Our intense reverence for the virtue of obedience is easily traceable. In the first place there is the deep-seated animal instinct, far outdating human history. For uncounted ages our brute mother ancestors had reared their brute young in automatic obedience, — an obedience bred in the bone by those who obeyed and lived, any deficiency in which was steadily expurgated by the cutting off of the hapless youngster who disobeyed. This had, of course, a reflex action on the mother. When one’s nerve-impulse finds expression through another body, that expression gives the same sense of relief and pleasure as a personal expression. When one wills another to do something which the other promptly does, it gives one an even larger satisfaction than doing what one wills one’s self. That is the pleasure we have in a good dog, — our will flows through his organism uninterrupted. It is a temporary extension of self in activity that does not weary.
This is one initial reason for the parental pleasure in obedience and displeasure in disobedience. When the parent emits an impulse calling for expression through the child, and the child refuses to express it, there is a distinct sense of distress in the parent, quite apart from any ulterior advantage to either party in the desired act. Almost any mother can recall this balked feeling, like the annoyance of an arrested sneeze.
To this instinct our gradually enlarging humanness has added the breadth of wider perceptions and the weight of growing ideas of authority, with the tremendous depth of tradition and habit. Early races lived in constant danger, military service was universal, despotism the common government, and slavery the general condition. The ruling despot exacted obedience from all; and it was by each grade exacted remorselessly from its inferiors. No overseer so cruel as the slave. Where men were slaves to despotic sovereigns, their women were slaves to them; and the women tyrannised in turn over their slaves, if they had any. But under every one else were always the children, defenceless absolutely, inferior physically and mentally. Naturally, they were expected to obey. As we built out of our clouded brains dim and sinister gods, we predicated of them the habits so prominent in our earthly rulers: the one thing the gods would have was obedience, which, therefore, grew to have first place in our primitive religion. The early Hebrew traditions of God, with which we are all so familiar, picture him as in a continuous state of annoyance because his “children” would not “mind.” In the centuries of dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, obedience became additionally exalted. The power and success of that magnificent organisation depended so absolutely on this characteristic that it was given high place in the vows of religious societies, — highest of all by the Jesuits, who carried it to its logical extreme, the subordinate being required to become as will-less as a corpse, actuated solely by the commands of his superior. Even militarism offers no better instance of the value and power of obedience than does “the Church.”
It now becomes clear why we so naturally venerate this quality: first, the deep brute instinct; second, the years of historic necessity and habit; third, the tremendous sanction of religion. It is only a few centuries since the Protestant Reformation broke the power of church dominance and successfully established the rebellion of free thought. It is less than that since the American Revolution and the French Revolution again triumphantly disobeyed, and established the liberty of the individual in matters temporal. Since then the delighted brain has spread and strengthened, thinking for itself and doing what it thought; and we have seen some foretaste of what a full democracy will ultimately bring to us. But this growth of individual freedom has but just begun to penetrate that stronghold of all habit and tradition, the Home. Men might be free, but women must still obey. Women are beginning to be free, but still the child remains, — the under-dog always; and he, at least, must obey. On this we are still practically at one, — Catholic and Protestant, soldier and farmer, subject and citizen.
Let us untangle the real necessity from this vast mass of hoary tradition, and see if obedience is really the best thing to teach a child, — if “by obedience” is the best way to teach a child. And let careful provision here be made for a senseless inference constantly made when this question is raised. Dare to criticise a system of training based on obedience, and you are instantly assumed to be advocating no system at all, no training, merely letting the child run wild and “have his own way.” This is a most unfair assumption. Those who know no other way of modifying a child’s behaviour than through “making him mind” suppose that, if he were not made to mind, he must be utterly neglected. Child-training to their minds is to be accomplished only through child-ordering; and many think the training quite accomplished if only the subject is a model of obedience. Others, a little more open-minded, and who have perhaps read something on the subject, assume that, if you do not demand obedience of the child, it means that you must “explain” everything to him, “reason” with him from deed to deed; and this they wearily and rightly declare to be impossible. But neither of these assumptions is correct. One may question the efficacy of the Salisbury method without being thereby pledged to vegetarianism. One may criticise our school system, yet not mean that children should have no education.
The rearing of children is the most important work, and it is here contended that, in this great educational process, obedience, as a main factor, has a bad effect on the growing mind. A child is a human creature. He should be reared with a view to his development and behaviour as an adult, not solely with a view to his behaviour as a child. He is temporarily a child, far more permanently a man; and it is the man we are training. The work of “parenthood” is not only to guard and nourish the young, but to develope the qualities needed in the mature.
