The Eugenic Marriage Volume I Part 4

"Education for parenthood cannot be completed at this early age. The strategic years for making it most effective are from sixteen to twenty-four, when home-making instincts are waking and strongest. We have 15,000,000 young people of these ages in no schools, and eligible for such instruction. All state boards of education were recently pet.i.tioned by the American a.s.sociation for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality to urge the appointment of commissions on continuation schools of home-making, to investigate conditions and needs in their respective states and to report plans for meeting them effectively through such continuation schools or cla.s.ses."

DIFFICULTY IN DEVISING A SATISFACTORY EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM.--It will be observed that each of these authoritative writers criticises the system of education now in vogue. The criticism is not, nor could it justly be, specialized. It is simply an expression, from different viewpoints, of the feeling that we are not doing ourselves justice as yet, we are groping after something better. It may be, as I have previously stated, that no[28]

satisfactory system of education will be evolved until the laws of kindred sciences, which have organic relations.h.i.+p to what we understand as education, are fixed and better understood. We are just beginning to appreciate the true meaning of environment. We know little about heredity, but enough to appreciate its vital importance. Psychology is a realm of much hope, but we have only tasted of its surface promise and know little of the mysteries it may unfold. Eugenics, the infant giant of science, promises to establish the race on an enduring foundation. These sciences have laws which we do not yet understand; they relate to that part of human evolution which mind dominates. The quality of the mind's dominion depends upon the mind's education and environment, and since the laws of these sciences, upon which a perfect system of education depends, have not been revealed, it is quite evident that all past systems of education have been more or less deficient. It is further evident that evolution has suffered as a result of the mind's imperfect education,--a condition that is manifest all around us.

It must be appreciated, however, that we are discussing a large subject. If we understood all there is to know about environment; if we knew the laws of heredity, and psychology, and eugenics, and then could apply them, and educate the product of this combination of forces, we would be very near to the super-man. One must have a sober mental horizon to evolve the picture which would be the product of the above solution and then to estimate its meaning on human happiness and progress. We are approaching the ethics of right living,--of justice and truth,--the divine in man. At no time in the history of man has civilization been so near a solution of life's supreme problem as at the present moment.

Education is an important function in life's scheme, and while we may regret that it is not possible to formulate a system that would be perfect and capable of immediate application, we can continue to work patiently and hopefully, with a.s.surance that in the near future the problem will be satisfactorily solved. When heredity, psychology, and eugenics combine [29]

to dictate the system, we shall doubtless find, that, in the beginning, it will be a system of individualization. In the interest of health and of justice, and consequently of efficiency, this would seem to be the natural and the logical lead.

So long as human nature is as it is, we must meet conditions as they exist.

We know as parents, and some of us know as physicians, that a task easily performed by one individual, without any apparent harmful results, will tax the capacity of another individual to the very utmost. Any educational system which does not recognize this law, is vicious. Yet such is the system in vogue to-day in America. We must adapt the burden to the endurance of the pupil. The administration of an educational machinery must solve this problem from the individual standpoint.

In the departmental work in our public schools there seems to be no system.

Each teacher prescribes home work without any knowledge of what others of the same grade do, and without any apparent consideration in favor of the individual pupil. The result is that the total amount for each night is absurdly in excess of the capacity of the ordinary, or for that matter the extraordinary, pupil. This engenders nervousness and irritability, and is contrary to the ethics of education,--the fundamental law of which should be the preservation of good health. We must have regard for the physical and mental health of each pupil, and as the capacity of each pupil is different, the system is committing an egregious wrong by sacrificing the weaker instead of adapting the burden according to the strength and endurance of the bearer.

THE HIGH SCHOOL SYSTEM FALLACIOUS.--Even the high schools do not seem to be wisely availing themselves of their opportunity from the eugenic or economic standpoint. According to the report of the Commissioner of Education of the United States the percentage of pupils studying some of the more important subjects in the year 1909-1910 is stated as follows:[30]

Latin, French and German 83 per cent.

Algebra and Geometry 88 " "

English Literature 57 " "

Rhetoric 57 " "

History 55 " "

Domestic Economy,--including sewing, cooking and household economies 4 " "

If only barely four per cent. of the girls in our high schools are studying subjects which directly contribute to their efficiency as home-makers, what are the prospects for worthy parenthood in the light of the fact that seventy-five per cent. of all women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are married?

The function of the high school, so far as girls are concerned, is to conserve health, to train for domestic efficiency and motherhood, and if necessary for economic independence. It must also furnish the stimulus for mental culture and direct a proper aspiration for social enlightenment. The curriculum should include biology, hygiene, psychology, home beautifying, the story-telling side of literature, music and a few other studies tending to make woman more like woman than she is to-day. When we have this, teaching for mothercraft will be more nearly realized.

