The Family and the School : Part 1

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 15 of 22)

"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others." - Herbert Spencer.

"The final value of all institutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard." - John Dewey.

"Socialized education has four aims:

First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse, - language, number, social forms and conventions.

Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through participation in present social life.

Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.

Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized." - George Albert Coe.

"The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.' But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself." - Emerson.

"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. It depends upon us to make the effort." - Tolstoi.

New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry. - When the power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal service from each class to each class above to the tax system of modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.

When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in doing.

The connection between these movements in education and the family well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.

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.