Obedience is defended, first, as being necessary to the protection of the child, and, second, as developing desirable qualities in the adult. But the child can be far better protected by removing all danger, which our present civilisation is quite competent to do; and “the habit of obedience” developes very undesirable qualities. On what characteristics does our human pre-eminence rest? On our breadth and accuracy of judgment and force of will. Because we can see widely and judge wisely, because we have power to do what we see to be right, therefore we are the dominant species in the animal kingdom; therefore we are consciously the children of God.
These qualities are lodged in individuals, and must be exercised by individuals for the best human progress. If our method of advance were that one person alone should be wise and strong, and all other persons prosperous through a strict subservience to his commands, then, indeed, we could do no better for our children than to train them to obey. Judgment would be of no use to them if they had to take another’s: will-power would be valueless if they were never to exercise it.
But this is by no means the condition of human life. More and more is it being recognised that progress lies in a well-developed average intelligence rather than in a wise despot and his stupid serfs. For every individual to have a good judgment and a strong will is far better for the community than for a few to have these qualities and the rest to follow them.
The “habit of obedience,” forced in upon the impressible nature of a child, does not develope judgment and will, but does develope that fatal facility in following other people’s judgment and other people’s wills which tends to make us a helpless mob, mere sheep, instead of wise, free, strong individuals. The habit of submission to authority, the long, deeply impressed conviction that to “be good” is to “give up,” that there is virtue in the act of surrender, — this is one of the sources from which we continually replenish human weakness, and fill the world with an inert mass of mind-less, will-less folk, pushed and pulled about by those whom they obey.
Moreover, there is the opposite effect, — the injurious reaction from obedience, — almost as common and hurtful as its full achievement; namely, that fierce rebellious desire to do exactly the opposite of what one is told, which is no nearer to calm judgment than the other.
In obeying another will or in resisting another will, nothing is gain
ed in wisdom. A human creature is a self-governing intelligence, and the rich years of childhood should be passed in the guarded and gradual exercise of those powers.
Now this will, no doubt, call up to the minds of many a picture of a selfish, domineering youngster, stormily ploughing through a number of experimental adventures, with a group of sacrificial parents and teachers prostrate before him. Again an unwarranted assumption. Consideration of others is one of the first laws of life, one of the first things a child should be taught; but consideration of others is not identical with obedience. Again, it will be imagined that the child is to be left to laboriously work out for himself the accumulated experiments of humanity, and deprived of the profits of all previous experience. By no means. On the contrary, it is the business of those who have the care of the very young to see to it that they do benefit by that previous experience far more fully than is now possible.
Our system of obedience cuts the child off from precisely this advantage, and leaves him longing to do the forbidden things, generally doing them, too, when he gets away from his tutelage. The behaviour of the released child, in its riotous reaction against authority as such, as shown glaringly in the action of the average college student, tells how much judgment and self-control have been developing behind the obedience.
The brain grows by exercise. The best time to develope it is in youth. To obey does not develope the brain, but checks its growth. It gives to the will a peculiar suicidal power of aborting its own impulse, not controlling it, but giving it up. This leaves a habit of giving up which weakens our power of continued effort.
All this is not saying that obedience is never useful in childhood. There are occasions when it is; and on such occasions, with a child otherwise intelligently trained, it will be forthcoming. We make a wide mistake in assuming that, unless a child is made to obey at every step, it will never obey. A grown person will obey under sharp instant pressure.
If there is a sudden danger, and you shriek at your friend, “Get up — quick!” or hiss a terrified, “Sh! Sh! Be still!” your friend promptly obeys. Of course, if you had been endeavouring to “boss” that friend with a thousand pointless caprices, he might distrust you in the hour of peril; but if he knew you to be a reasonable person, he would respond promptly to a sudden command.
Much more will a child so respond where he has full reason to respect the judgment of the commander. Children have the automatic habit of obedience by the same animal inheritance that gives the mother the habit of command; but we so abuse that faculty that it becomes lost in righteous rebellion or crushed submission. The animal mother never misuses her precious authority. She does not cry, “Wolf! Wolf!” We talk glibly about “the best good of the child,” but there are few children who are not clearly aware that they are “minding” for the convenience of “the grown-ups” the greater part of the time. Therefore, they suspect self-interest in even the necessary commands, and might very readily refuse to obey in the hour of danger.
It is a commonplace observation that the best children — i.e., the most submissive and obedient — do not make the best men. If they are utterly subdued, “too good to live,” they swell the Sunday-school list of infant saints, die young, and go to heaven: whereas the rebellious and unruly boy often makes the best citizen.
The too obedient child has learned only to do what he is told. If not told, he has no initiative; and, if told wrong, he does wrong. Life to him is not a series of problems to be solved, but a mere book of orders; and, instead of understanding the true imperious “force” of natural law, which a wise man follows because he sees the wisdom of the course, he takes every “must” in life to be like a personal command, — a thing probably unreasonable, and to be evaded, if possible.
