more adaptable, tender bodies more desirable because they were
smaller.
In England the work of women and children first reached its highest point.
The poorhouses sent crowds of children to the wool weaving industry in
Lancashire, children who worked in shifts at the same machine and slept in
the same dirty beds. The population in the industrial districts pined away, as
the result; diseases unknown before came into existence; ignorance and
roughness increased. Women and children from four to five years old
worked fourteen to eighteen hours. The report of the investigations made on
this subject caused Elizabeth Barrett to write her poem, "The Cry of the
Children" that made the employers of children so indignant, but which
helped to produce the Ten Hour bill. This bill laid down that women,
children, and young persons should not work more than ten hours a day in
textile factories. This law was succeeded by others of the same type. Similar
conditions in other lands have produced similar legislation. In Saxony,
Belgium, Alsace, and the Rhine Provinces the results of the system seemed
to be just as frightful as in England. On the Rhine, as early as the year 1838,
a Prussian army officer noticed that the number of those able to bear arms
had diminished as a result of the degenerating influence of woman and
child labour. But notwithstanding the introduction of this legislation
generally, the labour of women and children continues. It takes the most
destructive forms in those occupations which lie outside of the sphere of
legislation. There are places in which child labour is as shocking as it was
in England in 1848. In Russia, in the Bastmat weaving industry, children of
three or four years have been found at work; and masses of children under
ten working as much as eighteen hours a day. In Germany the toy industry
can show as cruel figures in connection with children's work, all the more
cruel because in order to provide enjoyment for happy children the living
energy of others is forced out of existence. Industrial work at home is done
by children four to five years old, while the age limit for child labour in
factories, both in Germany and in Switzerland, is fourteen years. The
government of Denmark has proposed the same limit of age. In Italy most
of the crippled young children were brought up in the sulphur districts of
Sicily, crowded together in low galleries, burdened with heavy sacks at an

age at which their tender limbs under such conditions must inevitably and
incurably be contorted. As early as twelve and thirteen years old many of
them are incapable of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain, quantities of
children six to eight years old are kept at work; through the poisonous
odours they fall victims to severe diseases. Other children carrying heavy
pitchers on their head are employed to water dry places. The child is a
cheaper means of transportation than the ass.
Despite protective legislation the average of height and weight in the
Lancashire children is and continues to be lower than anywhere else. Of the
two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred and
fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight were
seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of good health.
All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in the morning till
five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the hopeful ten-year-old
child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy. This degeneration of the
population in industrial districts is becoming a serious danger for England's
future.
After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to this
same danger, industrial and street work of children will be everywhere
forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child protection, which,
in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at first on both economic and
industrial grounds. Among these was the uncontested right of fathers to
decide on the work of their children.
It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low standpoint
taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved also by the
introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is as humiliating
for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides.
Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one,
when the blow is delivered in cold blood long after the act occasioning it
has been done. Most of the victims are so accustomed to blows already that
the physical effect is little or nothing, but they awaken feelings of
detestation against a society which so avenges its own faults. If the soul of
the child is sensitive, corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual
torment, as was the case with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some
years ago met his death by drowning. Everybody knows his story from the

fine account of him by the Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood,
had taken a plank, a piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was
condemned to be punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever
present with him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment
—a punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character.
The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose poverty
and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their faults. The
victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame or terror, can
experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of moral shame.
If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined were
revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return to, a home
where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is hindered from
caring for her children. They have suffered from the custom of sleeping
together, the result of overcrowded dwellings, with its demoralising
influence. It may be the child has commenced to make his living on the
street as messenger, cigar picker, or newspaper boy, or has been engaged in
such like occupations, and so in his immediate neighbourhood has seen the
luxurious living of the upper classes, which he strives to imitate. Hardly a
week passes that the street youngster does not read about the
embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the capitalistic classes, frequently
committed by grey-headed men, whose childish impressions go back to the
good old time, on whom the lax education of the present could not have any
influence. No day passes in which he does not see how the representatives
of the upper classes, old and young alike, satisfy their desires for pleasure.
But from the child of the tenement and the street, people expect Spartan
virtue or try to thrash it into him. It is hard to say which is greater here,
stupidity or savagery.
While the upper classes show that they are crude, immoderate, lazy, devoted
to enjoying themselves; while the majority are aiming at getting and
spending money; while so many are able to eat without working, and so few
can find work who look for it; while careless luxury lives side by side with
careless necessity, the upper class has not the shadow of right to expect an
improved lower class. The society of the present day creates and maintains
a social system whose effects are notorious in the economic crimes of the

