Chapter 1: The Family
> “The family is the unit of the nation.” > > Frederick Denison Maurice
Probably no other educational thinker has influenced parents as deeply as Rousseau did. Few people read Emile now, but how many current theories about the right way to raise children have their unsuspected source there? Everyone knows, and his contemporaries knew it better than we do, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau lacked the solid character that would entitle him to pose as an authority on any subject, least of all on education. He describes himself as a poor thing, and we see no reason to reject the evidence of his Confessions.
We are not carried away by the charm of his style; his “forcible feebleness” does not dazzle us. No man can say more than he is. His philosophical theories lack grit, and that removes most of them from the category of usable thought.
But Rousseau had the insight to see one of those obvious truths that somehow it takes a genius to discover. And because truth is indeed prized above rubies, seeing that truth earned him his rank as a great teacher. “Is Jean Jacques also among the prophets?” people asked, and still ask. That he had thousands of fervent disciples among the educated parents of Europe, and that his teaching has filtered into many a secluded home of our own day, is answer enough. Indeed, no other educator has had a tenth of Rousseau’s influence.
Under the spell of his teaching, people of fashion, like that Russian Princess Galitzin, left society and went off with their children to some quiet corner. There they could devote every hour of the day, and every power they had, to the duties that fall to parents. Mothers from court circles withdrew from the world, sometimes even leaving their husbands, to work hard at the classics, mathematics and the sciences, so that they could teach their children with their own lips. “What else am I for?” they asked. And the feeling spread that bringing up children was the one work of first importance for men and women.
Whatever extravagant ideas he had chosen to put forward, Rousseau would still have found a following, because he happened to touch a spring that opened many hearts. He was one of the few educators who appealed to the instincts of parents. He did not say, “We have no hope of the parents; let us work for the children!” That is the kind of faint-hearted, pessimistic thing we say today. What he said was, in effect, “Fathers and mothers, this is your work, and only you can do it. It rests with you, parents of young children, to be the saviors of society for a thousand generations. Nothing else matters. The occupations people wear themselves out over are foolish child’s play compared with this one serious business of bringing up our children to go further than we ourselves have gone.”
People listened, as we have seen. The response to his teaching released such a flood of parental enthusiasm as has never been known before or since. And Rousseau, weak and of little worth as he was, was a preacher of righteousness in this: he turned the hearts of the fathers to the children, and to that extent made ready a people prepared for the Lord. But alas! Having laid the foundation, he had little better than wood, hay, and stubble to offer the builders.
Rousseau succeeded, as he deserved to succeed, in waking many parents to the binding character, the vast range and the profound seriousness of their obligations. He failed, and deserved to fail, when he offered his own crude notions as an educational code. But his success is very encouraging. He saw that God placed the training of every child in the hands of two people, a father and a mother. And the response to his teaching proved that, as the waters rise to the pull of the moon, so the hearts of parents rise to the idea of the great work entrusted to them.
No doubt every parent is aware of unwritten laws, more or less definite and noble according to his own status. Even so, an attempt to codify these laws, however slight, may interest parents.
“The family is the unit of the nation.” This saying, so full of meaning, suggests some aspects of the parents’ calling. From time to time, in every age of the world, communal societies have arisen. Sometimes they formed to cooperate in a great work, social or religious; more recently they have arisen as a protest against inequalities of condition. But in every case, the fundamental rule of such societies is that the members hold all things in common.
In our careless way, we tend to think that such attempts at communal association are doomed to failure from the start. But that is not so. In the United States, perhaps because hired labor is harder to find there than it is here in England, they seem to have found congenial soil, and many well-regulated communal bodies flourish. There are failures too, many and disastrous. These can usually be traced to one cause: a government weakened by trying to combine democratic and communal principles, to live a common life while each does what is right in his own eyes. A communal body can thrive only under vigorous and absolute rule.
A favorite dream of socialism is (or was, until the idea of collectivism took hold) that each state of Europe should be divided into countless small, self-contained communes. Now, it sometimes happens that the thing we desire already exists, if only we had eyes to see it. The family is, in practice, a commune. In the family, undivided property is enjoyed by all the members in common, and there is equality of social condition with diversity of duties. In lands where patriarchal customs still prevail, the family merges into the tribe, and the head of the family is the chief of the tribe, a very absolute sovereign indeed.
In our own country, families are usually small: parents and their immediate children, with the attendants and belongings that naturally gather around a household and that, let us not forget, form part of the family. The smallness of the family tends to hide its character, and so we see no force in the saying at the head of this chapter. We do not see that if the unit of the nation is the natural commune, the family, then the family is the social microcosm. It is pledged to carry on within itself all the functions of the State, with the delicacy, precision and fullness of detail proper to work done on a small scale.
