Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 2

VIRTUE



CHAPTER I
CHILDREN AND PARENTS
The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called "the
century of the child." When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen
Key, who has most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view,
one asks oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought
much to the child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our
century, parents may for the most part be divided into two classes:
those who act as if their children existed only for their benefit, and
those who act as if they existed only for their children's benefit, the
results, she adds being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents
tyrannise over the child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an
arbitrary discipline too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of
discipline and would model him into a copy of themselves, though
really, she adds, it ought to pain them very much to see themselves
exactly copied. The second group of parents may wish to model their
children not after themselves but after their ideals, yet they differ
chiefly from the first class by their over-indulgence, by their anxiety to
pamper the child by yielding to all his caprices and artificially
protecting him from the natural results of those caprices, so that instead
of learning freedom, he has merely acquired self-will. These parents do
not indeed tyrannise over their children but they do worse; they train
their children to be tyrants. Against these two tendencies of our century
Ellen Key declares her own Alpha and Omega of the art of education.
Try to leave the child in peace; live your own life beautifully, nobly,
temperately, and in so living you will sufficiently teach your children to
live.
It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the

duty of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace
is the best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All
these questions about education are rather idle. There are endless
theories of education but no agreement concerning the value of any of
them, and the whole question of education remains open. I am here
concerned less with the duty of parents in relation to their children than
with the duty of children in relation to their parents, and that means that
I am not concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still
presents no serious problems, since they have not yet developed a
personality with self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one
attitude must condition the other attitude. The reaction of children
against their parents is the necessary result of the parents' action. So
that we have to pay some attention to the character of parental action.
We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children.
Thus if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we
seem to find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to
either of Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been
compounded of severity and independence; children were first strictly
compelled to go their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way.
There seems a certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful
whether it can fairly be regarded as more unreasonable than either of
the two modern methods deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had
points for admiration. It was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded,
as any fortifying discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for
freedom, and it is precisely there that the more timid and clinging
modern way seems to fail.
We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
concerning old English domestic life, the Paston Letters. Here we find
that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to
serve in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education
really took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in
knowledge of life. Such education was considered so necessary for a
youth that a father who kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent

of his duty to his family. A knowledge of the world was a necessary
part, indeed the chief part, of a youth's training for life. The remarkable
thing is that this applied also to a large extent to the daughters. They
realised in those days, what is only beginning to be realised in ours,[1]
that, after all, women live in the world just as much, though differently,
as men live in the world, and that it is quite as