Chapter XI: Introduction (7)

The close relationship between parent and child, which has such a decisive influence upon so many in our civilisation, that submission to the parent or defiance of the parent may become the dominating pattern of a lifetime, is not found in Samoa. Children reared in households where there are a half dozen adult women to care for them and dry their tears, and a half dozen adult males, all of whom represent constituted authority, do not distinguish their parents as sharply as our children do. The image of the fostering, loving mother, or the admirable father, which may serve to determine affectional choices later in life, is a composite affair, composed of several aunts, cousins, older sisters and grandmothers; of chief, father, uncles, brothers and cousins. Instead of learning as its first lesson that here is a kind mother whose special and principal care is for its welfare, and a father whose authority is to be deferred to, the Samoan baby learns that its world is composed of a hierarchy of male and female adults, all of whom can be depended upon and must be deferred to.

The lack of specialised feeling which results from this diffusion of affection in the household is further reinforced by the segregation of the boys from the girls, so that a child regards the children of the opposite sex as taboo relatives, regardless of individuality, or as present enemies and future lovers, again regardless of individuality. And the substitution of relationship for preference in forming friendships completes the work. By the time she reaches puberty the Samoan girl has learned to subordinate choice in the selection of friends or lovers to an observance of certain categories. Friends must be relatives of one’s own sex; lovers, non-relatives. All claim of personal attraction or congeniality between relatives of opposite sex must be flouted. All of this means that casual sex relations carry no onus of strong attachment, that the marriage of convenience dictated by economic and social considerations is easily born and casually broken without strong emotion.

Nothing could present a sharper contrast to the average American home, with its small number of children, the close, theoretically permanent tie between the parents, the drama of the entrance of each new child upon the scene and the deposition of the last baby. Here the growing girl learns to depend upon a few individuals, to expect the rewards of life from certain kinds of personalities. With this first set towards preference in personal relations she grows up playing with boys as well as with girls, learning to know well brothers and cousins and schoolmates. She does not think of boys as a class but as individuals, nice ones like the brother of whom she is fond, or disagreeable, domineering ones, like a brother with whom she is always on bad terms. Preference in physical make-up, in temperament, in character, develops and forms the foundations for a very different adult attitude in which choice plays a vivid rôle. The Samoan girl never tastes the rewards of romantic love as we know it, nor does she suffer as an old maid who has appealed to no lover or found no lover appealing to her, or as the frustrated wife in a marriage which has not fulfilled her high demands.

Having learned a little of the art of disciplining sex feeling into special channels approved by the whole personality, we will be inclined to account our solution better than the Samoans. To attain what we consider a more dignified standard of personal relations we are willing to pay the penalty of frigidity in marriage and a huge toll of barren, unmarried women who move in unsatisfied procession across the American and English stage. But while granting the desirability of this development of sensitive, discriminating response to personality, as a better basis for dignified human lives than an automatic, undifferentiated response to sex attraction, we may still, in the light of Samoan solutions, count our methods exceedingly expensive. The strict segregation of related boys and girls, the institutionalised hostility between pre-adolescent children of opposite sexes in Samoa are cultural features with which we are completely out of sympathy. For the vestiges of such attitudes, expressed in our one-sex schools, we are trying to substitute coeducation, to habituate one sex to another sufficiently so that difference of sex will be lost sight of in the more important and more striking differences in personality. There are no recognisable gains in the Samoan system of taboo and segregation, of response to a group rather than response to an individual. But when we contrast the other factor of difference the conclusion is not so sure. What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world, of the strong ties between parents and children, ties which imply an active personal relation from birth until death? Specialisation of affection, it is true, but at the price of many individuals’ preserving through life the attitudes of dependent children, of ties between parents and children which successfully defeat the children’s attempts to make other adjustments, of necessary choices made unnecessarily poignant because they become issues in an intense emotional relationship. Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialisation of emotion which might be brought about in other ways, notably through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds it is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Œdipus complexes, Electra complexes, and so on.

The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the child.

The presence of many strongly held and contradictory points of view and the enormous influence of individuals in the lives of their children in our country play into each other’s hands in producing situations fraught with emotion and pain. In Samoa the fact that one girl’s father is a domineering, dogmatic person, her cousin’s father a gentle, reasonable person, and another cousin’s father a vivid, brilliant, eccentric person, will influence the three girls in only one respect, choice of residence if any one of the three fathers is the head of a household. But the attitudes of the three girls towards sex, and towards religion, will not be affected by the different temperaments of their three fathers, for the fathers play too slight a rôle in their lives. They are schooled not by an individual but by an army of relatives into a general conformity upon which the personality of their parents has a very slight effect. And through an endless chain of cause and effect, individual differences of standard are not perpetuated through the children’s adherence to the parents’ position, nor are children thrown into bizarre, untypical attitudes which might form the basis for departure and change. It is possible that where our own culture is so charged with choice, it would be desirable to mitigate, at least in some slight measure, the strong rôle which parents play in children’s lives, and so eliminate one of the most powerful accidental factors in the choices of any individual life.

