The Family and the School : Part 2

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 16 of 22)

Education a Social Process. - These elements are attempts to socialize education. We say that education is a process in the development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.

Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs. The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency.

The Three Learned Professions. - When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.

New Calls for Trained Leadership. - This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to put into the college and university. This means not only that the family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations must not be ignored.

It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate, the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The education that will finally unite in better understood coöperation all class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life more secure as well as the state more united.

The Special Education of Girls. - The application of new educational ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious to require explanation.

There are those who believe that there is no question of sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the two sexes?

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.