The Children that Never Grow Up : Part 4

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 14 of 20)

Meanwhile, for the parents whose children number one or more of the handicapped there is the comfort of securing for such all that science and special arts of teaching and institutional provision can give to make the life of those who can never grow up at least comfortable and free from exploitation by evil influences. That some of the noblest and best of men and women are giving their lives in wise and loving ministration to these least among the children of men is proof of the overmastering power of human sympathy. Meanwhile, again, we are finding out that the more discriminating observation of children and their more truly scientific rating will take many children from the lists of the "backward" and the "difficult" and even the supposed feeble-minded into the ranks of the educable toward full normality.

Special Rooms in Public Schools. - The special rooms in the schools and the special schools in the school system and the school nurses and school doctors and the visiting teacher, with her power of making connection between the home and the school and playground, all show that we are coming to a point where every child will have a better chance for having his mental and moral as well as his physical diagnosis correctly made. And such a diagnosis we have already learned often shows that no congenital doom marks the child labelled "different," but rather some curable bad condition in his life that needs only wisdom and economic power to correct. The "Observation Cards" to which allusion has been made as helping toward discovery of the specially gifted may also, if used with discriminating judgment, show that many whom we thought lagged behind their mates from native disability can be made to keep up with the procession if they are rightly fed, have enough sleep, get a chance at fresh air, and are not made the victims of industrial exploitation.

The new gospel of environmental change in the interest of better physical, mental, and vocational opportunities for all, includes not only the better care of all incompetent for self-control, self-support, and self-direction, it also is coming to include a far more searching investigation of the causes of degeneracy and backwardness, and many children are thereby lifted from the hopeless classes to the group of those requiring only special care and teaching to be able to be classed as normal.

Training the Nervous System. - Professor James said, "The great thing in education is to make the nervous system the ally, not the enemy. For this we must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as we can and carefully guard against growing into ways which are likely to be disadvantageous." His advice for self-discipline is to "seize every first possible opportunity to act on any resolution made, and on every emotional prompting in the direction of habits one aspires to gain." Professor Thompson, in his book on Brain and Personality, says, "We can make our own brains, so far as special functions or aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take the trouble." These and many other admonitions in the direction of more effective mental training show the trend of modern education. How many a will has been weakened by bad methods of family influence! How many nervous systems made the enemy of education rather than its ally by bad family conditions!

The Parent-Teacher Associations are doing valiant service in bringing to the home the best thought of the school and in bringing to the school the best feeling of the home. It is not too much to hope that when the jointure between real education and pure affection is made more complete we may lessen the toll of incompetent personality and raise the social standard of human powers. In this connection one vital thought must not be over-looked, namely, the social advance we may reasonably expect from the new power of women to select the fathers of their children. Doctor Sumner said, "During the ages of the man-family men could not make up their minds what they wanted woman to become." If that be so, it is still more true that now, as the age of the man-and-woman-family begins, women are undertaking to make up their own minds as to what they want to be and to do and are attaining a freedom of sex-selection such as they have not had before in the civilization we call our own.

Doctor Todd says truly, in his Theories of Social Progress, that "from now onward the centre of selection is shifted from without to within, from passive adaptation to active self-determination;" and he adds, "To rationalize sexual selection and make it serve progress will be to revise the 'mores' and inject into them new principles." While women had no real power to select their mates in marriage; while their economic helplessness led them almost universally to marry as a means of support even when no real affection softened and sanctified the process; while they had no power over laws or customs, or knowledge of actual life outside the household, and hence had to take wholly on trust the character and protestations of the man they married; while women were in this subject condition they could not contribute to family life either a high standard of choice of parental quality or a forceful demand for previous purity and right living in the husband. Hence, women have up to a recent time been more sinned against than sinning if they passed on defective germ plasm or doomed their children to suffering lives.

Responsibility of Women in Marriage. - Now the case is different. No woman of usual physical strength or natural ability or average vocational efficiency is necessarily tempted to make "marriage a trade." If she has any strength of character she can make her own way and find many good things in life for herself. She can, therefore, exact such a standard of character and attainment from any man who seeks her in marriage as he may well demand of her and can pass by as incompetent to family demand all who do not measure up to the requirements.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.