The Family and the School : Part 6

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 20 of 22)

May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the "Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great moment throughout the ages of the past.

Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.

The New Training in Sex-education. - The need to have the right sort of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most effective way. In the admirable volume on Sex-Education written by Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia University, a list of eight reasons for sex-instruction is given which are here quoted by permission:

1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health.

2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or immorality of men.

3. The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prostitution.

4. There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the result of the common irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women.

5. There is need of more general following of a definite moral standard regarding sex-relationships.

6. There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning all sexual processes.

7. There is very general misunderstanding of sexual life as related to healthy and happy marriage.

8. There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that concern future generations.

To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of family needs in education will give assent. This is not the place for specific treatment of prostitution and its effect upon the home, nor is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of sex-education and of social hygiene now advocated and beginning to show encouraging results in use. The simple statement must be made that if, as Spencer has said, one test of education is its ability to make men good husbands and fathers, the element of sex-education must not be omitted from the educative process. How or where the necessary information and stimulus to truly social conduct may or should be given is matter for another statement.

Heroes Held Up for Admiration. - One point, usually wholly ignored, must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past. That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear in outline the lives of the great and good. It may be that some prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in social judgment required for full understanding of the character without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled.

This is particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its difficulties.

Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion in universal conditions to universal laws of right. His method leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and place.

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.