upper and lower class alike. It is not surprising that great cities are full of
tramps and street urchins, like a spoilt cheese full of maggots.
A destroyed home life, an idiotic school system, premature work in the
factory, stupefying life in the streets, these are what the great city gives to
the children of the under classes. It is more astonishing that the better
instincts of human nature generally are victorious in the lower class, than
the fact that this result is occasionally reversed.
There is another argument against child labour, to be found in its immediate
effect on industry itself.
Working men trained in the schools are everywhere notoriously most
efficient; even in Russia, where popular education is still so defective, this
experience has been noted. The working man able to read and to write
receives without exception on that account a higher pay than the illiterate
ones who can be only used for the coarsest kind of work. The present
development of German industry, as compared with English, is to be
ascribed among other things to the superior educational training of the
German people. The intensive and intelligent work of the American
working man has apparently the same cause. But when children made
sleepy by work in the factory enter evening schools, or when children are
taken too early from school, they lose under continuous hard work the
desire and possibility of adapting themselves to a higher education; they
become organic machines which feed the inorganic ones. This must cause
the value of their work to decline. These organic machines are passive, they
do not try to improve their condition of life, as do the higher workmen.
Besides living machines cannot increase the product of labour. Intelligent
working men who watch over their own rights and increase them are also
those who learn easiest new methods of work, discover new inventions
which are of advantage to their line of work, and so increase the value of
their product. It is only by the growth of this class of workmen, that any
country to-day can stand the pressure of foreign competition. But the chief
condition of this growth is that the bodily and mental powers of the child
shall be used for his own development in school games and play; at the
same time his capacity for work must be trained by occupation at home and
in the technical school, not by work in a factory.

Some years ago, a poem created a furore over the whole civilised world,
from Canada to the islands of Polynesia. The author of this poem, Edwin
Markham, was inspired by Millet's simple and wonderful picture, The Man
with the Hoe. An agricultural labourer with bowed back stands there, one
hand folded on the other, supported on the handle of the hoe. Millet in him
has eternalised the expression so often observed in old workmen, especially
in those who are worn out by day labour. The man's face is empty, says
nothing, every human aspect has disappeared; we only see in his face the
look of the patient beast of burden. For while moderate work ennobles the
animal in man, immoderate work kills humanity in the beast.
Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once himself a slave to bodily
labor, a revelation, the eternal artistic type of the generation of man bowed
down from childhood under the yoke of labour. In one strophe after another
of that finely conceived poem he pictures this being that does not sorrow,
and never hopes, his destroyed soul for which Plato and the Pleiades, the
sunrise and the rose, all the treasures of mind and nature, are nothing. The
poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors how they will restore to this
thing a soul, how they will give it music and dreams. What, he asks, will
become of the people who have made this being what it is now; when after
a thousand years' silence God's terrible question is answered,—What has
become of his soul.
Many such employers of labour go to church, they hear explanations of
texts like these, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto ... even the least of these, ... ye
did it unto me. All that ye wish others should do to you, that do to them." It
does not occur to them to think how Jesus, the most inconsiderate of men,
at the right place, would have characterised their demands to have small
children employed in glass works at ten years of age. It never occurs to
them to ask whether they would like to see their own children in these
factories or others like them.
This complete dualism between life and teaching in our present-day society
will continue to exist until people realise that the opinions about life which
are expressed by the lips, but are denied by deeds, should no longer be
proclaimed as an absolute explanation of life and rule of life. The
permanent element in Christianity can only be realised through the
conviction that mankind is master of Christianity just as it is over all its

