Revival: The New Generation (1930)

The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children

Victor Francis Calverton, Samuel Daniel Schmalhausen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351338820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This is the second presentation by these editors of a collection of essays dealing with the changing point of view relative to morals, particularly as they affect the marital state. The contributions to this volume include all of those names that have become prominent in the field of psychology and sociology. The one question that arises in the mind of the critic is whether or not it is wise to distribute for general reading to a popular audience such discussions of sex perversion as this volume makes available. The essays are all of interest, although many of the authors are unnecessarily verbose.

PART I.—PARENTS VERSUS CHILDREN

Education: Savage And Civilized

by John Langdon Davies

WHEN we speak of a savage community, we mean one where there is hardly any progress from one generation to another, where change is looked on with more than suspicion and all human energies are concentrated upon maintaining the status quo. Such communities are usually so busy defending themselves in the primeval struggle against unsubdued nature, that they can do little but dig themselves in and be stubborn in the face of circumstances. A civilized community, a purely relative term, is one wherein progress and change are the life-blood of every activity, economic, aesthetic, ethical ; its citizens may allow a healthy conservatism to hold a watching brief for things as they are, but they never forget that without evolution there is no life. Pericles, in summing up the whole art of being civilized, especially emphasized that the Athenians showed their civility by forever seeking after a new thing.

And so too with savage parents and civilized parents: savage parents are those who regard education as the art of making out of their children replicas of themselves; their watchword is, “What was good enough for me, is good enough for my children.” Civilized parents are those who use every available device and ingenuity to prevent their children’s being like themselves; they seek for an education which will enable the next generation to face life a few steps further on. There are rudimentarily civilized parents in many primitive societies; civilized communities, so-called, are honeycombed with savage ones.

The task of savage parents in educating their children is far easier than that of civilized ones; for the former know precisely what they want, while the latter only know what they do not want, and have to call upon their imagination, a fatiguing exercise, for their more positive ideals. Savage parents regard education as being much like the art of making boxes of toy soldiers; a dozen “useful citizens”, a dozen “God-fearing clean men”; all neatly painted and bent into the correct rigid drill-like attitudes. They have an easy task to choose the right college for their sons: a little trouble will reveal where the most successful generals, lawyers, business men, bible-class leaders were molded; while it is still easier to cut the knot and send the son to his father’s college, which, if it has preserved itself from change, ought to turn him out better than any other institution can. It is when you look for the college which will turn out the best human being, judged by the higher standards of the unborn future, that the real difficulties begin.

All educational systems are largely concerned with the fitting of the child to become a satisfactory member of the community. This is the central problem of all education; and if we want light upon how it is to be tackled in our own cases, we cannot do better than turn an eye to the way in which primitive communities have solved it. Our own ideas bear within them indelible traces of their lowly origin in the minds of our even more savage ancestors, and the key to many an educational difficulty has been thrown into the swamps of the Congo or lost in the sands of Australia, where we must look for it before we can unlock the fate of truth.

Here is an interesting summary¹ of the means adopted by most savage communities for educating children, that is, for turning boys into men:

1. Purification by emetics, sweating, bathing, scrubbing with sand and the making of cutaneous incisions.

2. Circumcision, incision, and sub-incision.

3. Physical suffering caused by a great variety of tests of endurance such as extreme fatigue in the chase, tattooing, cicatrizing, heating, cooling, knocking out teeth, immobility for long periods, and whipping.

4. Moral instruction, including tribal usages, relating to obedience, courage, truth, hospitality, sexual relationships, reticence, and perseverance.

5. Transfer of power from elders to novices by the latter’s going through the motions of hauling a rope, blood transfer, rubbing with crystals, or blowing.

6. Isolation accompanied by a taboo of silence, disguise by paint and dress, reception of a new name, and rebirth into the social group with many formalities.

7. Training in magic of the so-called sympathetic variety whereby love is requited or an enemy injured.

We have only to read this curriculum to be struck by a very important fact: with scarcely any change it is the curriculum used to this day in our own communities as an integral part of normal orthodox education; we do not have to go to China or Peru, or the Warramunga or the Waja to find it in use, we can stop in New York or London. It is, of course, perfectly true that no public school or college prospectus speaks of the contents of section three being normally practiced within their establishments, but that proves nothing; for hardly any of the most important features of education are mentioned in these pieces of conventional hypocrisy. They deal only with that insignificant part of education which is transacted between the faculty and the students and scarcely mention the vital part which is purely a matter between one student and another.

