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Title: The Children and Psychology Author: Paul Goodman Language: en Topics: Childhood, children, education Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1334, 2021.
What is most significant, it seems to me, is the earnest attention paid
to the Children and Family as a subject, the desire of parents to be
Informed and thereby do their best, rather than following their wit and
impulse; or to say this another way, what is significant is the
importance assigned in our society to Psychology itself? for Psychology
is still by and large the family-psychology that Freud made it
discussing the problems of jealousy, infantile dependency authority,
submissiveness and rebelliousness, and sibling competition: and problems
of spite, moral prejudice and other reaction-formations springing from
instinctual deprivation. This interest in the Children is of course
hopeful, for the increase of wisdom cannot fail to remedy abuses, and
has already done so quite spectacularly.
But this interest is also itself a symptom of an unfortunate social
situation. Earnest folk pay such special attention to the children, and
in general to their Inter-personal Relations, because there is not
enough objective manâs work or womanâs work to put themselves to. I do
not mean that there is not enough absolutely (itâs a large universe);
but that in our present social and technical arrangements there are not
enough exciting and available and unquestionably self-justifying
enterprises, where a lively human being can exercise initiative and use
his enormous psychic and physical powers to anything like capacity. This
problem goes, I think, deeper than any of the current differences in
political or economic arrangements, and I cannot think of any immediate
change that could alleviate it. We are in a phase of collective
enterprise that does not. and probably cannot as yet much use and
stimulate such remarkably gifted animals as individual people,
especially if we consider them (as children) before they are discouraged
and become rusty, and in addition to our powers all the knowledge and
equipment of our culture. So more and more are likely to blow off steam
in religious exploration; and the brunt of the burden falls on
preoccupation with the Children and Interpersonal Relations, for these
at least are things that one can individually try to do something about.
Good parents work to preserve-and-give more available energy to their
children; the children in turn grow up and find they have not much field
of action for this energy, but they can expend some of it on their
children.
The helping of children has the prime advantage that it can be
disinterested, compassionate, and noblesse oblige; it is our nearest
equivalent to the old chivalry. The bother is that, except for those who
have a calling, who are born teachers, it is stultifying as a steady
occupation. We also need some dragons to kill and planets to visit, for
goods to produce that people unquestionably need. A psychiatrist friend
of mine says that the right care of children is: let them alone and be
around; where ââbe aroundâ means I suppose, to provide safety, audience
for the exploit, consolation for the hurt, suggestion and material
equipment for the next step, and answers when asked. This simple formula
will not fill up a twenty-lecture seminar on Children.
As our families are, the children in both their present satisfaction and
the free growth of their powers, are certainly crushed, thwarted,
pushed, hurt, and misled by their hostile and doting grown-ups. Frankly,
I doubt that you can find one child in a dozen who is not being
seriously injured, in quite definite and tangible ways, by his family. I
would say this indignantly, as an indictment of the Family and ecrasez
lâinfame letâs fight to get rid of it! If I thought that the available
substitutes were not even more disastrous. But consider also the other
side, that the parents are tied to and tyrannized over by the little
Neros. You cannot put them in their places for several reasons:
bounces back on you in the end; and
demands of the children because most, and perhaps all? of the hard
things they really want are justified: they want space, excitement,
sexual freedom noble models to grow up to, wise saws of experience, real
arts and crafts to learn animals to hunt, an unknown to explore, and
comprehensible answers to direct questions.
But it is not the case that our housing our economy, our style, our
frontiers, and our sciences are amenable to these justified childish
demands. Our arrangements have become so objective that few grown-ups
and no children any longer have an available objective world. So a
sensitive parent feels justly guilty; he tries anxiously, in impossible
conditions, not to rob the children of their natural rights as the free
heirs of nature and man. Do not many of us suffer from what we could
call a Lear-complex? We are abashed by the free unspoiled power of the
very young, we have no right to withstand it. we resign and give up our
own rights.
As a striking example of parental guilty good intentions, notice in
community planning how every adult requirement of quality style, and
efficiency, is sacrificed to suburban utilities of safety and
playground.
Contrast it to make the point clear- with a master and his disciples
whether an artist or an artisan or a scholar: he uses the kids for his
purposes, he says do and donât with a clear conscience because his soul
is fixed on the work; he teaches them out of his compassion to prevent
error and advance the future. They. in turn, are neither humiliated nor
browbeaten nor exploited. They are growing into the work and growing
through him because he is a master of the work; and the compelling proof
of all this does not come from authority but from the work. Now
regarding the Family as a school of growth in the art of personal life
and of exploration and inspiration towards a career, what experienced
mother or father feels like a master of the subject and can command and
forbid with conviction, except in some elementary issues of health and
safety and perhaps grammar and manners? (As Yeats said, âThe best lack
all conviction â the worst are full of passionate intensity.â) We do not
know the method to reach the goal we do not know. This is often
expressed by the sentence, âI donât care what my children do or become,
so long as they will be happy.â An honest, humble, and sensible
sentence, but it puts parents in the impossibly anxious position of
trying to fulfill an indefinite responsibility. So instead of
improvising with wit and love on a foundation of experience and
unquestioned personal achievement they necessarily rely on Psychology
and Mental Hygiene.
Another cause of preoccupation with the children is that children have
become the only colorable excuse for existence of the monogamous family.
