Part 6

But this continuous occupation with the child is bad for the child, however gratifying it is to ourselves. By the provision of too many appliances and “helps to learn,” and by continual experiments that are too often changed, we tend to check creative originality, and thereby we destroy the interest we are labouring to stimulate. It is better for the child if we are less occupied with his needs. If we do not provide him with interests he will find them for himself. In this case they will mean more to him—do more for him. I dislike exceedingly all contrivances that make things easy. I believe the child dislikes them too. That is one reason why he tires so soon of all the appliances you provide. They do not stimulate interest and effort, except quite temporarily, indeed, they destroy both.

This applies to children’s play quite as much as to their schoolwork. Most children to-day are given too many and too elaborate toys. Perhaps nothing is more mentally destructive. The child will invent his own amusements. He wants to fight giant lamp-posts and to go to sea in an inverted table. To fasten his imagination to your adult suggestions is to destroy his vigour.

Know then this truth. You can teach the child lessons and you can discipline him by your grown up authority, _but you cannot by your ready-made devices successfully interest him or give him freedom_. That he must find for himself. He cannot develop fully and be reliant, unless by himself, and very often _against your will_, he travels on his own road.

There is the very greatest delusion about this idea of freedom in the school room. And it is open to question whether the children in the free school, left mainly to choose their own tasks and take their own time in performing them, are really freer, in any true sense, than the disciplined and directed children in the master-ruled schools who have, in my experience, much better opportunities in the out-of-school hours of developing personality. The discipline of the school does help them by giving them more rest. I think they are less influenced by their teacher. For always there is, and must be, whatever the educational plan and however free from apparent compulsions, behind the pupil the will of the teacher indirectly, if not directly, guiding. And I am not sure if this indirect coercion of suggestion is not worse, from the point of view of the child, than the old-fashioned methods of direct command. I will even go further and state my belief that its claims are heavier, and bind the boy or girl more permanently in the prison of obedience.

For one thing, such indirect coercion does close for the pupils the splendid liberating door of being rebellious.

I can still remember the excitement and real health-giving joy I obtained when, as a child, I once out-witted my instructor and escaped from my lessons, which I heartily detested, to go to a fair we had all been forbidden to visit. There was a glorious fat woman, and a man who swallowed swords! Wonderful! And there was a delicious sweet in a long roll of twisted pink and white, with inside a picture of Roger, the Claimant. It was the time of the Tichbourne trial. If you could find one tiny piece of the sweet without the picture, a whole immense bar, much bigger than those which were ordinarily sold, was to be forfeited and given to you free! Think of it! The possibility! The excitement! Every penny I had was spent—and it was worth it! Yes, a thousand times worth it! Of course, what I did brought punishment. For I had to confess my misdeeds. Those sweets made me very sick. What did that matter? I did gain the joy and liberty I was seeking. This was one of the really educating experiences of my childhood.

Seriously, I am deeply afraid that to-day in our very eagerness to help children, we may often be acting in an exactly opposite direction as a hinderance to their self-development, and future happiness. I believe we are trying to achieve something that is impossible.

One thing I am certain we ought to accept. It is the inescapable barrier between the generations—between the parents and the children, the teachers and the pupils. The young ought to be separated from the old. I think this biological fact is forgotten by many advocates of freedom and new ideals in education.

I believe also that the young want—and by “want” I mean both desire and need—the direction of the old. They want the authority that marks the division between the two generations, for this opens up opportunities to rebel. Instinctively they know they can find more liberty under authority, than when left with the pressing burden, often too heavy for their young inexperience, of deciding at school, as well as at home, almost everything for themselves.

Nor do I very much believe in the over-worrying conscientiousness of the modern teachers. Again I must insist upon this. The increasing pre-occupation with the child; the constant trying of different educational experiments, is almost certain to exercise an adverse influence. There may be a tyranny of solicitude and kindness that is harder to bear than scoldings and punishments. To me there is something mournful in this chorus of uncertainty, in which it is not difficult to detect the poverty of our faith. It tells a tale of infirmity both of life and purpose. So small a thing staggers us. We are without confidence in ourselves or in life. Why is this?