We can put the whole matter briefly in this way: the orthodox educational establishment is a device for carrying out two quite different forms of education at once; on the one hand the more or less civilized, or at any rate conventionalized form, for which the faculty are responsible; on the other the savage form, summarized above, which is in the hands of the students themselves. Since its details are such that the orthodox civilized conscience will not permit of adults openly countenancing it, it is carried on in a clandestine manner, but since the adult, being still three parts savage, heartily believes in its necessity, he gives every facility for its continuance, provided he can pretend to know nothing about it. The existence of this dual education, the civilized, or at least conventional, controlled by the faculty, and the savage, controlled by the students themselves, is of the utmost significance to the understanding of modern life; for the people who are making such a slaughter of human happiness in the world to-day are the natural product of it.

The key to the lasting effects of our orthodox educational system lies in this, that we are most influenced and shaped by what we learned from our contemporaries and that they taught us a savage code enforced by savage sanctions; or to use a synonym which may bring out the significance more forcibly, a neurotic code enforced by neurotic sanctions. What we learned about morality in the school chapel or in the headmaster’s study fell off us with the greatest ease, what we learned from our fellow savages stuck; and either we spent the next ten years painfully unlearning it again, or we remain savages to this day. Moreover the adults responsible for orthodox education are in the conspiracy because although they are compelled to a pretended acquiescence in civilization, they unconsciously believe that the savage code and method is better. This tendency is made more universal by the fact that these particular adults have so often never been in the world of men at all: from seven until thirteen they went to one school, from thirteen to eighteen to another, from eighteen to twenty-two to a glorified school called a university and then back to school again immediately as a master. No wonder the savage tradition can be maintained unbroken when those chiefly responsible have never moved among men and women of the world: the orthodox schoolmaster is a man whose whole life has been passed in the atmosphere of the neurotic race memory with not even an occasional cooling breath from the grown-up world.

Let us look at some details of this moral code which is never the adult code but always the neurotic savage code learned from the race memory kept alive by the group traditions of the school. As in all more primitive communities it deals with “tribal usages relating to obedience, courage, truth, sexual relationships, reticence and perseverance.”

Obedience: “the bond of rule,” and the mainspring of savage education. To savages it is always the obedience to be desired in parts of a machine; mechanical subservience all the better for being “unreasoned.” When the English Workers Educational Association approached a certain manufacturer with offers of classes for his factory girls: “I don’t want my girls to think,” he replied. “If they begin thinking they will get their hands caught in the machinery. I want them as mechanical as possible.” Savage education in an English Public School² teaches obedience precisely as the Warramunga teach it, as a complete sinking of the personality in the race memory or tradition and the herd mind or public opinion. That is why these schools have always been so successful as preparations for savage situations in adult life; for example, the winning of the battle of Waterloo: the posthumous winning of that battle on their playing fields is the chief business of English public schools to this day. Since civilization is largely the refusal of the individual to sink his glimmerings of common-sense in the neurotic herd it is clear what a powerful influence towards savagery an education based on this type of obedience must be.

Courage: To the savage group mind, courage boils down to the ability to endure physical pain without making a grimace. In orthodox schools arm-twisting, ear-pulling, frog-marching and other delights, in which the race memory is rich, are used as a means to inculcate the virtue. And so often the real object is not to make the sufferer virtuous, but to give his instructors plenty of the pleasure of cruelty. In America initiations into college fraternities embrace nearly all the items included in our list of savage tortures, with the possible exception of the more difficult surgical operations such as sub-incision. In England I myself have seen a boy of eleven forcibly held down while some thirty or forty small boys were compelled to beat him in turn by the presiding bullies. He attended the next class in a very natural state of collapse, and when the head teacher found himself disturbed by the sobs, he said, “Really, if you can’t control yourself, you had better go home.” There was no indiscreet delving into possible causes; the adult was too wise to risk revealing any emanation of the savage clandestine system; simply a hint that the child had failed to show “courage,” just as an Australian child may scream from time to time while being circumcised with a flint knife—a rare and unfortunate lapse from virtue. Nor was the boy in question one of those “exceptional boys” who must be “expected to have a bad time”: he grew up to do all the orthodox things desired by the public school system of its products, to be captain of the school, captain of the football fifteen, a scholar at Cambridge, and to be killed in the Great War. Among Australian savages an important part of the educational curriculum is the roasting of the small boy over a hot fire; the same thing was done in Tom Brown’s School Days and I myself have met with examples in my own school career. As for “cooling,” only last year I heard of a millionaire’s daughter at one of the leading American universities having to remain in a zero temperature for an hour or so at night as part of her initiation into a sorority.

