But if a new “inherent right” has been born into the world, if undergraduate life is in conflict with the “serious purpose” of higher education, the causes thereof are better understood and faced than ignored or belittled. For they are constant causes, and their scope and intensity do not lessen with the days. Though the colleges remain tangent to the realities, they have been far from untouched....
Of these realities, one is the constant, if obstructed, drive toward democracy, based on the dogma of natural rights which animated the wars and works of the founding fathers: free public education is a primary, if abated, attainment of this drive. Another is the correlated growth of population, cities, and natural resources: the dropsical school systems, public and private, are by-products of this increase. In a century the wealth of the United States has multiplied by inconceivable ratios. Even in 1932, at the very trough of a signal deflation, national wealth and income must be stated in figures that have no empirical living meaning. They are merely symbols of indefinitely extending power—manpower and machine-power; and of the organization of this power in dynamic patterns that constitute a social economy.
With this organization, there has come an increase in essential security. In spite of the business-cycle, in spite of unemployment, social waste, and all the rest of the major evils of industrial civilization, its individual citizens are better fed, better housed, in better health, and have better times than their pre-industrial ancestors. Their average expectation of life has increased from forty-seven years to fifty-eight. The society they compose is physiologically more adult, more aged, than the society of their forbears. More of its members are over forty, fewer of them are under seventeen. During the century of industrialization the proportion of children to adults has decreased by more than a half. This does not mean that the same number of children are born and more die. It means that fewer are born and far fewer die.
Far fewer die because all receive a great deal better care than even the children of the richest used to get a hundred years ago. This care comes only somewhat accidentally and in a disordered way from the parents. It comes systematically from the community. The average parent of the working class deals with his children much as his own parents dealt with him. He in the main realizes that the child requires and somehow receives absorbed attention in extreme infancy. Past that stage, he leaves it more and more to itself. All that he asks of it is to make itself as little troublesome and as largely convenient as possible. For the rest, it is out on the street to grow its way into adulthood for itself, troubled by only occasional irruptions of disciplinary or exploitative parental interest, and by admonitions from the cop on the beat.
To the socially-minded part of the community this is a dangerous situation. They fear disease and crime. They talk about corner gangs; about the break-down of family life. They regard it as of supreme importance “to get the children off the street.” Social settlements, boys’ clubs, scouting, playgrounds, and other semi-public and public enterprises have come up largely as instruments toward this end. But the chief instrument has become the school.
Since 1900, the school, more than any other social agency, is conceived first as supplementing, then as replacing, the home, and as exercising its function. The school authority is established in a practically complete jurisdiction over the child. Its field expands from indoctrination in the three R’s and patriotism to teaching personal hygiene; from teaching personal hygiene to official supervision over the details of health—the care of the teeth, ears and eyes, the adequacy of diet; and finally to keeping an eye on the personal relations of children with their parents themselves. In a word, the school invades the home and takes over more and more of its functions. By its means the control of the child is “socialized.”
Now on the face of it, this socialization appears unconnected with the drive and intent of industry as such. It looks rather like a defense against industry. Its animus is humanitarian, not economic; its effect is to delay the functional installation of the child in the economic system. Child labor is quite properly frowned on and hemmed in with rules and restrictions. Schooling is imposed and prolonged to later and later years; where it cannot be made exclusive it is made concurrent with the work-life by means of the continuation schools. And high schools and state universities extend the possibility of schooling as a free public function right up to the voting age and beyond. The immense national wealth makes this possible and easy; it enables the upkeep and expansion of an educational system whose per capita cost is greater than that of any other country in the world. Whether any connection obtains between these superiorities and the fact that Americans also enjoy a corresponding superiority in juvenile delinquency and crime I cannot say. The paradox is the more interesting because, as schoolmen are likely to boast, the school is often used by the child as a refuge from home and the street, as a place of sanctuary and safety.
Explanation is not easy. On the face of it, the socialization of child-control tends to defeat its own ends. And it tends to defeat its own ends because its instrument is an unnatural environment which offers no field for the assumption and discharge of natural responsibilities such as develop in the circle of an adequate family life. It keeps the young in a state that is tantamount to an artificial prolongation of infancy.