Do we, I often ask myself, know at all, what the child wants to find the freedom that gives liberty to the young soul—the only freedom that matters? How can we give the gifts of life unless we have ourselves firmer confidence? If anything can destroy the soul of a child, it is want of security. Our irresolution is our great danger. That is why so often our efforts are barren. It is a sign of a nervous disorder of the soul. We seek to gain from outside things what we should find within ourselves. And the child must suffer. For the child is so helplessly dependent, so inarticulate, so unable to express his own feelings and deeper needs.

There is still the most amazing blindness in regard to the effect of adult conduct on the child. I know of one small boy who was taught in a free school, where the idea of authority was held in abhorrence. Yet this boy of eight was found one night sobbing bitterly. His mother questioned him. It appeared he had been idle at school, rude, and generally naughty. He had not been scolded, and, of course, not punished. He had been reasoned with and told the foolishness of behaving in this way. Apparently all ought to have been well. Yet it was just in this reasonable gentleness of his headmaster that his trouble rested. He knew he had been naughty. He _wanted_ the punishment that would have wiped out his own consciousness of wrong doing. He sobbed out his complaint to his mother, “if only he (his teacher) had punished me or been cross and nasty I could have forgotten. It would have been all over. But now I keep on thinking about it, and I feel _all twisted up inside_.”

Now this young boy understood his own needs much better than did his master, who was making the very common mistake of judging the child by himself. The needs of the child are entirely different from the needs of the adult. The child wants security, he wants firmness, he desires authority, he even wants punishment.

Let me tell you another story to help to bring home these forgotten truths. This time it was a little girl of the tender age of six years, who had done wrong, was rude and very unkind to her governess. The occasion was a birthday party. Over-excitement was the outside cause of her bad behaviour. No one minded the rude remarks except the child herself. We all, including the insulted governess, understood the reason. Our mistake was, we understood too well, or rather, we judged from the outside and from our grown-up point of view, forgetting that it was not that of the child. We all tried to comfort the little one’s distress, assuring her we understood and knew she did not mean what she had said. In vain. The child would not be comforted. I can never forget the fatalism of her remark, “It does not matter that Miss —— and all of you forgive me, what matters is that I _did_ it.”

Again it was the child, not we—the grown-ups, who understood the situation as it really was. And what I want to impress upon you, is the suffering unwittingly imposed on both these children. If they had been punished they would not have felt this paralysing sense of wrong doing—a suffering of the soul, fitting perhaps for the adult, but not for the child. With punishment or even with scolding, the penalty would have been paid, and the relief would have been gained of self-forgiveness—a relief so much more necessary to happiness than the forgiveness of others.

Of course, it may be argued that morally such self-accusation which does follow from this method of adult forgiveness, with its sentimental treatment of wrong doing, is good for children. I do not think so. Certainly it makes them suffer—suffer intolerably and to an extent that few adults are sufficiently discerning to realise. But the burden placed on the untried, unhardened and sensitive child-soul is, I am certain, too heavy for them to bear safely at this stage of their psychic growth. Punishment would, in almost all cases, be far easier and more acceptable. It would also be far healthier. There is always the gravest danger in placing the immature child in any position that forces an emotional response in advance of the stage of development which has been reached. We have to see these problems as the child feels them, not as we think about them with our grown-up experience and adult deadness.

DIFFICULTIES AND MISTAKES IN SEX EDUCATION

To the theoretical teacher or parent eager to reform the world on paper, it may seem easy to introduce sex education into the nursery training of the home, and into the curriculum of our schools. It appears a comparatively easy matter to tell the little child the truth about its own body, and as it grows older, to give carefully prepared lessons about plants and animals, which shall lead it slowly and beautifully into the way of knowledge.

