The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Turning to the other great domestic industry, the care of children, we
may see hopeful signs of growth. The nursemaid is improving. Those who
can afford it are beginning to see that the association of a child's
first years with low-class ignorance cannot be beneficial. There is a
demand for "trained nurses" for children; even in rare cases the
employment of some Kindergarten ability. Among the very poor the
day-nursery and Kindergarten are doing slow, but beautiful work. The
President of Harvard demands that more care and money be spent on the
primary grades in education; and all through our school systems there
is a healthy movement. Child-study is being undertaken at last.
Pedagogy is being taught as a science. In our public parks there is
regular provision made for children; and in the worst parts of the
cities an incipient provision of playgrounds.
There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day than this new thought
about the child. In what does it consist? In recognising "the child,"
children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed
only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of
absolute personal ownership--the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked
indulgence, of the private home. Children are at last emerging from the
very lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad level of
common citizenship. That which no million separate families could give
their millions of separate children, the state can give, and does. Our
progress, so long merely mechanical, is at last becoming personal,
touching the people and lifting them as one.
Now what is all this leading to? What have we to hope--or to dread--in
the undeniable lines of development here shown? What most of us dread
is this: that we shall lose our domestic privacy; that we shall lose
our family dinner table; that woman will lose "her charm;" that we
shall lose our children; and the child lose its mother. We are mortally
afraid of separation.
The unfolding and differentiation of natural growth is not separation
in any organic sense. The five-fingered leaf, closely bound in the bud,
separates as it opens. The branches separate from the trunk as the
trees grow. But this legitimate separation does not mean disconnection.
The tree is as much one tree as if it grew in a strait-jacket. All
growth must widen and diverge. If natural growth is checked, disease
must follow. If allowed, health and beauty and happiness accompany it.
The home, if it grows on in normal lines, will not be of the same size
and relative density as it was in ancient times; but it will be as
truly home to the people of to-day. In trying to maintain by force the
exact limits and characteristics of the primitive home, we succeed only
in making a place modern man is not at home in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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