XXIV. Responsibility

BUT there is yet another quality which civilized standards demand of our human enterprise. People hate a quitter—and particularly the quitter whose defection leaves other people under the obligation to finish what he has started. We demand of a person that he should refrain from starting what he can’t finish. This is a demand not only for democratic intentions, but for common sense and ordinary foresight. He shouldn’t undertake a job that involves other people’s putting their trust in him, unless he can really carry it through. And if he finds in the middle of it that he has, as the saying goes, “bit off more than he can chaw,” he ought to try to stick it out at whatever cost to himself. If other people have believed he could do it, he must not betray their faith. This feeling is at the heart of what we ordinarily call telling the truth, as well as the foundation of the custom of paying one’s debts. We don’t really care how much[Pg 174] a man perjures his own immortal soul by lying, but we do object to his fooling other people by it. We are all so entangled with each other, so dependent upon each other, that none of us can plan and create with any courage or confidence unless we can depend on others to do what they say they will do. But our feeling goes deeper than the spoken word—we want people to behave in accordance with the promise of their actions. We despise the person who seems, and who lets us believe that he is, wiser or more capable than he turns out to be. We even resent a story that promises at the beginning to be more interesting than it is when it gets going. And in regard to work, the thing which we value above any incidental brilliancy in its performance, is the certainty that it will be finished. Hence the pride in finishing any task, however disagreeable, once started.

This is the hardest thing that children have to learn—not to drop their work when they get tired of it. But it should be obvious that there is only one way for children to learn this, and that it is not by anything which may be said or done in punishment or rebuke from the authority which imposes the task. It is not to be learned at all so long as the task is imposed by any one[Pg 175] outside the child himself. The child who is sent on an errand may forget, and not be ashamed. But the child who has volunteered to go on an errand—not as a pretty trick to please the Authorities, but because of a sense of the importance of the errand and of his own importance in doing it—that child has assumed a trust, which he will not be likely to violate.

But suppose, nevertheless, that he does forget. Here we come to the ethics of punishment—a savage ritual which we generally quite fail to understand. Let us take a specific case. A group of boys are building a house in the woods, and they run out of nails. Penrod says he will go home and get some from the tool-chest in the barn. He goes; and on the way, he meets a boy who offers to take him to the movies, where Charlie Chaplin is on exhibition. Penrod reflects upon his duty; but he says to himself that he will go in and see one reel of Charlie Chaplin, and then hurry away. But the inimitable Charles lulls him into forgetfulness of realities, and when he emerges from the theatre it is nigh on dinner time. Penrod realizes his predicament, and rehearses two or three fancy stories to account for his failure to return with the nails; but he realizes that none of them will hold. He wishes that a wagon would[Pg 176] run over him and break his leg, so that he would have a valid excuse. But no such lucky accident occurs. How is he going to face the gang next day? He has set himself apart from them, exiled himself, by his act. The question is, how is he going to get back? Now in the psychology of children and savages, there is happily a means for such reinstatement. This means is the discharge of the emotions—in the offender and in the group against which he has offended—of shame on the one hand and anger on the other, which together constitute the barrier against his return. That is, if they can express their anger by, let us say, beating him up, that anger no longer exists, they are no longer offended. While if he can by suffering such punishment pay the debt of his offence, he thereby wipes it out of existence, and at the same time cleanses himself from the shame of committing it. As the best conclusion of an unpleasant incident, he is ready to offer himself for such punishment. For children understand the barbaric ritual of punishment when it really has the barbaric ritual significance.

But the punishment must be inflicted by the victim’s peers. There are few adults who can with any dignity inflict punishment upon children—for the dignity with which punishment is given[Pg 177] depends upon the equality of the punisher and the punished, and on the implicit understanding that if the case had happened to be different the r?les would have been reversed.

It will be perceived that this leaves discipline entirely a matter for children to attend to among themselves, with no interference by adults, and no imposition of codes of justice beyond their years and understanding. Punishment, in this sense, cannot be meted out unless the aggrieved parties are angry and the aggressor ashamed; but let no adult imagine that he can tell whether an offending child is ashamed or not. Shame is a destructive emotion which a healthy child tries to repress. He does not say, “I am sorry.” He brazens out his crime until he provokes the injured parties to an anger which explodes into swift punishment, after which he is one of them again and all is well.

But the abdication of adults from the office of judge-jury-and-executioner of naughty children, destroys the last vestiges of the caste system which separates children from adults. It puts an end to superimposed authority, and to goodness as a conforming to the mysterious commands of such authority. It places the child in exactly such a relationship to a group of equals as he will bear[Pg 178] in adult life, and it builds in him the sense of responsibility for his actions which is the final demand that civilization makes upon the individual. And the importance of the school as a milieu for such a process is in its opportunity to undo at once, early in life, the psychological mischief brought about, almost inevitably, by the influences of the home.

There!—I have let the cat out of the bag. I had intended to be very discreet, and say nothing that could possibly offend anybody. But I have said what will offend everybody—except parents. They, goodness knows, are fully aware that a home is no place to bring children up. They see what it does to the children plainly enough. But we, the children, are so full of repressed resentments against the tyrannies inflicted upon us by our parents, and so full of repressed shame at the slavery to which we subjected them, that we cannot bear to hear a word said against them. The sentimentality with which we regard the home is an exact measure of the secret grudge we actually bear against it. Woe to the person who is so rash as to say what we really feel!—But the mischief is done, and I may as well go on and say in plain terms that the function of the school[Pg 179] is to liberate the children from the influences of parental love.

For parental love—as any parent will tell you—is a bond that constrains too tyrannically on both sides to permit of real friendship, which is a relationship between equals. The child goes to school in order to cease to be a son or daughter—and incidentally in order to permit the two harassed adults at home to cease in some measure to be father and mother. The child must become a free human being; and he can do so only if he finds in school, not a new flock of parents, but adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom and friendship. But that is something which I can discuss better in dealing with the subject of Love.