Yet, with all our effort so much more needs doing that multitudes live
and die wholly ignorant of the world they have come to or of the
race-life of which they are a part. Doctor Du Bois, in his classic
appeal for human comradeship for all, _The Soul of Black Folks_, has
shown what suffering comes to the cultured black man who finds all
cultured men and women of white races forcing him to be an alien
because of his skin. There is a sadder and more terrible, because
unconscious, deprivation; it is that of any one, white or black, rich
or poor, who loses the chance to partake of the culture of the past.
The man or woman, whether able to accomplish much or little on the
practical side of vocational service, whose outlook is bounded by the
narrow, the superficial, the personal, the ephemeral, is missing the
best part of his social inheritance, the capacity to "look before and
after and pine for what is not."
Such a little time we are here! Even a Methuselah might wish to have
in his mental furnishings the glory of the past and the prophetic hope
of the future. All children, not merely a fortunate few, should have
this sense of a group-life of which each is a part, should be able to
see life and see it whole in the social inheritance that belongs alike
to each one of us. Children make a large order upon each generation as
they come into a vast group of all that have been and reach
consciously toward the expanding life of the coming time.
The family must begin that culture by which the order shall be filled,
but no family can answer even the least of the social demands by
itself. "Culture," says Emerson, "shall yet absorb chaos itself,"
Every child has a rightful citizenship in that order-giving world of
thought, of history, of poetry, of art, of science, and of religion.
What a nation we might become if only every child had this, its right,
recognized and fulfilled!
QUESTIONS ON THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY
1. The eighteenth century was called the century of man, the
nineteenth century, of women, and the twentieth, that of the
child. What facts justify this statement?
2. What are the main elements in the modern standard of
child-care, child-protection, and child-nurture?
3. What of these elements can and should the private home supply,
and what must be the community provision and control?
4. In trying to effect both private and public conditions
favorable to the best development of child-life, what should be
the scale of values used, or what should be the order of
effort?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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