The Samoan parent would reject as unseemly and odious an ethical plea made to a child in terms of personal affection. “Be good to please mother.” “Go to church for father’s sake.” “Don’t be so disagreeable to your sister, it makes father so unhappy.” Where there is one standard of conduct and only one, such undignified confusion of ethics and affection is blessedly eliminated. But where there are many standards and all adults are striving desperately to bind their own children to the particular courses which they themselves have chosen, recourse is had to devious and non-reputable means. Beliefs, practices, courses of action, are pressed upon the child in the name of filial loyalty. In our ideal picture of the freedom of the individual and the dignity of human relations it is not pleasant to realise that we have developed a form of family organisation which often cripples the emotional life, and warps and confuses the growth of many individuals’ power to consciously live their own lives. The third element in the Samoan pattern of lack of personal relationships and lack of specialised affection, is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals are placed in categories and the response is to the category, “relative,” or “wife of my husband’s talking chief,” or “son of my father’s talking chief,” or “daughter of my father’s talking chief.” Consideration of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed out in favour of regimented associations. Such attitudes we would of course reject completely.

Drawing the threads of this particular discussion together, we may say that one striking difference between Samoan society and our own is the lack of the specialisation of feeling, and particularly of sex feeling, among the Samoans. To this difference is undoubtedly due a part of the lack of difficulty of marital adjustments in a marriage of convenience, and the lack of frigidity or psychic impotence. This lack of specialisation of feeling must be attributed to the large heterogeneous household, the segregation of the sexes before adolescence, and the regimentation of friendship—chiefly along relationship lines. And yet, although we deplore the prices in maladjusted and frustrated lives, which we must pay for the greater specialisation of sex feeling in our own society, we nevertheless vote the development of specialised response as a gain which we would not relinquish. But an examination of these three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish our desired end, the development of a consciousness of personality, through coeducation and free and unregimented friendships, and possibly do away with the evils inherent in the too intimate family organisation, thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjustment without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.

The next great difference between Samoa and our own culture which may be credited with a lower production of maladjusted individuals is the difference in the attitude towards sex and the education of the children in matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the facts of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children, no child has to conceal its knowledge for fear of punishment or ponder painfully over little-understood occurrences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge, faulty speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which may have far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare physical facts of sex without a knowledge of the accompanying excitement, of the fact of birth without the pains of labour, of the fact of death without the fact of corruption—all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth—are absent In Samoa. Furthermore, the Samoan child who participates intimately in the lives of a host of relatives has many and varied experiences upon which to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined within one family circle (and such confinement is becoming more and more frequent with the growth of cities and the substitution of apartment houses with a transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-holders), often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent. Their knowledge of sex, aside from children’s gossip, comes from an accidental glimpse of parental activity. This has several very obvious disadvantages. In the first place, the child is dependent for its knowledge upon birth and death entering its own home; the youngest child in a family where there are no deaths may grow to adult life without ever having had any close knowledge of pregnancy, experience with young children, or contact with death.

A host of ill-digested fragmentary conceptions of life and death will fester in the ignorant, inexperienced mind and provide a fertile field for the later growth of unfortunate attitudes. Second, such children draw their experiences from too emotionally toned a field; one birth may be the only one with which they come in close contact for the first twenty years of their lives. And upon the accidental aspects of this particular birth their whole attitude is dependent. If the birth is that of a younger child who usurps the elder’s place, if the mother dies in child bed, or if the child which is born is deformed, birth may seem a horrible thing, fraught with only unwelcome consequences. If the only death bed at which one has ever watched is the death bed of one’s mother, the bare fact of death may carry all the emotion which that bereavement aroused, carry forever an effect out of all proportion to the particular deaths encountered later in life. And intercourse seen only once or twice, between relatives towards whom the child has complicated emotional attitudes, may produce any number of false assumptions. Our records of maladjusted children are full of cases where children have misunderstood the nature of the sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied by anger, or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror from one highly charged experience. So our children are dependent upon accident for their experience of life and death; and those experiences which they are vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so are the worst possible way of learning general facts about which it is important to acquire no special, distorted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex experience, is a generous total for the child brought up under living conditions which we consider consonant with an American standard of living. And considering the number of illustrations which we consider it necessary to give of how to calculate the number of square feet of paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by twelve feet by fourteen feet, or how to parse an English sentence, this is a low standard of illustration. It might be argued that these are experiences of such high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It might also be argued if a child were severely beaten before being given its first lesson in calculating how to paper a room, and as a sequel to the lesson, saw its father hit its mother with the poker, it would always remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would know about the real nature of the calculations involved in room-papering is doubtful. In one or two experiences, the child is given no perspective, no chance to relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details of the life process to their proper place. False impressions, part impressions, repulsion, nausea, horror, grow up about some fact experienced only once under intense emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable to the child’s attaining any real understanding.