other creations. The ardent idea of the Galilean carpenter, fraternity among
men, will give man no rest until man has wiped out the last trace of
injustice in his social relations. But the thought will not be realised by those
ideals regarded by Jesus as absolute. This is the point of view which has
crippled man's conscience and it applies equally to the realisation of this
and all other ideals. An ideal impossible to carry out under the ordinary
assumptions of human life, yet to which men have given the authority of a
divine revelation, and which they conceive of as absolute, this is the main
cause for the demoralisation which has gone on for nineteen hundred years.
The history of humanity has really revealed to men how this absolute ideal
of theirs has been betrayed. The cause of this demoralisation must cease
before existence can be remodelled seriously by those who are convinced
that ideals can really be binding.
People will then not do as they do now, misuse the name of the Father,
whom Jesus has taught men to proclaim with their lips, will not murder one
another en masse on the battlefield, to solve political and economic
questions of supremacy. A society which calls itself Christian will no longer
tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange gambling, and
child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on their mother's
breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then tread in the footsteps
of their fathers, trampling one another down in the struggle for bread.
Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise
existence by humanising the human race.
The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the
Christian circles of ideals into another circle. The successful method would
be to face immediately new purposes and aims that are really believed, and
for which men wish to live. But many of our young generation know of no
new purposes and aims in which they can believe. Hence comes that
spiritual apathy which has mastered a great part of the young generation.
Without undervaluing the influences of environment, I still believe that
young people who have lost their ideals without getting new ones in their
place are to be pitied. The young who are not making ideals out of their
own souls will have no other time than this to find ideals. A generation of
young men of this type laughed at Socrates. They would have nailed Jesus

of Nazareth to the Cross, with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have
become, undoubtedly, in 1789, emigrés with the Bourbons.
When the youth of any period remains without ideals, we pass through a fin
de siècle period no matter what the exact date may be. But when the young
generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts to do, a new
century begins. It is always the fortunate right of young people to stimulate
individualism before everything else. This is done every time a young
person full of sound egoism develops his own personality completely and
powerfully, throws himself keenly into the struggle for his own fortune.
Any one who takes his individual development seriously will find that it is
hard to become an independent, noble, and exalted personality by treading
underfoot other individuals. He will moreover see that it makes more
demands on his personal powers to try to create new values by new means,
to devote his youthful energy to new tasks, than to look back to ideas that
are already exhausted. There is another truth the young man will soon find
to be valid. If an individual throws himself into the struggle of life without
consideration for any one else, he is all the more likely to get hurt in the
struggle. The more developed, too, an individual is, the more assailable
points there are about him to be wounded. Great pain, as well as great
happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life. Failures of a
personality are often better proofs that it is above the average than its
victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave our innermost
personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt that there is a
bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean, that we lay on the
wounds of others.
No real man needs to wait until life has taught him, to sympathise with
others. The inspiring age of youth may experience this, as well as the strong
individual feeling of power. In this sense, many remain ever young, always
able to pass through inspired moments, such moments when a great action,
a great truth, a great and beautiful thing, or great good fortune, absorbs our
whole existence; moments when our eyes fill with tears, when our arms
stretch out to embrace the world and the thoughts which it contains. Such
moments include the most intensive emotion of our own personality; at the
same time they bring the fullest absorption in the common feeling of
existence as a whole. A great life means giving continuity of action to such
inspired moments.

There are young people who can look back on no such moments, who
arrogantly look down on the problems of their times from the height of their
"superman" theories or from their superior learning; who measure them by
the iron law of historical development. At all times there have been such
people. There is no question in which it is more fatal for young people to
isolate themselves, than that which deals with social conflicts. This age
requires the young above all others to test this question from all points of
view, to investigate all other ideas in connection with it. Every reform plan
must be investigated in connection with its influence on the problems of
individualism and socialism. From youth we have a right to expect
something for the future. This hope implies that youth, in approaching it, in
thinking and acting for the many whose lot it is the immediate task of the
future to improve, adopt as their own the words of Walt Whitman, "I do not
ask whether my wounded brother suffers; I will myself be this wounded
brother."

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