Ellen Key

“ The school should be nothing but the mental dining-room in which parents and teachers prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must have the right to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the parents have the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by it, the food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must be driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans will be drawn up in vain. ”

“ It is impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in future generations. ”

“ The whole factor of love in the being of these women is shrivelled up as a bud that has never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a woman friend, they find an expression for that sacrifice whose real aim they deny or overlook, a something which ends often by avenging itself in a tragic way.
I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the unborn generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute selfishness. ”

“ Mischievous children, obstinate characters, one-sided and original natures, are always martyrs at school because of their desire for action, their spirit of opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-going, amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own individual tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get good certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced into shape—or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a pebble on the seashore. ”

“ Equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being. Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars. ”

“ It will go on, as it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national interests, treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned. The moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of God is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the idea of the soldier will be ennobled. ”

“ The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the power to express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these give man a new share of civilisation and culture. As long as education and social life do not consciously forward this kind of courage, power, and will, the world will remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity, crudeness, force, and selfishness, no matter whether radicals or conservatives, the democratic or aristocratic elements, have the upper hand. ”

“ The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own ”

“ A society which calls itself Christian will no longer tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange gambling, and child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on their mother's breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then tread in the footsteps of their fathers, trampling one another down in the struggle for bread.
Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise existence by humanising the human race.
The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the Christian circles of ideals into another circle. ”

“ By treating the child every moment as one does an adult human being we free education from that brutal arbitrariness, from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have transformed him. Whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit alone, or whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the result is alike deplorable. ”

“ The pure, warm, clear atmosphere in which father, mother, and children live together in freedom and confidence; where none are kept isolated from the interests of the others; but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest; where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are willing to help one another when necessary,—in this atmosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity ”

“ How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even where blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute straightforwardness and the down [Pg 148] right personal courage to show oneself as one is. As long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no perfect honour will be found in children. So long as the home and the school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the child himself at the cost of humanity. ”

“ In the school, the painful restlessness of the present "to get somewhere" will disappear entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere of my school, the young generation will be trained to believe that the most important thing for man is not to do something, but to be something. It may be harsh to say that common natures are reckoned by what they do, noble natures by what they are; yet it is a deep truth, forgotten in this century of activity, in this age of woman. But it is bound to be remembered in the century of contemplation, in the century of the child. ”

“ Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has injured them in one way or another, but when they take up the training of their own children they depend on the effect of such chastisement.
What burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine fawning flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. It makes the lazy lazier, the obstinate more obstinate, the hard, harder. It strengthens those two emotions, the root of almost all evil in the world, hatred and fear. And as long as blows are made synonymous with education, both of these emotions will keep their mastery over men. ”

“ A child should receive life only through this common impulse. Many children are born, as it is, in legalised prostitution, in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in the consciences of many women and men, the slightest shadow of religious reverence, of æsthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of existence. And yet we continue in the name of morality to veil for youth the nakedness of nature and we neglect to inspire their feeling of devotion towards their own being as the shrine in which the mystery of life must some day be fulfilled. ”

“ It forces on man's mind a special view of the world, like a conventional mask on a man's face. But freedom and the rights of the soul's life can only be secured by its own reflections. The soul itself must work out that assurance of belief in which man can live and die. For generations the great spiritual dangers of mankind have been caused by looking backwards to find the ideal and the truth, by regarding both as once for all given, as absolutely limited.
As soon as a child becomes conscious of himself he should feel that he is a discoverer with infinities before him. ”

“ When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight and size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on its young mother, I began to think about the education of my future children. Then as now my educational ideal was that the children should be happy, that they should not fear. Fear is the misfortune of childhood, and the sufferings of the child come from the half-realised opposition between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way in which these possibilities are actually handled. ”

“ Great pain, as well as great happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life. Failures of a personality are often better proofs that it is above the average than its victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave our innermost personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean, that we lay on the wounds of others.
No real man needs to wait until life has taught him, to sympathise with others. The inspiring age of youth may experience this, as well as the strong individual feeling of power. ”