A standard of reticence which forbids the child any sort of comment upon its experiences makes for the continuance of such false impressions, such hampering emotional attitudes, questions such as, “Why were grandma’s lips so blue?” are promptly hushed. In Samoa, where decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank, naïve repugnance to the odours of corruption on the part of all the participants at a funeral robs the physical aspect of death of any special significance. So, in our arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his experiences, and he is not permitted to discuss those which he has had and correct his mistakes.

With the Samoan child it is profoundly different. Intercourse, pregnancy, child birth, death, are all familiar occurrences. And the Samoan child experiences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were we to decide for widening the child’s experimental field, would regard as essential. In a civilisation which suspects privacy, children of neighbours will be accidental and unemotional spectators in a house where the head of the household is dying or the wife is delivered of a miscarriage. The pathology of the life processes is known to them, as well as the normal. One impression corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details.

It must not be supposed, however, that the mere exposure of children to scenes of birth and death would be a sufficient guarantee against the growth of undesirable attitudes. Probably even more influential than the facts which are so copiously presented to them, is the attitude of mind with which their elders regard the matter. To them, birth and sex and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our so often repeated comment that “it’s not natural” for children to be permitted to encounter death would seem as incongruous to them as if we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat or sleep. And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children’s presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so dignifiedly permitted them.

As in every case, it is here impossible to separate attitude from practice and say which is primary. The distinction is made only for our use in another civilisation. The individual American parents, who believe in a practice like the Samoan, and permit their children to see adult human bodies and gain a wider experience of the functioning of the human body than is commonly permitted in our civilisation, are building upon sand. For the child, as soon as it leaves the protecting circle of its home, is blasted by an attitude which regards such experience in children as ugly and unnatural. As likely as not, the attempt of the individual parents will have done the child more harm than good, for the necessary supporting social attitude is lacking. This is just a further example of the possibilities of maladjustment inherent in a society where each home differs from each other home; for it is in the fact of difference that the strain lies rather than in the nature of the difference.

Upon this quiet acceptance of the physical facts of life, the Samoans build, as they grow older, an acceptance of sex. Here again it is necessary to sort out which parts of their practice seem to produce results which we certainly deprecate, and which produce results which we desire. It is possible to analyse Samoan sex practice from the standpoint of development of personal relationships on the one hand, and of the obviation of specific difficulties upon the other.

We have seen that the Samoans have a low level of appreciation of personality differences, and a poverty of conception of personal relations. To such an attitude the acceptance of promiscuity undoubtedly contributes. The contemporaneousness of several experiences, their short duration, the definite avoidance of forming any affectional ties, the blithe acceptance of the dictates of a favourable occasion, as in the expectation of infidelity in any wife whose husband is long from home, all serve to make sex an end rather than a means, something which is valued in itself, and deprecated inasmuch as it tends to bind one individual to another. Whether such a disregard of personal relations is completely contingent upon the sex habits of the people is doubtful. It probably is also a reflection of a more general cultural attitude in which personality is consistently disregarded. But there is one respect in which these very practices make possible a recognition of personality which is often denied to many in our civilisation, because, from the Samoans’ complete knowledge of sex, its possibilities and its rewards, they are able to count it at its true value. And if they have no preference for reserving sex activity for important relationships, neither do they regard relationships as important because they are productive of sex satisfaction. The Samoan girl who shrugs her shoulder over the excellent technique of some young Lothario is nearer to the recognition of sex as an impersonal force without any intrinsic validity, than is the sheltered American girl who falls in love with the first man who kisses her. From their familiarity with the reverberations which accompany sex excitement comes this recognition of the essential impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy them; from the too slight, too casual practice comes the disregard of personality which seems to us unlovely.

