Sigmund Engel

“ How can we expect that an illegitimate child will be properly brought up when the father commonly accepts no responsibility for the matter, and the mother is usually forced to commit her child to the care of a baby-farmer or to send it to a foundling hospital? By the contemptuous attitude of the general public towards him, and by his inferior legal, social, and economic position, the person of illegitimate birth is, as it were, forced to seek revenge from society for the wrongs which, in his opinion, society has inflicted upon him. ”

“ We consider, therefore, that child-protection is necessary, although, notwithstanding great pains and great sacrifices, it often results in the survival of individuals who are useless to society. The view that only the children of the inferior and poorer classes of the population are suitable for the application of the methods of child-protection, is erroneous, if only for the reason that the well-to-do to-day bring forth offspring utterly regardless whether these are strong or weak; and also because capitalism interferes in other ways with the effective operation of natural selection. ”

“ The number of illiterates depends in part also upon the proportions of persons at various ages, inasmuch as, in reckoning the percentage of illiterates to the general population, those under school age are left out of the account.
By no means is it the aim of education to provide general culture. The State cannot possibly insist that every individual should devote himself to the acquirement of general culture, for the most talented person is at times unable to earn his own living. In the struggle for existence, general culture, taken by itself, is utterly useless. ”

“ It is easier to excuse a stepmother for ill-treating a child than it is to excuse the child’s own parents. When all is said and done, it is impossible to expect a stepmother to have the same love for the stepchild as for the children of her own body, and it is only natural that the stepchild which stands between her and her husband should be differently treated from her own children. A stepchild is certainly more likely to be ill-used when the stepmother has children of her own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is indisputable that the more prosperous members of the working class have fewer children on the average than those who are not so well off; that in any region in which an improvement has taken place in the conditions of working-class life a fall in the birth-rate has ensued; that the poorer the condition of any stratum of the proletariat, the larger is the average family. An increase in the average working-class income will lead to a proportionately greater decline in the death-rate of infants and young children. ”

“ The aim of education, namely, to awaken and cultivate the child’s natural capacities and inclinations, can only be attained when the teacher recognises their existence, and is able to form a correct picture of the child’s mental life. But the teacher will not be able to do this unless he sees his pupil engaged in physical work as well as in mental. If at school young people are exclusively occupied in mental work, they acquire an antipathy to physical work. Manual training, on the other hand, teaches children to esteem physical labour and the proletariat. ”

“ Only family care can replace for a child the loss of its own family. Family care is the only natural method of upbringing, whereas the best possible institutional care is purely mechanical, full of defects, and cannot possibly replace a free life. In a sense, the institution is indeed a large family. But in the free life, outside the particular family to which the child belongs, there are thousands of others, communicating and competing with one another. No such competition exists in the institution ”

“ For example, a child of ten can call for help, and can run away, but an infant is utterly defenceless. Punishable offences against children need to be severely punished, because they betray the existence of a coarse and rough disposition in the offender. It must be regarded as an aggravating circumstance when the offender is the person responsible for the child’s upbringing. And yet the criminal offences of parents, guardians, foster-parents, and teachers, against the children under their care, are often nothing more than a misuse in all good faith of the authority entrusted to them. ”

“ In the character of every child there exist the germs of individuality. Whether it is normal or abnormal, whether it is a foundling or not, whether it is educated by its parents or at school, in the family or at an institution, it must be educated in accordance with the needs of its own individuality. The educationalist’s device should be—individualisation.
The greatest delight of every individual, whether child or adult, is to be occupied in accordance with its own inclinations, and to be treated by others in a manner suited to its own peculiar tendencies. ”

“ By the men of the household, most often by their employer or his sons, they are seduced, and then left to fend for themselves. They seldom stay long in one situation; and when out of employment, especially if they have formed bad associations, they are exposed to the gravest moral dangers. Their hours of work are unlimited, and for this reason they wish to live as intensely as possible during the few and scanty hours of liberty. Their legal position is a very unfavourable one, and it is practically impossible for them to organise themselves in a trade union. They form a servile class. ”

“ The true child-protection, the child-protection of the future, will take the form of the destruction of capitalism. It is true that in a certain way, and within certain limits, child-protection alleviates many of the evil effects of capitalism. But there is no doubt whatever that the aims of child-protection could be attained far more efficiently and far more rapidly by the destruction of capitalism. If we were to remove the causes which make child-protection necessary, as they would be removed by the destruction of capitalism, the need for child-protection would disappear. ”

“ It is a natural postulate of a sound education, that all these three factors, parents, school, and environment, should co-operate, and that each should exercise its appropriate influence. If they counteract instead of assisting one another, the general result will be unsatisfactory and inadequate. In vain does the school attempt to exercise a favourable influence if the work of the school is undone by the influence of the parents. Again, the joint influence of parents and of school is fruitless if the child, when away from home and out of school hours, is under the influence of bad associates. ”

“ Insecurity is the keynote of the working man’s economic existence. The consequences of this insecurity are ill-humour and embitterment, which find expression for the most part in domestic life. The place of work is often far removed from the dwelling-place. Husband, wife, and the elder children go to work; they have to get up very early in the morning, when the children are still asleep. Since the spells of rest for meals are very short, they have no time to go home; or if they do hurry home, they have to gulp down their food with lightning speed. ”

“ It is essential that the child should see that the teacher himself practises all which is theoretically asserted to be right and admirable.
Confidence and Love.—Authority and compulsion are important factors of education; but those take the wrong path who attempt to influence the child by means of authority and compulsion alone. For individualisation in education the device should be, Confidence and Love. These mean to the child what sunshine means to the plant: without sunshine, the plant lags behind in its growth, and ultimately perishes; but in the sunshine it flourishes abundantly. ”

“ The more complete the division of labour, the more do employers tend to utilise the services of unskilled labourers—that is, the services of those whose work is of such a character that all they need know to enable them to perform it is at most a little reading, writing, and arithmetic. The capitalists have no use for workmen with more knowledge than this, for the unskilled workers are cheaper. The owning class are not inclined to make sacrifices to enable the children of workpeople to learn more in the elementary school. ”

“ A moderate amount of bodily work in addition to the mental work of school is not merely harmless, but is in most cases desirable. It is not wage-labour in and by itself which is harmful, but the conditions under which that labour is usually carried out. (This applies equally to the labour of women and of children.) The greed of employers, the deficient resisting powers of children, and the poverty of the children’s relatives, make child-labour dangerous in manifold ways for the bodily, mental, and moral health of the child. ”

“ All political parties consider the public elementary school to be extremely important, and each one of them wishes to use this institution for its own purposes. They all recognise that the future belongs to the young, that the public elementary school plays the leading part in the education of the young; and each party sees that its special aims can be attained only by the education of individuals to consider that these aims are sacred and desirable. ”

“ Knowledge.—Knowledge gives the individual power, and provides him with a powerful weapon in the struggle for existence. The dominant classes, for the protection of their own egoistic interests, keep knowledge for themselves, and refuse to provide the lower classes with the means and weapons for their liberation. The State insists upon a minimal quantity of knowledge for every one of its members, because this is to the interest of the community and of the upper classes. ”

“ Numerous and important branches of child-protection—the care of foundlings, for instance—are concerned chiefly with illegitimate children; and in other departments of child-protection the protection of the illegitimate must be more vigorous than that of the legitimate. But the more unfavourable the legal status of the illegitimate child, the more energetic must intervention be from the side of criminal law and from that of local administration, not only for the protection of the illegitimate themselves, but also for the protection of society against the illegitimate. ”

“ Most of the children attending the public elementary schools will become proletarians, wage-workers. Since the proletarian must be diligent, thrifty, humble, disciplined, it is regarded as the duty of the elementary school to inculcate these virtues. But these so-called virtues are not virtues at all. The greatest obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the average wage-earner is that he should be content with things as they are. The labourers’ wage represents the minimum that he finds requisite to the satisfaction of his needs; when his needs increase, his wages rise. ”

“ Inheritance and Education.—In human beings, as in other animals, an improvement in the inborn capacities is possible. At the present time we are content to take children as we find them, and we simply endeavour by education to make every child into a useful member of society. But only through influences affecting hereditary qualities can the material of future generations be improved, and a humanity be brought into being better equipped than we are for the tasks of civilisation. ”

“ A public trial is not in the least adapted to induce in the juvenile offender a sense of shame, or to awaken in him the consciousness that he has taken a wrong path. As far as he understands the matter, an imposing apparatus is at work in a fine big room; the officials of the court do their work in a cool and businesslike manner, and with an air of importance. ”

“ The misery of the apprentices is greater in proportion to the poverty of the factory or workshop in which they are employed. No one need be surprised that there is universal complaint of the lack of apprentices. They are so badly treated that no parents want their own child to become an apprentice. Moreover, many families are so poor that their children must earn money as soon as possible, and therefore cannot be apprenticed. The relationship between apprentice and master involves a contract on the one side to give care, protection, and instruction, and on the other to do work. ”

“ When we examine the teaching of history in the modern elementary school, we find that the pupils, instead of acquiring some general ideas upon universal history, and the history of civilisation, have their minds crammed with a jingo record of wars and dynasties, a mass of dates of battles and other trivial incidents, patriotic anniversaries, and a biassed selection of anecdotes—all this having no other object than to bring the children up as jingoes and anti-socialists. ”

“ Authority over a child, in a modern State, is not essentially different from an official position. Since our criminal courts are empowered to decree any one’s unfitness to hold an official position, and to deprive any citizen of his civil rights, why should they not also be empowered to decide that certain persons are unfitted to exercise authority over children? ”