From the eugenic standpoint the present system of education is not satisfactory. To attain our end it is essential to devise other means of education. It must be remembered, however, that no system of education alone can ever enable us to achieve our end, no matter how perfect the system may be. Education can only draw out what is in the child; it cannot draw out what is not there. What the child is, depends upon its heredity.

The pedagogic ability of the school-master will never make a genius.

A child's mind may be likened to a block puzzle, each block representing a part of a picture, which can only be completed when they are all arranged in their correct places. Each block is an ancestral legacy,--the child's heritage--and to find its proper place in order to complete the [31]

character picture--to solve the riddle of the jumbled blocks,--is the duty of the educator. He can only manipulate what is there, and the test of his system will depend upon his ability to solve the puzzle of the ancestral blocks. We must divorce ourselves from the idea that a child's mind, at the beginning, is an empty s.p.a.ce, to be filled in with knowledge according to the ability of the teacher; or that it is like a sheet of paper, to be written upon. Education, and the educator, is absolutely limited to "drawing out" what heredity put there. Education frequently is given credit which rightly belongs to nature. A child cannot do certain things until nature intends that it should. A baby cannot possibly walk until the nervous mechanism which controls the function of walking is developed. Many children walk at the first attempt, simply because they did not make the first attempt until after nature had perfected the mechanism and the innate ability to walk was already there. Suppose we tried to teach that baby to walk a month before nature was ready; each day we patiently coax it to "step out," we guide it from support to support, and we protect it from stumbling. Some day it walks, and we congratulate ourselves on the victory, when as a matter of fact, we not only had nothing to do with it but were impertinent meddlers, not instructors. Nature was the teacher and she was quite capable of completing the task without our aid. It is reasonable also to a.s.sume that any effort to force a natural function is quite likely to do much harm. We have found this to be so in various departments of education when the system was wrongly conceived. In physical culture this principle has been demonstrated over and over again.

If our ancestral legacy is a good one, our picture blocks will be numerous and it will be possible for the proper system of education, aided by a suitable environment, to arrange them into many designs. If, on the other hand, our heredity did not endow us abundantly the number of our picture blocks may be limited to three or four, and they will be easily arranged so as to form a simple picture. The one represents a child whom heredity has richly endowed, the other one whom it has meagerly supplied with innate[32]

possibilities. Heredity therefore dictates the function of education; and the school-master can only fas.h.i.+on the picture put there. If the ancestral blocks are not there with which to make an elaborate picture he must content himself with what is there,--he or his art cannot create others.

When he congratulates himself on achieving a wonderful result in graduating a particularly brilliant student, he is taking to himself unmerited honors.

If his individual ability is responsible in one instance, why not apply the same system to all pupils? If this system is responsible for the brilliancy of one pupil, why does not the same system make all brilliant? The reader knows the answer,--because heredity did not endow them equally. Men are not born equal, despite the Declaration of Independence.

The school-master is not responsible for the apt and the inapt pupil. He is responsible for his system which dictates how he will differentiate between the apt and the inapt pupil, in order to achieve the best results without injustice to either.

The inefficient teacher is a dangerous equation in the school system. I mean by inefficiency, the quality of being temperamentally unsuited to the profession. There are a large number of anemic, hysterical young women teaching in the public schools of our cities who should not be there. They should not be there in justice to themselves, nor should they be there in justice to their pupils. A strict, yearly medical examination should be made of the teachers to decide their physical and psychical fitness to fill their positions adequately. One teacher, physically or psychically inefficient, can do an inconceivable amount of harm in one school term. We cannot afford to experiment along this line. It means too much, and even at the price of one unhappy child it is too much to pay. The teacher who feels that she is not suited to the work; who has constantly to hold herself and her temper under control; whose nerves are such that she cannot do justice to herself, whose sense of justice is capable of perversion on purely sentimental grounds; or who has lost--or never possessed--the gift of maintaining discipline, should promptly find another position. She is [33]

earning her salary under false pretenses, and that alone condemns her. I believe, that a large percentage of the inefficiency of the New York Schools is due, not to the academic or scholastic inability of the average teacher, but to the average female teacher's physical, and especially her psychical unfitness to teach. We must concede, however, that in many instances the teacher's unfitness is a direct product of the pernicious system itself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From "The Village of a Thousand Souls," Gesell, American Magazine_

Evidence of a Feeble Mind

A dirty shack in a mud hole in the country is merely another reflection of the same condition that causes the slums of the city. In our glowing spirit of humanity we cry out to raise up "the submerged tenth." Rather, should we not stamp them out of existence--treat them as a menace, and not as a thing of pity?

