The battle for the child: Compulsion, convenience, and conscience in state education

“ The road that man has traveled from the days when might made right, and when children had no claims which the State or parents were bound to respect, to a time when the child is regarded as of first importance, and adults represented in the State declare by law that the child shall be protected and shall have abundant educational advantages, is a long road and at times a very crooked one. Its ups and downs and forward movements have been those of the progress of the race, and in consequence a history of educational progress must be in part a history of the progress of civilization itself. ”

“ But the provision of the means of elementary education, and the imposing of a legal obligation upon each individual parent to utilise the means provided, is not merely or solely for the protection of society. Education confers not only a social benefit upon the community, but a particular benefit upon the individual. Its provision falls not within the merely negative benefits conferred by the State by its protection of the majority against the ignorance and wickedness of the minority, but it belongs to the positive benefits conferred by Government upon its individual members. ”

“ On the administrative side is a whole group of problems relating to forms of organization: the proper educational relationships between the State and its subordinate units; the development of a state educational policy: the types of instruction the State must provide, and compel attendance upon; questions of taxation and support, compulsory attendance, and child labor; the training and oversight of teachers for the service of the State; problems of child health and welfare; the provision of adequate and professional supervision ”

“ In the modern State, the following ideas as to parental authority are generally prevalent. Parental authority involves duties as well as rights. Our laws give rights to parents only in order to enable them to fulfil their duties. They are, in a sense, plenipotentiaries of the State, entrusted with the duty of bringing up their children in a state of bodily, mental, and moral health, and of ensuring that these children shall develop in such a way that they will be useful to society. ”

“ In all day-schools the authority of the head-master is necessarily impaired by that of the father, and the discipline of the school by that of the home; but here this is more than usually the case. The parents even go so far as to trench upon the schoolmaster's domain, reserving to themselves the right of deliberately breaking the school rules, whenever it is convenient to them to do so. ”

“ We hope to see not far in the future a first-class school at this place. We have material in abundance upon which to work. Time, patience and labor will bring success.”
The school at Avery has not made such progress as was hoped for during the year. On the first of January its numbers were decreased by the taking away of most of the larger boys to cut the crops for their parents. The irregularity of attendance is a great obstacle in the way of our success. Some attend for one day, and may not be seen again for a month. Those who have attended regularly have made progress. ”

“ Australia has good public schools. In all the states primary education is free and compulsory. In New South Wales if children between seven and fourteen are not sent to school their parents are fined one dollar and twenty-five cents for the first offence and five dollars or seven days’ imprisonment for each subsequent one. There are school officers who hunt up absent pupils, and the truants are sure to be caught. In Sydney a special school for truants has been established with a trained psychologist in charge, who makes a study of the causes and cure of “playing hookey.” ”

“ In like manner, the expense of the special education of the morally defective in Industrial Schools and in other institutions may be justified on the ground of the present and future protective benefit to society. In these cases parental government has either altogether ceased or become too weak to act as an effective restraining force, and as a consequence the community for its own self-preservation has to undertake the control and education of the actual or incipient youthful criminal. ”

“ In the second place, while much has been done since the advent of compulsory elementary education to better the means of education and to increase the facilities for the higher instruction of the youth of the country, there is a widespread belief that all the hopes held out by [Pg 6] the early advocates of universal compulsory education have not been realised, and that our Primary Schools in large measure have failed to turn out the type of citizen which a State such as ours requires for her after-service. ”

“ There is need, for otherwise the child suffers through the criminal neglect of the parents, and the community must interfere for the sake of the future social efficiency of the individual and of the nation. There is justification, for here as in the case of the parents of the morally defective, parental responsibility has either ceased to act or become too weak a motive force to be effective in securing the welfare of the child. As the individual parent neglects his duty, so and to the corresponding degree to which this neglect extends, must the duty be enforced by the State. ”

“ Hence, as a nation, we have rarely considered for its own sake and as a whole the problem of the education of the children. And until we have done so—until we have made clear to ourselves the kind of future citizen which as a State we desire to rear up—our educational agencies must manifest a like [Pg 3] indefiniteness, a like inconsistency, and a like want of connection as do our educational aims and ideals. ”

“ Shown to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.
COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State, and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide. ”

“ If every pupil had to pay school fees, a strict enforcement of compulsory school attendance would involve gross injustice to the poorer classes. If the State makes school attendance compulsory, the State must make it possible for every child to attend school. Many children fail to attend school because they lack proper clothing, and especially boots and shoes. Is it not the duty of the education authorities to provide for poor children of school age the clothing they need to make it possible for them to attend school? ”

“ State schools are absolutely free, and even books are provided. A smart child can win bursaries, and go from the primary school to the high school, and then on to the University, and win to a profession without his education costing his parents anything at all. When I was a boy the State of Tasmania used to send every year two Tasmanian scholars to Oxford University, giving them enough to pay for a course there. That has since been stopped, but many Australians come to British Universities now—mostly to Oxford and Edinburgh—with money provided by their parents. ”

“ The funds needed for compulsory education in rural areas shall be shared by the people's governments at various levels on the basis of the items and proportions as prescribed by the State Council.
⁠People's governments at various levels shall gratuitously provide textbooks for the school-age children and adolescents whose families are in financial difficulties, and subsidize resident students in living expenses. ”

“ It is objected that the feeding of school children conflicts with the principle of parental responsibility, and that it impairs the intimacy of family life, which demands, as all will admit, that the members of the family shall meet one another at least at meals. Our aim, we are told, should therefore be to do away with the poverty which is the cause of so many children coming to school underfed. But school feeding may be so arranged that the parents are charged for the meals at cost. ”

