Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, HeredityGruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Science
Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Children
One of the things that presents a difficulty in every generation is
the fact that the social and moral ideals change from age to age. We
are thus constantly tempted to put into the characters of our
children those traits that were valued highly by our parents,
without always considering the importance of each item for the days
in which our children will play their parts. Thus it comes about
that many of the virtues that have a traditional value may be
questioned when offered as staples for citizens of to-morrow.
Obedience, for example, is a permanent necessity in a society that
rests upon the assumption that one or a few chosen men represent the
will of the gods on earth, but has only a transitory value in a
democracy. As someone has said, obedience in childhood must be
considered as a scaffold that is useful while the lasting parts of
the structure are being put in place; when the desired structure is
completed, obedience is naturally removed as of no further service.
Now the kind of discipline required in a democracy calls for an
attitude or disposition that makes cooperation with others come as a
matter of course; it calls for the making of decisions, or the
forming of opinions, on the basis of facts; and it calls for the
habit of taking due account of the rights of others. The training
for this class of habits is best obtained through methods that take
full account of children's interests.
Just as the older outlook turned to "discipline" as a means for
obtaining freedom, the new psychology utilizes freedom as a means
for obtaining discipline. In both cases the end is of course the
same--that is, the liberation of the human spirit and the organizing
of the individual's powers to the greatest good. But as our ideas of
human relations and of values have changed, science has given us new
methods for attaining the final goals that we set ourselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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