The fashion in which their sex practice reduces the possibility of neuroses has already been discussed. By discounting our category of perversion, as applied to practice, and reserving it for the occasional psychic pervert, they legislate a whole field of neurotic possibility out of existence. Onanism, homosexuality, statistically unusual forms of heterosexual activity, are neither banned nor institutionalised. The wider range which these practices give prevents the development of obsessions of guilt which are so frequent a cause of maladjustment among us. The more varied practices permitted heterosexually preserve any individual from being penalised for special conditioning. This acceptance of a wider range as “normal” provides a cultural atmosphere in which frigidity and psychic impotence do not occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment in marriage can always be established. The acceptance of such an attitude without in any way accepting promiscuity would go a long way towards solving many marital impasses and emptying our park benches and our houses of prostitution.

Among the factors in the Samoan scheme of life which are influential in producing stable, well-adjusted, robust individuals, the organisation of the family and the attitude towards sex are undoubtedly the most important. But it is necessary to note also the general educational concept which disapproves of precocity and coddles the slow, the laggard, the inept. In a society where the tempo of life was faster, the rewards greater, the amount of energy expended larger, the bright children might develop symptoms of boredom. But the slower pace dictated by the climate, the complacent, peaceful society, and the compensation of the dance, in its blatant precocious display of individuality which drains off some of the discontent which the bright child feels, prevent any child from becoming too bored. And the dullard is not goaded and dragged along faster than he is able until, sick with making an impossible effort, he gives up entirely. This educational policy also tends to blur individual differences and so to minimise jealousy, rivalry, emulation, those social attitudes which arise out of discrepancies of endowment and are so far-reaching in their effects upon the adult personality.

It is one way of solving the problem of differences between individuals and a method of solution exceedingly congenial to a strict adult world. The longer the child is kept in a subject, non-initiating state, the more of the general cultural attitude it will absorb, the less of a disturbing element it will become. Furthermore, if time is given them, the dullards can learn enough to provide a stout body of conservatives upon whose shoulders the burden of the civilisation can safely rest. Giving titles to young men would put a premium upon the exceptional; giving titles to men of forty, who have at last acquired sufficient training to hold them, assures the continuation of the usual. It also discourages the brilliant so that their social contribution is slighter than it might otherwise have been. We are slowly feeling our way towards a solution of this problem, at least in the case of formal education. Until very recently our educational system offered only two very partial solutions of the difficulties inherent in a great discrepancy between children of different endowment and different rates of development. One solution was to allow a sufficiently long time to each educational step so that all but the mentally defective could succeed, a method similar to the Samoan one and without its compensatory dance floor. The bright child, held back, at intolerably boring tasks, unless he was fortunate enough to find some other outlet for his unused energy, was likely to expend it upon truancy and general delinquency. Our only alternative to this was “skipping” a child from one grade to another, relying upon the child’s superior intelligence to bridge the gaps. This was a method congenial to American enthusiasm for meteoric careers from canal boat and log cabin to the White House. Its disadvantages in giving the child a sketchy, discontinuous background, in removing it from its age group, have been enumerated too often to need repetition here. But it is worthy of note that with a very different valuation of individual ability than that entertained by Samoan society we used for years one solution, similar and less satisfactory than theirs, in our formal educational attempts.

The methods which experimental educators are substituting for these unsatisfactory solutions, schemes like the Dalton Plan, or the rapidly moving classes in which a group of children can move ahead at a high, even rate of speed without hurt to themselves or to their duller fellows, is a striking example of the results of applying reason to the institutions of our society. The old red school-house was almost as haphazard and accidental a phenomenon as the Samoan dance floor. It was an institution which had grown up in response to a vaguely felt, unanalysed need. Its methods were analogous to the methods used by primitive peoples, non-rationalised solutions of pressing problems. But the institutionalisation of different methods of education for children of different capacities and different rates of development is not like anything which we find in Samoa or in any other primitive society. It is the conscious, intelligent directing of human institutions in response to observed human needs.

Still another factor in Samoan education which results in different attitudes is the place of work and play in the children’s lives. Samoan children do not learn to work through learning to play, as the children of many primitive peoples do. Nor are they permitted a period of lack of responsibility such as our children are allowed. From the time they are four or five years old they perform definite tasks, graded to their strength and intelligence, but still tasks which have a meaning in the structure of the whole society. This does not mean that they have less time for play than American children who are shut up in schools from nine to three o’clock every day. Before the introduction of schools to complicate the ordered routine of their lives, the time spent by the Samoan child in running errands, sweeping the house, carrying water, and taking actual care of the baby, was possibly less than that which the American school child devotes to her studies.

The difference lies not in the proportion of time in which their activities are directed and the proportion in which they are free, but rather in the difference of attitude. With the professionalisation of education and the specialisation of industrial tasks which has stripped the individual home of its former variety of activities, our children are not made to feel that the time they do devote to supervised activity is functionally related to the world of adult activity. Although this lack of connection is more apparent than real, it is still sufficiently vivid to be a powerful determinant in the child’s attitude. The Samoan girl who tends babies, carries water, sweeps the floor; or the little boy who digs for bait, or collects cocoanuts, has no such difficulty. The necessary nature of their tasks is obvious. And the practice of giving a child a task which he can do well and never permitting a childish, inefficient tinkering with adult apparatus, such as we permit to our children, who bang aimlessly and destructively on their fathers’ typewriters, results in a different attitude towards work. American children spend hours in schools learning tasks whose visible relation to their mothers’ and fathers’ activities is often quite impossible to recognise. Their participation in adults’ activities is either in terms of toys, tea-sets and dolls and toy automobiles, or else a meaningless and harmful tampering with the electric light system. (It must be understood that here, as always, when I say American, I do not mean those Americans recently arrived from Europe, who still present a different tradition of education. Such a group would be the Southern Italians, who still expect productive work from their children.)

So our children make a false set of categories, work, play, and school; work for adults, play for children’s pleasure, and schools as an inexplicable nuisance with some compensations. These false distinctions are likely to produce all sorts of strange attitudes, an apathetic treatment of a school which bears no known relation to life, a false dichotomy between work and play, which may result either in a dread of work as implying irksome responsibility or in a later contempt for play as childish.

The Samoan child’s dichotomy is different. Work consists of those necessary tasks which keep the social life going: planting and harvesting and preparation of food, fishing, house-building, mat-making, care of children, collecting of property to validate marriages and births and succession to titles and to entertain strangers, these are the necessary activities of life, activities in which every member of the community, down to the smallest child, has a part. Work is not a way of acquiring leisure; where every household produces its own food and clothes and furniture, where there is no large amount of fixed capital and households of high rank are simply characterised by greater industry in the discharge of greater obligations, our whole picture of saving, of investment, of deferred enjoyment, is completely absent. (There is even a lack of clearly defined seasons of harvest, which would result in special abundance of food and consequent feasting. Food is always abundant, except in some particular village where a few weeks of scarcity may follow a period of lavish entertaining.) Rather, work is something which goes on all the time for every one; no one is exempt; few are overworked. There is social reward for the industrious, social toleration for the man who does barely enough. And there is always leisure—leisure, be it noted, which is not the result of hard work or accumulated capital at all, but is merely the result of a kindly climate, a small population, a well-integrated social system, and no social demands for spectacular expenditure. And play is what one does with the time left over from working, a way of filling in the wide spaces in a structure of unirksome work.

Play includes dancing, singing, games, weaving necklaces of flowers, flirting, repartee, all forms of sex activity. And there are social institutions like the ceremonial inter-village visit which partake of both work and play. But the distinctions between work as something one has to do but dislikes, and play as something one wants to do; of work as the main business of adults, play as the main concern of children, are conspicuously absent. Children’s play is like adults’ play in kind, interest, and in its proportion to work. And the Samoan child has no desire to turn adult activities into play, to translate one sphere into the other. I had a box of white clay pipes for blowing soap bubbles sent me. The children were familiar with soap bubbles, but their native method of blowing them was very inferior to the use of clay pipes. But after a few minutes’ delight in the unusual size and beauty of the soap bubbles, one little girl after another asked me if she might please take her pipe home to her mother, for pipes were meant to smoke, not to play with. Foreign dolls did not interest them, and they have no dolls of their own, although children of other islands weave dolls from the palm leaves from which Samoan children weave balls. They never make toy houses, nor play house, nor sail toy boats. Little boys would climb into a real outrigger canoe and practise paddling it within the safety of the lagoon. This whole attitude gave a greater coherence to the children’s lives than we often afford our children.

The intelligibility of a child’s life among us is measured only in terms of the behaviour of other children. If all the other children go to school the child who does not feels incongruous in their midst. If the little girl next door is taking music lessons, why can’t Mary; or why must Mary take music lessons, if the other little girl doesn’t take them. But so sharp is our sense of difference between the concerns of children and of adults that the child does not learn to judge its own behaviour in relationship to adult life. So children often learn to regard play as something inherently undignified, and as adults mangle pitifully their few moments of leisure. But the Samoan child measures her every act of work or play in terms of her whole community; each item of conduct is dignified in terms of its realised relationship to the only standard she knows, the life of a Samoan village. So complex and stratified a society as ours cannot hope to develop spontaneously any such simple scheme of education. Again we will be hard put to it to devise ways of participation for children, and means of articulating their school life with the rest of life which will give them the same dignity which Samoa affords her children.

Last among the cultural differences which may influence the emotional stability of the child is the lack of pressure to make important choices. Children are urged to learn, urged to behave, urged to work, but they are not urged to hasten in the choices which they make themselves. The first point at which this attitude makes itself felt is in the matter of the brother and sister taboo, a cardinal point of modesty and decency. Yet the exact stage at which the taboo should be observed is always left to the younger child. When it reaches a point of discretion, of understanding, it will of itself feel “ashamed” and establish the formal barrier which will last until old age. Likewise, sex activity is never urged upon the young people, nor marriage forced upon them at a tender age. Where the possibilities of deviation from the accepted standard are so slight, a few years leeway holds no threat for the society. The child who comes later to a realisation of the brother and sister taboo really endangers nothing.

This laissez faire attitude has been carried over into the Samoan Christian Church. The Samoan saw no reason why young unmarried people should be pressed to make momentous decisions which would spoil part of their fun in life. Time enough for such serious matters after they were married or later still, when they were quite sure of what steps they were taking and were in less danger of falling from grace every month or so. The missionary authorities, realising the virtues of going slowly and sorely vexed to reconcile Samoan sex ethics with a Western European code, saw the great disadvantages of unmarried Church members who were not locked up in Church schools. Consequently, far from urging the adolescent to think upon her soul the native pastor advises her to wait until she is older, which she is only too glad to do.

But, especially in the case of our Protestant churches, there is a strong preference among us for the appeal to youth. The Reformation, with its emphasis upon individual choice, was unwilling to accept the tacit habitual Church membership which was the Catholic pattern, a membership marked by additional sacramental gifts but demanding no sudden conversion, no renewal of religious feeling. But the Protestant solution is to defer the choice only so far as necessary, and the moment the child reaches an age which may be called “years of discretion” it makes a strong, dramatic appeal. This appeal is reinforced by parental and social pressure; the child is bidden to choose now and wisely. While such a position in the churches which stem from the Reformation and its strong emphasis on individual choice was historically inevitable, it is regrettable that the convention has lasted so long. It has even been taken over by non-sectarian reform groups, all of whom regard the adolescent child as the most legitimate field of activity.

In all of these comparisons between Samoan and American culture, many points are useful only in throwing a spotlight upon our own solutions, while in others it is possible to find suggestions for change. Whether or not we envy other peoples one of their solutions, our attitude towards our own solutions must be greatly broadened and deepened by a consideration of the way in which other peoples have met the same problems. Realising that our own ways are not humanly inevitable nor God-ordained, but are the fruit of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine in turn all of our institutions, thrown into strong relief against the history of other civilisations, and weighing them in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.

XIV

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

We have been comparing point for point, our civilisation and the simpler civilisation of Samoa, in order to illuminate our own methods of education. If now we turn from the Samoan picture and take away only the main lesson which we learned there, that adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so, can we draw any conclusions which might bear fruit in the training of our adolescents?

At first blush the answer seems simple enough. If adolescents are only plunged into difficulties and distress because of conditions in their social environment, then by all means let us so modify that environment as to reduce this stress and eliminate this strain and anguish of adjustment. But, unfortunately, the conditions which vex our adolescents are the flesh and bone of our society, no more subject to straightforward manipulation upon our part than is the language which we speak. We can alter a syllable here, a construction there; but the great and far-reaching changes in linguistic structure (as in all parts of culture) are the work of time, a work in which each individual plays an unconscious and inconsiderable part. The principal causes of our adolescents’ difficulty are the presence of conflicting standards and the belief that every individual should make his or her own choices, coupled with a feeling that choice is an important matter. Given these cultural attitudes, adolescence, regarded now not as a period of physiological change, for we know that physiological puberty need not produce conflict, but as the beginning of mental and emotional maturity, is bound to be filled with conflicts and difficulties. A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilisation, not in the physical changes through which our children pass, but it is none the less real nor the less inevitable in twentieth-century America.