Such cruelties technically forbidden by law at least when done by adults to children are a commonplace in orthodox education. No adults, no school authority could advocate torture as an educational weapon; torture is not so much as mentioned in any school prospectus ; but subconsciously most adults believe it to be valuable and provide for its practice in secret. Thus they avoid responsibility without having to give up methods on which they rely. As adults in modem society their bullying of children must be confined to intellectual and emotional bullying, but the necessary physical bullying is safeguarded by herding a few hundred savages together and putting them on their honor—the honor of neurotic savages—and looking the other way. In this way physical “courage” which lies at the root of all the vices, is secured in modern education in spite of the humanitarian alloy which prevents instruction in it by adults.

Truth: The orthodox savage parent values nothing above truth, in his son. “If my son told a lie,” he says, “I would thrash him to within an inch of his life.” The very idea sends a quiver of ecstasy down his spine. I have heard precisely this sentiment expressed three times by three different savages, all of them respected in their community. Truth as taught by one savage to another in orthodox schools is simply loyalty to the group—a blending of lies which will keep the group from being found out. It is not surprising that in adult life truth is assumed to be synonymous with propaganda. Loyalty to a neurotic group mind is hardly likely to produce any nice distinction between the two. To thine own group be true, it then shall follow, as the night the day, thou canst not help being false to other men. It is often called “learning to play for your side” and comes high in the neurotic code. Its use to the community is that it trains people to realize how wrong Nurse Edith Cavell was, when she said, “Patriotism is not enough.” Besides, the battle of Waterloo was won by propaganda, by that idea of truth learned on the playing fields of the public schools.

Sexual relationships: Probably not even economic injustice causes so much pain in the world of adult human beings as the sex code learned entirely from the neurotic group mind of childhood. Sex is always learned from the savage race memory and the instruction of adults has hardly any influence at all. Put four hundred boys together and keep them “ignorant” of anything civilized about sex, and far from remaining in a state of frigid suspended animation, their “being’s inmost cells” will boil over in response to the stimuli and reactions imparted by their fellow savages. We do not learn the art of sexual conduct from manuals, nor from lectures given by adults, but from sexual experience. Such experience may consist only of feelings and not at all of acts, but nevertheless it is authentic experience which alone teaches us how to behave sexually. Now the sexual experience of four hundred boys isolated together in a school can only be of two sorts, autoerotic and homosexual, and these two lie at the basis of all sex knowledge imbibed by those whose education has been orthodox. The attitude of English education towards homosexuality can only be described as droll. The education itself is tinged through and through with the Greek tradition; in the classrooms we translate the Greek tragedians; on the playing fields we emulate the Discobolus; yet we are constantly guarded against the emotion which permeates everything in Greek art, literature and history. On the one hand we are violently punished for any homosexual lapse; on the other we are soaked in the Greek spirit and incarcerated in barracks where heterosexual stimulus does not exist. Occasionally two boys are found to have been too far soaked in the Greek spirit, and expulsion follows. Of course, there are cases like that of Young Woodley where a boy falls in love with one of the few women he ever sees, a housemaid, or a master’s wife, but such cases are rare, largely because of the type of women schoolmasters marry, and the type of women these employ as housemaids. Thus the sex education of the ordinary public school boy consists according to his temperament either of messy and vulgar attempts at autoerotism and homosexuality, or of something even more dangerous, idealistic Galahad-like attachments to women he sees in holiday time, which are complicated and usually wrecked by the loathing of sex set up in such a boy’s mind by his term-time experiences. It is not surprising that such exposure to the savage neurotic group mind during the course of orthodox education usually insures that in after life a civilized outlook on sex will not be forthcoming.