The escaped child, long suppressed under obedience, is in no mood for a cheerful acceptance of real laws, but imagines that there is more “fun” in “having his own way.” The foolish parent claims to be obeyed as a god; and the grown-up child seeks to evade God, to treat the laws of Nature as if she, too, were a foolish parent.
Suppose you are teaching a child arithmetic. You tell him to put down such and such figures in such a position. He inquires, “Why?” You explain the reason. If you do not explain the reason, he does not understand the problem. You might continue to give orders as to what figures to set down and in what places; and the child, obeying, could be trotted through the arithmetic in a month’s time. But the arithmetic would not have gone through him. He would be no better versed in the science of numbers than a type-setter is in the learned books he “sets up.” We recognise this in the teaching of arithmetic, and go to great lengths in inventing test problems and arranging easy stages by which the child may gradually master his task. But we do not recognise it in teaching the child life. The small acts of infancy are the child’s first problems in living. He naturally wishes to understand them. He says, “Why?” To which we reply inanely, “Because I tell you to!” That is no reason. It is a force, no doubt, a pressure, to which the child may be compelled to yield. But he is no wiser than he was before. He has learned nothing except the lesson we imagine so valuable, — to obey. At the very best, he may remember always, in like case, that “mamma would wish me to do so,” and do it. But, when cases differ, he has no guide. With the best intentions in life, he can but cast about in his mind to try to imagine what some one else might tell him to do if present: the circumstances themselves mean nothing to him. Docility, subservience, a quick surrender of purpose, a wavering, untrained, easily shaken judgment, — these are the qualities developed by much obedience.
Are they the qualities we wish to develope in American citizens?
III.
TWO AND TWO TOGETHER.
“If not trained to obedience, what shall the child be trained to?” naturally demands the outraged parent. To inculcate that first of virtues has taken so much time and effort that we have overlooked the subsequent qualities which require our help, and feel rather at sea when this sheet anchor is taken from us.
But it is not so hard a problem, when honestly faced. A child has a body and a mind to be nourished, sheltered, protected, allowed to grow, and judiciously trained.
We are here considering the brain training; but that is safely comparable to — is, indeed, part of — the body training, for the brain as much as the lungs or liver is an organ of the body. In training the little body, our main line of duty is to furnish proper food, to insure proper rest, and to allow and encourage proper exercise. Exactly this is wanted to promote right brain growth. We do not wish to overstimulate the brain, to develope it at the expense of other organs; but we do wish to insure its full natural growth and to promote its natural activities by a wise selection of the highest qualities for preferred use. And we need more knowledge of the various brain functions than is commonly possessed by those in charge of young children.
The office of the brain we are here considering is to receive, retain, and collate impressions, and, in retaining them, to hold their original force as far as possible, so that the ultimate act, coming from a previous impression, may have the force of the original impulse. The human creature does not originate nervous energy; but he does secrete it, so to speak, from the impact of natural forces. He has a storage battery of power we call the will. By this high faculty we see a well-developed human being working steadily for a desired object, without any present stimulus directed to that end, even in opposition to prevent stimulus tending to oppose that end. This width of perception, length of retention, storage of force, and power of steady, self-determined action distinguish the advanced human brain.
Early forms of life had no brains to speak of. They received impressions and transmitted them in expressions without check or discrimination. With the development of more complex organisms and their more complex activities came the accompanying complexity of brain, which could co-ordinate those activities to the best advantage. Action is the main line of growth. Conditions press upon all life, but life is modified throug
h its own action under given conditions. And the relative wisdom and success of different acts depend on the brain power of the organism.
The superiority of races lies in better adaptation to condition. In human life, in the long competition among nations, classes, and individuals, superiority still lies in the same development. Power to receive and retain more wide, deep, and subtle impression; power to more accurately and judiciously collate these impressions; power to act steadily on these stored and selected impulses rather than on immediate impulses, — this it is which marks our line of advance.
The education of the child should be such as to develope these distinguishing human faculties. The universe, speaking loudly, lies around every creature. Little by little we learn to hear, to understand, to act accordingly. And this we should teach the child, to recognise more accurately the laws about him and to act upon them.
A very little child does this in his narrow range exactly as does the adult in wider fields. He receives impressions, such as are allowed to reach him. He stores and collates those impressions with increasing vigour and accuracy from day to day; and he acts on the sum of those impressions with growing power. Naturally, his range of impression is limited, his power of retention is limited, his ability to relate the impression retained is limited; and his action is at first far more open to immediate outside stimulus, and less responsive to the inner will-force, than that of an adult. That is the condition of childhood. It is for us to gently, delicately, steadily surround the child with such conditions as shall promote this orderly sequence of brain function rather than to forcibly develope and retain his more primitive methods.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 195