Text books have been written, pamphlets officially issued, schemes drawn up for home and school instruction, and rules laid down—new finger-posts to right conduct, whereby the younger generation may be enlightened and (as we hope) by this means saved from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made.

I wish it were as simple as this. That sex instruction could be taken from books.

Of late various attempts have been made to focus attention on this aspect of the question or on that; we have been told how this teaching should be given, and with still greater assurance how it should not be given; this must be done and that must not be done; this said and that left unsaid. And groups of earnest-minded parents and teachers, in almost every town, have met together to discuss and decide debatable points; lecturers have been applied for, and their utterances have been listened to as a new gospel; yet I venture to think that, as in all other experimental and debatable questions, the very multitude of counsel and the earnestness that is expended, indicates the uncertainty of our knowledge and the doubtful value of many of our affirmations.

I find a tendency amongst most grown-ups, and especially teachers and advanced parents who ought to know better, to place too firm a reliance on their own power to educate the young in sex. I myself have done this. Like those drowning in deep water where they cannot swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see so many of the old planks—religion, social barriers, chaperones, home restrictions, and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us; been broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying grasp of the young generation; and, therefore, we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking life-raft, in pursuit of the one aim, to protect our children.

But will it save them? I doubt if it will except in a limited and very different way from what is usually accepted. We cannot help the young very far or deeply by any of our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands. And I think it may be well that at once we realize and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.

Thus I have nothing new or very striking to bring to the solution of this difficult problem. I shall endeavour, however, to look at the matter broadly and practically, and attempt to indicate in what direction, as it seems to me, further progress may be made at the present stage of our very faulty knowledge.

One of the most disturbing features that we have to recognise in relation to the child is the very early age at which sex manifests itself. It was formerly supposed that the sex-life began at the age of puberty. Nothing is more untrue. Every child is born with instincts and desires—feelings of love, of hate, of jealousy, which furnish the motives of conduct, and are accompanied by physical manifestations of pleasure or discomfort which express themselves, often in a veiled way, as wishes and cravings, that find relief in action, and must therefore be yoked either to some burden of utility or to some car of vanity.

It should be noted, however, that the word sexual is somewhat ambiguous, because I want to stretch it to include the very germs that afterwards blossom into the adult sex-life. The little girl with her doll is maternal, and the boy with a tin sword is showing the crudest manifestation of the male protective instinct.

The baby whenever it enjoys the satisfaction of realising its infantile wants gurgles with delight. “Every nurse, and every mother who tends her child herself knows this, and recognises as a necessary task in the training of the child, almost from the day of its birth, the winning of it away from this egocentric concentration on its own body.”[2]

We are always trying not to admit that we have to recognise in relation to sex the very early age at which it manifests itself. We do not believe this, because we dislike to believe it. Our fear causes us to neglect in a quite wrong way the deeply affective results of the early childish emotions.

To the uninstructed eye, early desires and feelings connected with sex are often so unlike their final form that they pass unrecognised. But the mother who has eyes to see and knowledge to understand knows that the child can hide no secret. When the lips speak not, the faces in twitching mouth and blinking eyes; the hands, in telling gestures; the biting nails; the sucking thumb; the shuffling feet; the toes that are played with and sucked—all these utter the truth; and betrayal escapes out of every nervous movement of hands, and feet, and face.

We will not see and acknowledge the presence of these early emotions because we want to see the child an angel. We cannot surrender the picture of childhood as a period of delightful ignorance and innocence.

The very reverse is the truth. The child has brought with it much from more primitive times; just in the same way as its body still shows traces of earlier developments in life, so its emotions, its instincts, its wishes and desires, revert back, in many particulars, to lower stages of growth. Always the child has to fight its way upwards, and indeed, it has no easy task to find and keep the right path, in its short journey of discovery to reach from the savagery of the babe to the level of a civilised social man or woman. If we do not help it, the way becomes doubly hard and often the path is lost or, in other words, the savage triumphs.