“ The State will carry the children to school on its railways free. If there is no railway it will send a ’bus round to collect children in scattered localities. Failing that, in the case of families which are quite isolated, and which are poor, the State will try to persuade the parents to keep a governess or tutor, and will help to pay the cost of this. The effect of all this effort is that in Australia almost every child can read and write.
Going to school in the Bush parts of Australia is sometimes great fun. ”

“ The Australian school child’s health is well looked after. Medical inspection, and often medical treatment, is provided in the city schools, and the school departments of several of the states have travelling hospitals and travelling medical, dental, and eye clinics. ”

“ Freedom of education has no other limitations than those imposed by morals, good customs, public order and national security.
Officially recognized education may not be oriented towards propagating any political partisan tendency.
Parents have the right to choose the educational establishment for their children.
An organic constitutional law shall establish the minimum requirements that have to formulated for each of the levels of basic and intermediate education and shall provide the objective provisions, of general application, that permit the State to monitor its fulfillment. ”

“ It seems probable that the appeals for assistance on the part of worthy pupils will be greater than usual on account of the smaller returns their best endeavors to help themselves have secured.
A severe and protracted drought has affected all this region, so that the cotton crop was small and required early attention, and pupils were taken out of school and attendance and pay were rendered small. We meet under the shadow of sorrow, having lost five students by death during the vacation, one of them a beloved member of the senior class. ”

“ The necessity under which many labor, of teaching school in order to pay their own school bills, makes attendance somewhat irregular. The grade of the school is being steadily advanced, and under efficient teachers and Principal, the pupils are making solid advancement. ”

“ But in the third class of cases parental responsibility may be an active and willing force, yet the means available may be so limited in extent that the child is in the chronic condition of being underfed. ”

“ I must need limits myself more or less to parental-filial relations as these develop in homes in which it becomes possible for parents consciously to influence the lives of their children, not such in which the whole problem of life revolves around bread-winning. I do not consider the latter type of home a free home. It is verily one of the severest indictments of the social order that [Pg 7] in our land as in all lands bread-winning is almost the sole calling of the vast majority of its homes. ”

“ There are many who argue to-day against coercive reformatory education, on the ground that personal freedom and parental authority should be inviolable. We even find some who attack modern ideas from the standpoint of various legal theories. Such persons tell us that coercive reformatory education interferes more than punishment with the child’s individual liberty, and that it absolutely ignores parental authority. The criminal authorities have absolutely no right, in their view, to supervise a child’s education, but merely to punish it or to set it at liberty. ”

“ The state concededly has power to require and control the education of its citizens, but it cannot by a general law compelling attendance at public schools preclude attendance at a private school adequate in its instruction, where the parent seeks to secure for the child the benefits of religious instruction not provided by the public school. ”

“ Without recourse to such compulsion the state is free to compel attendance at school and require teaching by instruction and study of all in our history and in the structure and organization of our government, including the guaranties of civil liberty which tend to inspire patriotism and love of country. ”

“ It may be good to persuade another of the validity of one's judgments, but such persuasion on the part of parents should be most reluctant lest children feel compelled to adopt untested parental opinion, and the docility of filial agreement finally result in intellectual dishonesty or aridity. Than this nothing could be more ungenerous, utilizing the intimacies of the home and the parental vantage-ground in the interest of enforcement of one's own viewpoints. ”

“ Whether or not this entail the necessity of physical separation is less important than that it be clearly understood that there is a higher law even than parental mandate or filial whim, that parents and child alike do well to understand. Parents dare not fail to act upon the truth that, if intellectual coercion be bad, the unuttered and unexercised compulsions toward a lower moral standard are infinitely worse. A child may not forget that, when parental dictate is repudiated in favor of a higher law, it must in truth be a higher law which exacts obedience. ”

“ In the more advanced countries, but only in these, we find the following legislative provisions for the regulation of child-labour. Child-labour and compulsory school attendance are contradictories. If merely in the interest of the protection of child-labour, the State must ordain that every child shall attend school from the age of six to the age of twelve, and must employ every means in its power to see that the duty of school attendance is never evaded. Regulations are made for the prevention of mendicancy by children. ”

“ The children, by their attendance, give the best evidence that the Vacation School is in their opinion a good way of spending a holiday and the report gives greater detail as to the reason. The teachers tell how “listless manners give place to animation and energy, and how the tendency prevalent among the boys to loaf or aimlessly to idle away their holidays was checked by the introduction of an objective, the absence of which is chiefly responsible for the loafing 86tendency.... ”

“ It is really fairer to say that what is viewed as the parental instinct of possession is really nothing more than the eagerness of parents somehow to bestow upon children the unearned fruits of experience. It is the primary and inalienable right of children to blunder, to falter upon the altar-steps, and blundering is a teacher wiser though costlier than parents. Reckoning and rueing the price they have paid for the lessons of experience, parents, whose good-will is greater than their wisdom, insist upon the right to transmit to children through teaching these lessons of experience. ”

“ As the freeing of elementary education can be justified on the ground that the education of the child is necessary for the future protection of the State, so on similar grounds it may be urged that the nutrition of the child is also necessary. ”

“ Lastly, if we understand the true nature and function of the State, we need have no fear that the State should [Pg 45] control the education of all the people. What we have to fear on the one side is the bureaucratic control of education, and on the other its control and direction by one class in the interests of itself. The State exists for—the reason of its very being is to secure—the welfare of the individual, and the State approaches its perfection when its organisation is fitted to secure and ensure the widest scope for the full and free development of each individual. ”