Prodigal Sons and Daughters : Part 5

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 16 of 20)

The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is, however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown, have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline implanted in all responsive natures.

Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines? - There is abundant evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a need in youth for some required devotion to "the collectivity that owns us," some "moral equivalent for war" and the military drill of older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy, sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early earning at "gainful occupations," and instituted all manner of recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, "We are all members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of all." We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as were the old "Fraternities" of primitive life, and as are still the outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children's Courts are a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance in life. There are needed, also, devices of education and of compulsory social service and social obedience which may tend to give society a fair deal from every adult.

Prodigal sons and daughters, therefore, who are abnormal, weak, morally invalid, must be cared for in the way easiest and best for the social whole. Parents must help and not hinder in that task.

Prodigal sons and daughters who are normal save for some accidental divergence from legal or actual right-doing must be helped to come back into the line of social usefulness. And, above all, the facts of juvenile delinquency should give us impetus, strong and intelligent, toward a social and family discipline that shall make freedom and happiness of childhood a way to social order and never a pathway toward social degeneracy or personal wrong-doing.

Questions on Prodigal Sons and Daughters

1. What has been the general trend of social ideal and practice in the treatment of the criminal and the vicious?

2. What part has the family played in restraint of evil tendency or in responsibility before the law for offences against social order?

3. What part should the family now play in these vital social matters?

4. What is "sentimentality" and what is "justice" in dealing with the prodigal?

5. What can be done through physical and mental examinations, by experts, of all children, to prevent development of criminality, vice, and waywardness?

6. In 1724 the English law held any one legally responsible for action subversive of law and order unless he was "totally deprived of his understanding and memory and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild beast." Since 1843, the criterion of responsibility under the law is "knowledge of what is right or wrong in the particular case." Following the same line of change, our statutes now ask, in addition, if the person on trial is generally competent to understand and to obey social rules of conduct. Is this trend toward the lessening or toward the increase of crime and vice?

7. What does social well-being require shall be done for and with those proved incapable of social habits?

8. Head "The Socially Inadequate; How Shall We Designate and Sort Them?" by Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in American Journal of Sociology, July, 1921. This is an attempt to introduce a blanket term under which feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic, including delinquent and wayward; epileptic; inebriate, including drug habitues; diseased, including tuberculous, lepers, and others with chronic infectious diseases; blind, including all of seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seriously impaired hearing; deformed, including the crippled; and dependent, including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors in "homes," chronic charity-aided folk, paupers, and ne'er-do-wells, may be listed. This article attempts to make a classification inclusive, yet subject to minute subheading, which may make reports more definite in listing human beings.

Is such an attempt wise, and if so, how would each member of this group classify the "socially inadequate?"

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.