Economically women make money and own most of it. As a way of life, with
the general breakdown of the old sexual conventions and the weakening of
the old inhibitions, monogamous marriage is felt as a trap and a
frustration; people are exposed to and allow themselves to feel,
temptation but are not able to take satisfaction so there is plenty of
resentment and guilt, projected resentment. Frankly, again, it is my
observation that if many marriages (maybe most) could be simply
dissolved after a few years, the partners would suddenly become
brighter, rosier, and younger. And again I would therefore urge, change
the whole institution, except that the situation is not simple: we are
still in the toils of jealousy of our own Oedipus-complexes, and in the
present social fragmentation the companionship of marriage, such as it
is, a safeguard against isolation and loneliness. (The Family was a
bulwark of the private economy, and now it is a refuge against the
collective economy.) But these grounds for the continued existence of
the institution cannot stand much ethical scrutiny, considering the
cost. It is the children that make the effort unquestionably worthwhile;
and of course with the two or three children now standard, the burden of
justification that must be borne by each little darling is great indeed.
As a defense against it, it has become the highest aim in life of an
entire young generation to âachieveâ a normal happy marriage and raise
healthy (psychologically healthy) children. This is, what was always
taken as a usual and advantageous background for work in the world and
the service of God, is now regarded as a heroic goal to be striven for.
This is preposterous. Yet, I should like to repeat it, the sentiment is
deeply justified by the fact that at least this goal can be personally
striven for; it is connected with real, not merely symbolic
satisfactions and responsibilities; and the same cannot be said for
other goals for most people, which are either fictions of prestige and
power, or are managed collectively. Consider, as a test, when the goal
cannot be achieved or when the marriage cracks up: it is the exceptional
case where the personâs work or social role is important enough and real
enough to occupy his thoughts and keep him going with manly fortitude.
Viewed in this light, the thousand manuals of sex-technique and happy
marriage have the touching dignity of evangelical tracts, as is indeed
their tone; they teach how to be saved, and there is no other way to be
saved.
The well-intentioned loving and resentful parents make a vocation of the
children until finally they can send them off, at increasingly early
times, to nursery-schools and schools. Perhaps the schools will provide
âexploration and inspiration toward a careerâ. But the situation of the
teachers in the schools is fundamentally no different. For always the
question is, What to teach? What is realistically worth teaching? The
curriculum becomes poorer and poorer, Because an honest educator cannot
seriously believe that the solid sciences and humanities are
life-relevant to the average of this mass of pupils. Nor is so-called
âvocationalâ training the answer. (The same tends to be applied
precisely in the absence of vocation.) Neither the jobs trained? for nor
the kill-time training add up to what would enliven a human soul. The
answer of the school is again psychology; what the teacher has is not a
subject-matter but a method? and what he teaches is Interpersonal
Relations. The only art that is essential is to read simple words, for
production and distribution depend on reading. (So there has been
universal free primary education for a hundred years, and the earmark of
the delinquent who wonât fit into the economy is that he won t or canât
learn to read.) But the savage and intolerable irony is the current
craving for more mathematics and physics, lest our bombs, radar, and
rockets fall behind Russiaâs â these beautiful studies that have been
transcendent goals for many of our best! now advocated so basely and the
professors greedy for the subsidies and students on any conditions.
Brought up in a world where they cannot see the relation between
creativity and achievement, adolescents believe that everything is done
with mirrors, tests are passed by tricks, achievement is due to pull,
goods are known by their packages, and a man is esteemed according to
his front. The delinquents who cannot read and quit school, and thereby
become still less able to take part in such regular activity as is
available, show a lot of sense and life when they strike out directly
for the rewards of activity, money, glamour, and notoriety, which will
âproveâ in one fell swoop that they are not Impotent. And it is curious
and profoundly instructive how they regress, politically, to a feudal
and band-and-chieftain law that is more comprehensible to them. The code
of a street-gang has made an article in common with the Code of Alfred
the Great.
It is disheartening indeed to be with a group of young fellows who are
in a sober mood and who simply do not know what they want to do with
themselves in life. Doctor, lawyer, beggar-man? thief? Rich man, poor
man, Indian chief? They simply do not know an ambition and cannot
fantasize one. But it is not true that they donât care; their âso what?â
is vulnerable, their eyes are terribly balked and imploring. (I say âit
is dishearteningâ, and I mean that the tears roll down my cheeks; and I
who am an anarchist and a pacifist feel that they will be happier when
they are all in the army.)
This a sad picture, naturally; for it is always sad when you write about
something, rather than do something. (Poetry is not sad, it is an
action.) I do not think there is cause for indignation, nor for despair.
Not for indignation because so many people are doing their best and many
of these difficulties that have arisen are surprising and must simply be
addressed patiently. Not for despair, for my feeling is that we are in a
strange transition: to finding some kind of collective arrangements that
will be rich with animal vitality and creative spontaneity and will be
without Interpersonal Relations. Of course I cannot imagine such an
apparently contradictory thing or I would be writing that instead of
this. Meantime we psychologically-informed parents are doggedly (and out
of our own hides) contributing to the explosion of it. By the millions â
soon by the vast majority â we have let up on toilet-training, we have
been liberating sexuality, we have honestly relinquished an old-
fashioned authority because we do not know right principles. Then in the
new generation there is more and more health and available energy, and
less and less to do with it; more and more unprejudiced,
not-class-ridden and goodhumored kids who are, yet more and more stupid.
This is the psychology of abundance that goes with the economy of
abundance.
With the alleviation of the anxieties of poverty, there naturally loom
vaster and at first vaguer anxieties of destiny. Our present task, it
seems to me, is just to get rid of a few more ideas, to get rid of Life
so we can have a little life, and finally to get rid of Psychology so we
can have a little contact and invention. As Lao tse said, ââGood
government is to empty the peopleâs minds and fill their bellies.â
Paul Goodman