“ Any one who remembers how, as a child, he played on the beach or in the wood, in a big nursery or in an old-fashioned attic, or has seen other children playing in these surroundings, will know how such unrestrained play deepens the soul, increases the capacity for invention, and stimulates the imagination a hundredfold more than children's games and occupations devised by the arrangement, and promoted by the interference, of elder persons. Adults are accustomed to amuse children in crowds, a custom which comes from intellectual vulgarity, instead of leaving them alone to amuse themselves. ”

“ But the most dangerous of all educational mistakes in influencing humanity, is due to the fact, that children are now taught the Old Testament account of the world as absolute truth, although it wholly contradicts their physical and historical instruction. Besides children learn to regard the morality of the New Testament as absolutely binding, while its commands are everywhere seen to be transgressed by the child, the moment he takes his first step into life. Our whole industrial and capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of the Christian command to love one's neighbour as one's self. ”

“ The school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more to outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for holiday. Young people, often, have no other impression of home than that it is a place where they meet society which bores them. ”

“ Women, on the contrary, they say, should demand the same protective legislation for women as for men. They ask for technical instruction and an extended field of work for women.
This whole argument is quite logical from the point of view that limitation of woman's labour is opposed to one of the foremost principles of our time,—the self-determination of the individual. This implies the right of the adult woman, as well as the adult man, to choose her own work. Privileges on the ground of sex only hinder the woman from being put on an equality with man before the law. ”

“ But when young people love now they seldom have the means for union, and when they have the means, then that which leads them to the marriage union is not the deepest feeling they have ever felt, but only an impulse, which, even if real, is still only a substitute.
Such a transformation of the conditions of society and of the individual view of the true worth of life will enable young men and women, between the ages of twenty and thirty, to found their own home and under simple conditions, to secure their happiness. ”

“ Where is this guardian angel in the innumerable other cases of misfortune: when children remain alone because their mother must go to work and they fall out of the window or into the fire? When they lose their eyesight in dark cellars? When they are pressed to death because in miserable lodgings they have to share a bed with their parents? When the parents are drunk and the children lose their lives? ”

“ It means the humble realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are infinite, while the ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does the educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age, is making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvellous shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each impression. The slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least act of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for life in the finely strung soul of the child. ”

“ As long as schools represent an idea, stand for an abstract conception, like the family and the state, so long will they, just as the family and the state, oppress the individuals who belong to them. The school no more than the family and the state represents a higher idea or something greater than just the number of individuals out of which it is formed. It, like the family and the state, has no other duty, right, or purpose than to give to each separate individual as much development and happiness as possible. ”

“ For the temperament of the child as well as for the development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery, adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of movement. But if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient, a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn that every place occupied by him has its limits. ”

“ The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does not allow himself to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth then let us not speak to children about life at all—life in its unity and diversity, its manifold creative acts, its process of continuous creation, its eternal divine subjection to law. ”

“ The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a business, and dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating manifoldness of life, and has become an egoistic self-concentrated campaign. On this account I, and many others of my generation, with many more of the younger generation, stand outside of the movement, although we actively wished, and still wish, for the freedom of woman. ”

“ The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow the camels of grown people. ”

“ Just as there are few better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,—Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's life is a constant torment. ”

“ We must distinguish between and select real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of mankind, of man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the whole race a rich and strong personality. We must look to great models. We must reverence the divine and the regular in the course of the world, in the processes of development of man's mind. These are the new lines of meditation, the new religious feelings of reverence and love, that will make the children of the new century strong, sound, and beautiful. ”

“ In this respect a woman has only one duty, an unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord. ”

“ In the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the superiority of the good established. The good comes to be seen as more productive of happiness to the individual himself and his environment. So the child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the cause of punishment. ”

“ The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame, his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. ”

“ There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school." While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the training for their future life is a bad one—a life in which the common work and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school for a special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in the high sense of the word, and besides no school in which people learn for life. ”