=Dangerous Rebound from Ancient Family Discipline.=--Again, the
Children's and the Domestic Relations Courts bear testimony to the
fact that to-day we are in a rebound from inherited forms of
discipline of children and youth which have given to all, immigrant
and native-born alike, a feeling that society exists for their benefit
and that they owe nothing to society in return. The very
standardization of child-care by public demand, in matters of health
and education, of free books and free recreation and free music and
free parks and playgrounds and even free lunches in schools, and free
baths and medical and nursing care--all that is increasingly called
for and provided out of the public purse for the nurture and
development of child-life--tend toward giving children and youth the
idea that the world belongs to them.
The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young
is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and
the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own
development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals
that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit
people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is,
however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and
effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of
the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to
assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There
is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its
inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to
what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in
conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown,
have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to
service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline
implanted in all responsive natures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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