Coming of Age in Samoa/Chapter 14
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 cach 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 dully 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 wil] temper present compliance with the hope of future emancipation.
In a primitive, homogenous 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 role 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 satifying 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 clement 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 inde-pendent 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 difficultics 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.
Granting that society presents too many problems to her adolescents, demands too many momentous decisions on a few months' notice, what is to be done about it? One panacea suggested would be to postpone at least some of the decisions, keep the child economically dependent, or segregate her from all contact with the other sex, present her with only one set of religious ideas until she is older, more poised, better able to deal critically with the problems which will confront her. In a less articulate fashion, such an idea is back of various schemes for the prolongation of youth, through raising the working age, raising the school age, shielding school children from a knowledge of controversies like evolution versus fundamentalism, or any knowledge of sex hygiene or birth control. Even if such measures, specially initiated and legislatively enforced, could accomplish the end which they seck and postpone the period of choice, it is doubtful whether such a development would be desirable. It is unfair that very young children should be the battleground for conflicting standards, that their development should be hampered by propagandist attempts to enlist and condition them too young. It is probably equally unfair to culturally defer the decisions too late. Loss of one's fundamental religious faith is more of a wrench at thirty than at fifteen simply in terms of the number of years of acceptance which have accompanied the belief. A sudden knowledge of hitherto unsuspected aspects of sex, or a shattering of all the old conventions concerning sex behaviour, is more difficult just in terms of the strength of the old attitudes. Furthermore, in practical terms, such schemes would be as they are now, merely local, one state legislating against evolution, another against birth control, or one religious group segregating its unmarried girls. And these special local movements would simply unfit groups of young people for competing happily with children who had been permitted to make their choices earlier. Such an educational scheme, in addition to being almost impossible of execution, would be a step backward and would only beg the question.
Instead, we must turn all of our educational efforts to training our children for the choices which will confront them. Education, in the home even more than at school, instead of being a special pleading for one régime, a desperate attempt to form one particular habit of mind which will withstand all outside influences, must be a preparation for those very influences. Such an education must give far more attention to mental and physical hygiene than it has given hitherto. The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body, handicapped in no preventable fashion. And even more importantly, this child of the future must have an open mind. The home must cease to plead an ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles or frowns, caresses or threats. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think. And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as to-day they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice. Unhampered by prejudices, unvexed by too early conditioning to any one standard, they must come clear-eyed to the choices which lie before them.
For it must be realised by any student of civilisation that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly changing civilisation; we pay in high proportions of crime and delinquency, we pay in the conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of prices, we must count our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognised only one. Where other civilisations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilisation in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.
At the present time we live in a period of transition. We have many standards but we still believe that only one standard can be the right one. We present to our children the picture of a battle-field where each group is fully armoured in a conviction of the righteousness of its cause. And each of these groups make forays among the next generation. But it is unthinkable that a final recognition of the great number of ways in which man, during the course of history and at the present time, is solving the problems of life, should not bring with it in turn the downfall of our belief in a single standard. And when no one group claims ethical sanction for its customs, and each group welcomes to its midst only those who are temperamentally fitted for membership, then we shall have realised the high point of individual choice and universal toleration which a heterogeneous culture and a heterogeneous culture alone can attain. Samoa knows but one way of life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?