This view of the family as a commune does not at all mean that its domestic policy should be one of isolation. On the contrary, it is not too much to say that a nation is civilized in proportion as it can establish close and friendly relations with other nations, and not with one or two, but with many. Conversely, a nation is barbarous in proportion to its isolation. And does not a family decline in intelligence and virtue when, from generation to generation, it “keeps itself to itself”?
Again, a nation is probably healthy in proportion as it has its own proper outlets, its colonies and dependencies, which it is always eager to include in the national life. So it is with the nation in miniature, the family. The struggling families at “the back,” the orphanage, the mission, the needy people we know: are they not there to sustain the family in the higher life?
But it is not enough for the family commune to keep up neighborly relations with other such communes and with the stranger within the gates. The family is the unit of the nation, and the nation is an organic whole, a living body. Like the natural body, it is built up of countless living organisms. The life of the family is complete only as it contributes its share to the national life. It must share public interests, take up public work and cherish the public welfare. In a word, it must preserve its oneness with the nation. Otherwise the family ceases to be part of a living whole and becomes positively harmful, like decayed tissue in an animal body.
Nor are the family’s interests limited to those of the nation. It is the nation’s part to maintain wider relations, to be in touch with all the world, and always to lead in the great march of human progress. In the same way, this is the attitude required of each unit of the nation, each family, as an integral part of the whole.
Here is the simple and natural fulfillment of the noble dream of Fraternity. Each individual is attached to a family by ties of love, where not of blood. The families are united in a federal bond to form the nation. The nations are joined in love and compete in virtue. And all of them, nations and their families alike, play their respective parts as little children about the feet and under the smile of the Almighty Father.
Here is the divine order that every family is called to fulfill. “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,” and therefore it matters infinitely that every family should grasp the nature and the obligations of the family bond. As water cannot rise above its source, neither can we live at a higher level than our conception of our place and use in life.
Let us ask, then: does this way of regarding all education, and all civil and social relations, from the standpoint of the family have any practical outcome? It does, so much so that there is perhaps hardly a problem in life to which it does not hold the solution. For example, what shall we teach our children? Is there one subject that claims our attention more than another? Yes, there is a subject, or class of subjects, that has an imperative moral claim on us.
It is the duty of the nation to maintain relations of brotherly kindness with other nations. Therefore it is the duty of every family, as an integral part of the nation, to be able to speak as brothers with the families of other nations as opportunities arise. Therefore learning the languages of neighboring nations is not only a way to secure an inlet of knowledge and a means of culture but a duty of that higher morality, the morality of the family, which aims at universal brotherhood. Therefore every family would do well to cultivate two languages besides the mother tongue, even in the nursery.
Here is another example. A fair young Englishwoman was staying with her mother at a German spa hotel. They were the only English people there, and they probably forgot that Germans are better linguists than we are. The young lady sat through the long meals with her book, hardly pausing in her reading to eat. She addressed no more than one or two remarks to her mother, such as, “I wonder what that mess is!” or, “How much longer do we have to sit with these tiresome people?”
If she had remembered that no family can live to itself, that she and her mother represented England, that they were England for that little German community, she would have copied the courteous greetings the German ladies gave their neighbors.
But we must leave further consideration of this great subject. Let us close with a striking passage from John Morley’s appreciation of Emile: “Education slowly came to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase of the great general movement towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of such wider feeling about these relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment.”
Rousseau’s labors in this great cause, “the restoration of the family,” give him a claim on the gratitude and respect of mankind. It has proved a lasting, solid work. To this day, family relations in France are more gracious, more tender, closer and more inclusive than they are with us. They are more outgoing too, leading to generally kind and friendly behavior. And so strong and satisfying is the family bond that the young people feel little need to “fall in love.”
The mother sets out to win the friendship of her young daughters, who respond with complete loyalty and devotion. And whatever Zola’s novels may suggest, young Frenchwomen are wonderfully pure, simple and sweet, because their affections are abundantly satisfied.
Perhaps “the restoration of the family” is a task that invites us here in England, each within the circle of our own hearth, for there is little doubt that the family bond is looser among us than it was two or three generations ago. Perhaps nowhere is family life more idyllically lovely than in English homes at their best. But the wise always find something new to learn.
A nation, like an individual, must act along the lines of its own character, and on the whole we are well content with our English homes. Yet we might learn something from the inclusiveness of the French family. There, mother-in-law and father-in-law, aunt and cousins, widow and unmarried woman are cherished, and a hundred small tasks are devised for dependents who would be in the way in an English home. As a result, the children have a wider field in which to practice the thousand sweet attentions and self-restraints that make home life lovely.
No doubt the medal has another side, and there is probably much in French home life that we would shrink from. Even so, it offers object lessons we would do well to study. And where family life is most beautiful among us, is not the family a little apt to become self-centered and self-sufficient, instead of cultivating that openness toward other families which is part of our neighbors’ family code?