We are now in a better position to answer the question, so much debated, as to the age at which the sex education of the child should begin. Instead of this being a matter that can be put off until the child is older, and the angel innocence has been sullied by contact with an evil and ugly world, it becomes overwhelmingly important that _no time whatever should be lost_. Every effort must be made to educate from the very hour of birth these primitive instincts, which, though permissible in the savage and the little child, are wholly wrong if allowed to remain active in the later adult years. Delay is fatal. Time lost now never can be regained: mistakes made cannot be put right. A wrong direction may most easily be given by a careless act. I cannot emphasise this too strongly, or too often. _The character, the life history and the entire fate of every child is fixed in the nursery._

The mistake we have been making for so long is in regarding this instruction in sex as something we can impart to children or with-hold from them; a subject we may teach or not teach; enlightenment we may give to them or conceal from them. This view is entirely erroneous. In one sense, the whole matter really lies outside of our wills. Sex education cannot be omitted by any parent or any teacher from the training of any child, for it is given _by not being given_, just as surely as the other way about. There is no escape for anyone who has to do with a child.

You will see what I mean. It is not the good and wise lessons you may give, of nicely arranged explanations, with flower illustrations or stories of the mating of birds and animals; still less is it warnings or goody-goody talks about purity; nor is it any kind of formal or even conscious instruction that will have the true moulding influence on the character and emotional state of the child; but what most influences him, or in other words, teaches him, and helps or hinders him, is the peculiarly affective state—I mean, the emotional attitude—which usually is totally unknown to the parents and educators, and is also quite incomprehensible to the child himself. It is all the things that the grown-ups are trying hardest to hide from the children and perhaps also covering away from themselves that are the real directing forces in their character. The concealed enmity, or even small disharmonies between the parents, the repressed tempers, the strangled temptations, the secret longing of one or other parent, the miseries that are hidden—all these inevitably arouse a response in the children, which acting continuously and unconsciously bring them to a state corresponding with that of the parents. Their shame and want of joy in sex will become the children’s shame and want of joy; their unhappiness in love will be the children’s unhappiness; their most hidden wishes will escape to create disharmonies in these young and tender souls.

The parents, and especially the mother, impress deeply into the child’s being the seal of their characters, and the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. Take, for instance, the only or favourite child, who suffers under an anxious excess of tenderness, so that his love is so fixed on the mother, that not only does he become restless with too heavy a burden of emotional stress, and often really ill, but in later life he has the greatest difficulty in establishing his own character, freeing himself from the mother’s influence, or finding his own love-mate. Again, in the exact opposite position, there is the neglected and unwanted child, who, missing his rightful possession of love, suffers from a sense of inferiority, which dark and hindering shadow dogs his footsteps through life, finding a positive expression in shyness and incapacity for action, or a negative expression in bombastic and disagreeable self-assertion. So I might continue with countless examples. Adult traits can, in almost all cases, be traced back to the child’s early experiences in connection with its parents and in its home.

The child is like a flower, and the banks where it grows are its world—its home and the friends with whom it comes in contact; the sky above is the surrounding love on which it is dependent, and to which it looks up as the flower to the sun for gladness and for life. What I mean is this: the child has desires and impulses of its own, but it reflects the changing needs and atmosphere of the small world in which it lives, and is terribly dependent on that world. It is forming and selecting a character. It very largely tries what the effect is of different kinds of conduct—different characters. The child does not itself know what it is or would wish to be. Whenever there is, as often there must be, a mistake made, a wrong step taken—a conflict inevitably occurs, and must find some quick response in childish naughtiness; otherwise dullness and unhappiness will arise; and this, if continued, will tend to bring the dangerous condition of the repressed and introverted child.

We have established now that the love-life of the child starts at a very early age; it begins in the home, and I want to investigate this love-life. To do this we must examine with some care the child’s emotional relationships to the members of his family.