Religious Education in the Family | Page 5

to snatch a meal, or to sleep.
How can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.
Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living,
that just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all
the activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long
could the family as a unit continue under these conditions?
The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we

apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop
large belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically
done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.
§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT
It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of
the industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each
family was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more
than a nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such
as workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home
furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its
own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any
syndication of effort except in the church.
The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker
and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning
a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually
learned their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of
the house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched
the glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their tasks.
The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of each
day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a large
share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system, to a
large extent the family lost the father.
When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken
from it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical,

but the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy
seeks to realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing;
schooling was perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the
incalculable value of informality and reality. The father gone and the
mother still fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical
training for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand,
the young became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of
the voracious factory system.
This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place of
the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the father
and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now loses
the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six hours of
the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The family, once
living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has reached out into
factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been markedly
reduced.
But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in
the form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made
by the women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves,