UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA PART ONE HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I HUMANITARIANISM AND THE CHILD The child has been called the last serf of civilization. Two sister influences have come to his emancipation, humanitarianism and science. A humanitarian attitude toward children would seem to be the most natural thing in the world. Even among the lower animals we find the instinct of parental sympathy, the root of all tenderness. But history shows in many pages how both instinct and reason. have failed to develop an adequate regard for the child. It was written in the sacred books of the Hebrews that the disobedient son should be stoned by the tribe with stones till he die. This severity belongs to the Old Testament régime. Some of the loftiest conceptions of childhood were to appear in the New Testament. Strangely enough, however, some of the most terrible misconceptions concerning childhood developed with the Christian Church. From St. Augustine to Jonathan Edwards, the doctrine of child depravity was proclaimed and practiced. It was enunciated and reënunciated by the early fathers, the Lutherans, the Council of the Reformation, the Calvinists, and the Puritans. For over a millennium this gloomy declaration, now so abhorrent to our humanity, was a mere truism. It must be interpreted with due tolerance by the present generation, but it cannot be brushed aside as a mere theological theory. Theory colors practice, and this idea that children, "by their carnal conception and nativity, came into this world steeped in sin and guilt, the heirs of hell," inevitably introduced many forms of insidious cruelty into home and school. The puritanical spirit of abnormal sternness and repression, which interpreted simple childish mischievousness as the work of Satan, was directly descended from this honest belief in the utter depravity of human nature. The best measure of the civilization of any people is the degree of thoughtful reverence paid to the child. The close of the eighteenth century, which brought forth ideas of liberty and emancipation on such a grand scale, is therefore well called the age of enlightenment. The roll call of that great epoch of Aufklärung included the names of Schiller, Goethe, Kant, Payne, Washington, Wilberforce, Jefferson, Fichte, Grimm, Wordsworth, Kosciusko, Bach, Voltaire, Herder, Schleiermacher, Rousseau, a great medley, but proof that powerful liberalizing and humanizing forces were penetrating all departments of life. Elementary education in the fullness of time was to be transformed by this Aufklärung. The eternal worth of individuality was rising to a new recognition. "In a certain sense," says Natorp, “all threads run together in the one idea of education for humanity. At last man was anxious to understand the human in humanity, in order to develop the human in humanity." One great name which must be added to the above roll call is that of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. This picturesque but powerful man was moved by the new enthusiasm for humanity. He believed that children, above all else, should be understood and loved; that in them lay the regeneration. of the world. So he converted his home into a combined primary school and social settlement, and set the world a novel example of kindness for which it was becoming more and more ready. In Pestalozzi's old age there came into existence a form of harshness to children which in many respects dwarfed that of any previous age, the child labor of the Industrial Revolution. In England, the mighty land of looms, the trafficking in and enslavement of children became a veritable system, and the suffering and degeneration which fell upon thousands of defenseless creatures, toiling for fourteen and sixteen hours a day at the remorseless machines, are unspeakable. Southey exclaimed, "Death in the brazen arms of a Carthaginian idol was mercy to the slow waste of life in the factories." The liberation of children from industrial oppression is not yet complete. The resistance of the English mill owners, and even of parents and Parliament, including such statesmen as Brougham, Bright, Cobden, Russell, and Gladstone, to the amelioration of these child laborers is a matter of history. The noble work of the Earl of Shaftesbury in the face of this resistance is also history. He compelled the nation not to work its children more than twelve hours a day; he rescued the little chimney sweep from the danger of fire and death; he covered all London with ragged schools, and asylums for the homeless, and released a whole army of working boys and girls from factory, forge, and mine. Even thus, before dying, in 1885, he lamented: "I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it." England produced another great humanitarian in the person of Charles Dickens. His influence in creating a greater tenderness and respect for childhood in his own country, on the Continent, and in America, can hardly be overestimated. He was a contemporary of Lord Shaftesbury. These were |