And if we look at the particular forms which this need for choice takes, the difficulty of the adolescent’s position is only documented further. Because the discussion is principally concerned with girls, I shall discuss the problem from the girls’ point of view, but in many respects the plight of the adolescent boy is very similar. Between fourteen and eighteen, the average American boy and girl finish school. They are now ready to go to work and must choose what type of work they wish to do. It might be argued that they often have remarkably little choice. Their education, the part of the country in which they live, their skill with their hands, will combine to dictate choice perhaps between the job of cash girl in a department store or of telephone operator, or of clerk or miner. But small as is the number of choices open to them in actuality, the significance of this narrow field of opportunity is blurred by our American theory of endless possibilities. Moving picture, magazine, newspaper, all reiterate the Cinderella story in one form or another, and often the interest lies as much in the way cash girl 456 becomes head buyer as in her subsequent nuptials with the owner of the store. Our occupational classes are not fixed. So many children are better educated and hold more skilled positions than their parents that even the ever-present discrepancy between opportunities open to men and opportunities open to women, although present in a girl’s competition with her brother, is often absent as between her unskilled father and herself. It is needless to argue that these attitudes are products of conditions which no longer exist, particularly the presence of a frontier and a large amount of free land which provided a perpetual alternative of occupational choice. A set which was given to our thinking in pioneer days is preserved in other terms. As long as we have immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, the gap in opportunities between non-English-speaking parents and English-speaking children will be vivid and dramatic. Until our standard of education becomes far more stable than it is at present, the continual raising of the age and grade until which schooling is compulsory ensures a wide educational gap between many parents and their children. And occupational shifts like the present movements of farmers and farm workers into urban occupations, give the same picture. When the agricultural worker pictures urban work as a step up in the social scale, and the introduction of scientific farming is so radically reducing the numbers needed in agriculture, the movement of young people born on the farm to city jobs is bound to dazzle the imagination of our farming states during the next generation at least. The substitution of machines for unskilled workers and the absorption of many of the workers and their children into positions where they manipulate machines affords another instance of the kind of historical change which keeps our myth of endless opportunity alive. Add to these special features, like the effect upon the prospects of Negro children of the tremendous exodus from the southern corn fields, or upon the children of New England mill-hands who are deprived of an opportunity to follow duly in their parents’ footsteps and must at least seek new fields if not better ones.

Careful students of the facts may tell us that class lines are becoming fixed; that while the children of immigrants make advances beyond their parents, they move up in step; that there are fewer spectacular successes among them than there used to be; that it is much more possible to predict the future status of the child from the present status of the parent. But this measured comment of the statistician has not filtered into our literature, nor our moving pictures, nor in any way served to minimise the vividness of the improvement in the children’s condition as compared with the condition of their parents. Especially in cities, there is no such obvious demonstration of the fact that improvement is the rule for the children of a given class or district, and not merely a case of John Riley’s making twenty dollars a week as a crossing man while Mary, his daughter, who has gone to business school, makes twenty-five dollars a week, working shorter hours. The lure of correspondence school advertising, the efflorescence of a doctrine of short-cuts to fame, all contrive to make an American boy or girl’s choice of a job different from that of English children, born into a society where stratification is so old, so institutionalised, that the dullest cannot doubt it. So economic conditions force them to go to work and everything combines to make that choice a difficult one, whether in terms of abandoning a care-free existence for a confining, uncongenial one, or in terms of bitter rebellion against the choice which they must make in contrast to the opportunities which they are told are open to all Americans.

And taking a job introduces other factors of difficulty into the adolescent girl’s home situation. Her dependence has always been demonstrated in terms of limits and curbs set upon her spontaneous activity in every field from spending money to standards of dress and behaviour. Because of the essentially pecuniary nature of our society, the relationship of limitation in terms of allowance to limitation of behaviour are more far-reaching than in earlier times. Parental disapproval of extreme styles of clothing would formerly have expressed itself in a mother’s making her daughter’s dresses high in the neck and long in the sleeve. Now it expresses itself in control through money. If Mary doesn’t stop purchasing chiffon stockings, Mary shall have no money to buy stockings. Similarly, a taste for cigarettes and liquor can only be gratified through money; going to the movies, buying books and magazines of which her parents disapprove, are all dependent upon a girl’s having the money, as well as upon her eluding more direct forms of control. And the importance of a supply of money in gratifying all of a girl’s desires for clothes and for amusement makes money the easiest channel through which to exert parental authority. So easy is it, that the threat of cutting off an allowance, taking away the money for the one movie a week or the coveted hat, has taken the place of the whippings and bread-and-water exiles which were favourite disciplinary methods in the last century. The parents come to rely upon this method of control. The daughters come to see all censoring of their behaviour, moral, religious or social, the ethical code and the slightest sumptuary provisions in terms of an economic threat. And then at sixteen or seventeen the daughter gets a job. No matter how conscientiously she may contribute her share to the expenses of the household, it is probably only in homes where a European tradition still lingers that the wage-earning daughter gives all of her earning to her parents. (This, of course, excludes the cases where the daughter supports her parents, where the vesting of the economic responsibility in her hands changes the picture of parental control in another fashion.) For the first time in her life, she has an income of her own, with no strings of morals or of manners attached to its use. Her parents’ chief instrument of discipline is shattered at one blow, but not their desire to direct their daughters’ lives. They have not pictured their exercise of control as the right of those who provide, to control those for whom they provide. They have pictured it in far more traditional terms, the right of parents to control their children, an attitude reinforced by years of practising such control.