Men, in general, rise; their minds are subjectively or objectively educated to their mental limit. They cannot go beyond it. "The submerged tenth"

exists because its mental limit is low--often close to the upper margins of feeble-mindedness--and because it is mentally incapable of rising to anything else.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From "The Village of a Thousand Souls," Gesell, American Magazine_

Evidence of a Vigorous Mind

The family that is vigorous, healthy in mind and body, "up and coming,"

reflects itself in a hundred different ways. Small matter whether or not it is "an old family," has wealth, social position, a college education. A daughter's or a son's happiness, the real, deep-down-inside happiness that is worth while, may be more certainly insured by marrying with an eye to mentality and stock than by a marriage into a so-called "first family."

Eugenics hath its reward.]

Under an ideal system of education the child would be left absolutely free until the age of seven. We do not believe that the physical apparatus of the mind is prepared for educational interference before that age, and we know that the growth of the brain, physiologically and anatomically, is not complete until after the seventh year.

The greater portion of a child's education necessarily depends upon its environment. Heredity and environment, therefore, are the two factors which determine the characters of any living thing. Heredity gives to the child its potential greatness,--its promise of greatness. Whether these potential qualities ever become real depends upon environment. A child may have the hereditary (innate) ability to become a Shakespeare, but if his environment is not suitable to the development of this potential greatness, he will never realize his hereditary promise. In other words, the innate qualities which he has, and which will make of him a Shakespeare are never "drawn out" or educated. Hence he can never become great until environment furnishes the means to him.

Environment, including education, does not add to the potential qualities of inheritance. Education can only educate what heredity gives; it can give or add nothing itself; it simply educates what is there already. There is plenty of material, but it is not the right material. What educators want is the right kind of material--the material which the eugenists will eventually supply. Or as Mr. Havelock Ellis has expressed it:

"Education has been put at the beginning, when it ought to have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of education we give[34]

children; the primary matter is what sort of children we have to educate.

That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organized social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible unless a sound social organization permits the breeding of individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism move in the same circle."

Education, then, as an exclusive factor, cannot achieve our ideal of race-culture. In order that education may achieve a large measure of success, it must have the proper material, and the right material can only come as a result of the working out of the eugenic principle. Then--in the aftertime--our educational efforts will not be wasted and misdirected, as they are almost wholly to-day.

If we could transmit our acquired characteristics, education would have a relatively smaller, and a much more fixed function in the "general scheme,"

but we cannot. We can only transmit what was inherent in us when created.

This simply means that, at the moment of conception, the child is created,--it is a completed whole,--what it is to be is fixed at that moment, its inherent capacities are formed. Nothing can affect it, in this sense, after that moment. No act of either parent can have any influence on it. Whatever ability the father or mother possessed of an innate character is transmitted to the child at the instant of conception and that innate legacy const.i.tutes the working instrument of the child for all time. It cannot be added to by education, or by environment, but both of these may have a large influence in deciding whether it will be developed to its highest possible limit of attainment.

Education, mental, moral and physical, is limited by this inability to transmit acquired character to the persons educated. Each generation must, therefore, begin, not where their parents left off, but at the point [35]

where they began. The same difficulties and the same problems must be met at the beginning of each generation.

THE TRUE PROVINCE OF EDUCATION.--Education may justly be the instrument, however, which will educate public opinion to a true appreciation of the function of race culture. In this way the cause of the eugenist will greatly prosper, and the race will profit through the effort which will further the conservation of the best and most fit specimens for parenthood.

So also may education, through the molding of public opinion, create sound opinion,--when each individual will be a center of eugenic enthusiasm.

Especially does this responsibility fall upon parents and those who are in charge of childhood. The young must be taught the supreme sanct.i.ty of parenthood. They must be instructed in eugenic principles in a way that will impart to them the definite knowledge that it is the highest and holiest science. The eugenic education of children is the real beginning at the beginning, the indispensable necessity, if race culture is to a.s.sume its transcendent role in modern civilization. It is urgently necessary for both s.e.xes but more especially for girls. "Urgently necessary," because, though Herbert Spencer wrote the following criticism nearly fifty years ago, the conditions are much the same to-day:--

... "But though some care is taken to fit youth of both s.e.xes for society and citizens.h.i.+p, no care whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that, for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children, no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that it const.i.tutes 'the education of a gentleman'; and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities--the management of a family. Is it that this responsibility is but a remote contingency? On the contrary, it is sure to develop on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy?

Certainly not. Of all functions which the adult has to fulfill, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to [36]

fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognized, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed."

It must be our highest educational aim to cultivate or create the eugenic sense. In this way, and in this way only, may we feel satisfied that the foundation, upon which shall be erected the generations that are yet to come, will be of an enduring character.

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CHAPTER IV

"It is only because we are accustomed to this waste of life and are p.r.o.ne to think it is one of the dispensations of Providence that we go on about our business, little thinking of the preventive measures that are possible."