That compulsion is bound to awaken resistance, every parent and teacher ought to know. Great surprise is being expressed over the fact that the majority of children of radical parents are either altogether opposed to the ideas of the latter, many of them moving along the old antiquated paths, or that they are indifferent to the new thoughts and teachings of social regeneration. And yet there is nothing unusual in that. Radical parents, though emancipated from the belief of ownership in the human soul, still cling tenaciously to the notion that they own the child, and that they have the right to exercise their authority over it. So they set out to mould and form the child according to their own conception of what is right and wrong, forcing their ideas upon it with the same vehemence that the average Catholic parent uses. And, with the latter, they hold out the necessity before the young "to do as I tell you and not as I do." But the impressionable mind of the child realizes early enough that the lives of their parents are in contradiction to the ideas they represent; that, like the good Christian who fervently prays on Sunday, yet continues to break the Lord's commands the rest of the week, the radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government, domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he abhors. Just so, the Freethought parent can proudly boast that his son of four will recognize the picture of Thomas Paine or Ingersoll, or that he knows that the idea of God is stupid. Or that the Social Democratic father can point to his little girl of six and say, "Who wrote the Capital, dearie?" "Karl Marx, pa!" Or that the Anarchistic mother can make it known that her daughter's name is Louise Michel, Sophia Perovskaya, or that she can recite the revolutionary poems of Herwegh, Freiligrath, or Shelley, and that she will point out the faces of Spencer, Bakunin or Moses Harmon almost anywhere.
These are by no means exaggerations; they are sad facts that I have met with in my experience with radical parents. What are the results of such methods of biasing the mind? The following is the consequence, and not very infrequent, either. The child, being fed on one-sided, set and fixed ideas, soon grows weary of re-hashing the beliefs of its parents, and it sets out in quest of new sensations, no matter how inferior and shallow the new experience may be, the human mind cannot endure sameness and monotony. So it happens that that boy or girl, over-fed on Thomas Paine, will land in the arms of the Church, or they will vote for imperialism only to escape the drag of economic determinism and scientific socialism, or that they open a shirt-waist factory and cling to their right of accumulating property, only to find relief from the old-fashioned communism of their father. Or that the girl will marry the next best man, provided he can make a living, only to run away from the everlasting talk on variety.
Such a condition of affairs may be very painful to the parents who wish their children to follow in their path, yet I look upon them as very refreshing and encouraging psychological forces. They are the greatest guarantee that the independent mind, at least, will always resist every external and foreign force exercised over the human heart and head.
Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.
HOPE AND FEAR.1
(Translated from the Jewish of L. I. Peretz.)....My heart is with you.
My eye does not get weary looking at your flaming banner; my ear does not get tired listening to your powerful song....
My heart is with you; man's hunger must be appeased, and he must have light; he must be free, and he must be his own master, master over himself and his work.
And when you snap at the fist which is trying to strangle you, your voice, and your ardent protest, preventing you from being heardI rejoice, praying that your teeth may be sharpened. And when you are marching against Sodom and Gomorrah, to tear down the old, my soul is with you, and the certainty that you must triumph fills and warms my heart and intoxicates me like old wine....
And yet....
And yet you frighten me.
I am afraid of the bridled who conquer, for they are apt to become the oppressors, and every oppressor transgresses against the human soul....
Do you not talk among yourselves of how humanity is to march, like an army in line, and you are going to sound for it the march on the road?
And yet humanity is not an army.
The strong are going forward, the magnanimous feel more deeply, the proud rise higher, and yet will you not lay down the cedar in order that it may not outgrow the grass?
Or will you not spread your wings over mediocrity, or will you not shield indifference, and protect the gray and uniformly fleeced herd?
* * *You frighten me.
As conquerors you might become the bureaucracy: to dole out to everybody his morsel, as is the usage in the poor-house; to arrange work for everybody as it is done in the galleys. And you will thus crush the creator of new worldsthe free human will, and fill up with earth the purest spring of human happinesshuman initiative, the power which braves one against thousands, against peoples, and against generations? And you will systematize life and bid it to remain on the level of the crowd.
And will you not be occupied with regulations: registrating, recording, estimatingor will you not prescribe how fast and how often the human pulse must beat, how far the human eye may look ahead, how much the ear may perceive, and what kinds of dreams the languishing heart may entertain?
* * *With joy in my heart I look at you when you tear down the gates of Sodom, but my heart trembles at the same time, fearing that you might erect on its ruins new onesmore chilling and darker ones.
There will be no houses without windows; but fog will envelop the souls....
There will be no empty stomachs, but souls will starve. No ear will hear cries of woe, but the eaglethe human intellectwill stand at the trough with clipped wings together with the cow and the ox.