Reticence: The refusal to show any emotion of pleasure whatever the provocation unless the group as a whole sanctions it. Its keynote is a complete indifference to anything which is an individual pleasure rather than a group pleasure. You may enjoy football, nay, you must enjoy it, because it is a group pleasure, but all the little savages will be at your throat if you show signs of enjoying a picture, a poem or a sunset. Here the English public school system has certainly triumphed and produced a veritable fear of ever expressing feeling. Every boy is taught by the savage group mind that nobody but a baby ever cries; and it is probably true that young children cry more than adults; they have more to cry for. We cry less because our reactions are blunted, not because we have greater self-control. The process of learning self-control, as it is called, the process of blunting the emotions, as it really is, is well cared for in savage education.

Perseverance: or habitual mental and physical overstraining. An essential quality in any human being is the ability to stick to something provided that something is valuable and attainable. In the savage educational code it is sticking for sticking’s sake. The object is never the one for which perseverance is obviously most worth while, namely the ability to live a civilized adult life in the future; it is always some activity which leads to deformity of body or mind; a sport which will strain the heart, or an examination which will warp the brain. The former is the aim nearer the heart of the savage group mind, the latter appeals more to the adults; since it is the savages who rule, it is the former rather than the latter which is regarded by the school as most essential to a praiseworthy character. Hence it is “the thing” to persevere to the extent of deformity at games, but not “the thing” to persevere at work; this, seeing what the orthodox curriculum usually involves, is not altogether to the bad. The boy leaves school with a strained heart but only an empty brain, not a strained one; there is still a chance to fill it, though a very small one, it is true, seeing that the knowledge of how to fill can only be acquired in early life, when the savage domination is most complete.

So much for the savage, orthodox, neurotic code of education as it is to be found in English public schools and—unless I am mistaken—certain American institutions of polite learning. It seems to have taken a war to convince a minority of human beings that the system was not worth the candle. At least the post-war period has seen a powerful increase of the movement away from orthodox education. There are still plenty of old gentlemen who read romantic virtues into their old public school, just as they read glory into the trenches; but the younger generation of more thoughtful parents regard orthodox schools as places where their children will be surrendered to a neurotic atmosphere. Our attitude toward children has radically changed: it used to be the fashion to regard them as trailing clouds of glory from a land beyond the womb and these clouds, we pretend, made of childhood the brightest, purest, happiest of episodes before the prison house of adult life had to be entered. This attitude was made up of hypocrisy and deliberate blindness; nobody who really remembers his childhood can pretend to believe in it; though it is true the symptoms of the disease called childhood are often not painful to oneself but to others: a fact which sometimes obscures its nature. The man who says that there was no bullying in his school was probably the bully rather than the bullied.

Parents now frankly admit that children are sick persons to be nursed into the health and happiness of adulthood. Unfortunately the realization of this fact does not in itself lead direct to the palace of wisdom. Savage parents do not always give place to civilized ones, a third type is very noticeable; it may be called the anti-savage type. The anti-savage parent is reacting away from the restraints and repressions of its own childhood; it is in revolt against the emptiness, emotional and intellectual, of its own life, an emptiness largely the product of orthodox education; it has read Freud or Jung or Adler. Indeed if the anti-savage parent were a race horse one might say that it was got by Psychoanalysis out of Post-war Disillusion. Now, whatever the breed of the sire—some suspect a mongrel strain even there—there can be no doubt that the mother had very bad blood in her veins, and therefore their offspring is of a mongrel disposition.

The anti-savage parent can almost always be discovered by its use of the phrase “freedom in education.” Freedom is taken to be as absolutely good as obedience is in the savage code. And yet we can say of it, as of all ideas in education, that it is not the thing itself which is good or bad, but the motive of the adult. We must ask why the adult wants “freedom” for the child in given instances: if the motive is good then freedom will be good for the child, but there are often bad motives. Chief of these is desire to save trouble—the parent who gives its child complete freedom is really saying, “Go to hell your own way and don’t wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Parents Versus Children
• Part II The Child Versus Civilization
• Part III The Family Romance
• Part IV Potentialities of the Child
• Part V Education and Enlightenment
• Biographical Notes
• Index