But the daughter is in the position of one who has yielded unwillingly to some one who held a whip in his hand, and now sees the whip broken. Her unwillingness to obey, her chafing under special parental restrictions which children accept as inevitable in simpler cultures, is again a feature of our conglomerate civilisation. When all the children in the community go to bed at curfew, one child is not as likely to rail against her parents for enforcing the rule. But when the little girl next door is allowed to stay up until eleven o’clock, why must Mary go to bed at eight? If all of her companions at school are allowed to smoke, why can’t she? And conversely, for it is a question of the absence of a common standard far more than of the nature of the standards, if all the other little girls are given lovely fussy dresses and hats with flowers and ribbons, why must she be dressed in sensible, straight linen dresses and simple round hats? Barring an excessive and passionate devotion of the children to their parents, a devotion of a type which brings other more serious difficulties in its wake, children in a heterogeneous civilisation will not accept unquestioningly their parents’ judgment, and the most obedient will temper present compliance with the hope of future emancipation.

In a primitive, homogeneous community, disciplinary measures of parents are expended upon securing small concessions from children, in correcting the slight deviations which occur within one pattern of behaviour. But in our society, home discipline is used to establish one set of standards as over against other sets of standards, each family group is fighting some kind of battle, bearing the onus of those who follow a middle course, stoutly defending a cause already lost in the community at large, or valiantly attempting to plant a new standard far in advance of their neighbours. This propagandist aspect greatly increases the importance of home discipline in the development of a girl’s personality. So we have the picture of parents, shorn of their economic authority, trying to coerce the girl who still lives beneath their roof into an acceptance of standards against which she is rebelling. In this attempt they often find themselves powerless and as a result the control of the home breaks down suddenly, and breaks down just at the point where the girl, faced with other important choices, needs a steadying home environment.

It is at about this time that sex begins to play a rôle in the girl’s life, and here also conflicting choices are presented to her. If she chooses the freer standards of her own generation, she comes in conflict with her parents, and perhaps more importantly with the ideals which her parents have instilled. The present problem of the sex experimentation of young people would be greatly simplified if it were conceived of as experimentation instead of as rebellion, if no Puritan self-accusations vexed their consciences. The introduction of an experimentation so much wider and more dangerous presents sufficient problems in our lack of social canons for such behaviour. For a new departure in the field of personal relations is always accompanied by the failure of those who are not strong enough to face an unpatterned situation. Canons of honour, of personal obligation, of the limits of responsibilities, grow up only slowly. And, of first experimenters, many perish in uncharted seas. But when there is added to the pitfalls of experiment, the suspicion that the experiment is wrong and the need for secrecy, lying, fear, the strain is so great that frequent downfall is inevitable. And if the girl chooses the other course, decides to remain true to the tradition of the last generation, she wins the sympathy and support of her parents at the expense of the comradeship of her contemporaries. Whichever way the die falls, the choice is attended by mental anguish. Only occasional children escape by various sorts of luck, a large enough group who have the same standards so that they are supported either against their parents or against the majority of their age mates, or by absorption in some other interest. But, with the exception of students for whom the problem of personal relations is sometimes mercifully deferred for a later settlement, those who find some other interest so satisfying that they take no interest in the other sex, often find themselves old maids without any opportunity to recoup their positions. The fear of spinsterhood is a fear which shadows the life of no primitive woman; it is another item of maladjustment which our civilisation has produced.

To the problem of present conduct are added all the perplexities introduced by varying concepts of marriage, the conflict between deferring marriage until a competence is assured, or marrying and sharing the expenses of the home with a struggling young husband. The knowledge of birth control, while greatly dignifying human life by introducing the element of choice at the point where human beings have before been most abjectly subject to nature, introduces further perplexities. It complicates the issue from a straight marriage-home-and-children plan of life versus independent spinsterhood by permitting marriages without children, earlier marriages, marriages and careers, sex relations without marriage and the responsibility of a home. And because the majority of girls still wish to marry and regard their occupations as stop-gaps, these problems not only influence their attitude towards men, but also their attitude towards their work, and prevent them from having a sustained interest in the work which they are forced to do.

Then we must add to the difficulties inherent in a new economic status and the necessity of adopting some standard of sex relations, ethical and religious issues to be solved. Here again the home is a powerful factor; the parents use every ounce of emotional pressure to enlist their children in one of the dozen armies of salvation. The stress of the revival meeting, the pressure of pastor and parent gives them no peace. And the basic difficulties of reconciling the teachings of authority with the practices of society and the findings of science, all trouble and perplex children already harassed beyond endurance.