Religious Education in the Family Part 2

-- 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING

The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the spinning-wheel and the hand loom that c.u.mbered the kitchen of their childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated, that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained practically unchanged.

The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home determines the character of the coming days. In its social relations.h.i.+ps are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of society, central to all its problems and possibilities.

Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are what we are, not by the ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the cla.s.sroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circ.u.mstances that have touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.

The sweetest memories of our lives cl.u.s.ter about the scenes of family life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that claims affectionate grat.i.tude; many look back to a city house wedged into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned, earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the place made it potent.

Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits, tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something better, the apt.i.tude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future should be not whether we can pa.s.s on intact the forms of home organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from the much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the better part, the personal values in the a.s.sociation of lives in the family.

I. References for Study

W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.

Charles R. Henderson, _Social Duties from the Christian Point of View_, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.

C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home_. Religious Education a.s.sociation, $0.25.

II. Further Reading

Jacob A. Riis, _Peril and Preservation of the Home_. Jacobs, Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.

Charles R. Henderson, _Social Elements_. Scribner, $1.50.

Charles F. Thwing, _The Recovery of the Home_. American Baptist Publication Society, $0.15.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. The tendency toward community life ill.u.s.trated in the schools, amus.e.m.e.nt parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose of the family, how far is communal life desirable?

2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable condition for the higher purposes of the family?

3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost by present factory consolidation of industry?

4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those which are now pa.s.sing?

5. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?

6. What are the important things to contend for in this inst.i.tution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home and what are the features which should not be changed?

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Figures taken from C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home_, 1911.

[3] A.J. Todd, _Primitive Family and Education_, p. 21. A most valuable and suggestive book.

[4] Cited by Todd, p. 21.

CHAPTER III

THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE

-- 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE

The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.

This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for ideals. It is written plain in our pa.s.sions and strongest inclinations.

That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we knew this was the only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that

Love and joy are torches lit At altar fires of sacrifice.

With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask, What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in character development? In days when the outer sh.e.l.l of domestic arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?

-- 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--SOCIAL QUALITIES

The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school, city, state, and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.

Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.

The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.

Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any other inst.i.tution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly, ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group is the best possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state, and for world-living.[5] The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as a democracy, depends on the continuance of this inst.i.tution with its peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.

The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.

The small social organization, the family circle of from three members to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient school, training youth to live in social terms.

Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, a.s.sociations, affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.

-- 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE

Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.

"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them, "the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the loyalty, or the love?

The power of this small social group of the family to develop the fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will strengthen the ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in orphan asylums, still less in inst.i.tutions under the cold and impersonal care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small children. The cold, pa.s.sionless, automatic parent, then, would be the ideal--a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by providing adequate training of parents for their duties.

Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.

It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more serious is the cost in care, in nerves, in patience, in all the great elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying, fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.

One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The single child in a family misses something more important than playmates; he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember many families that have grown to beauty of character under the discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books ill.u.s.trate the spirit that blossoms under the trials and hards.h.i.+ps of the struggle of a family for a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.

A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties of blood and similarity, for purposes of the development of personal character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.

The family is an educational inst.i.tution dealing with child-life for its full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.