Educating emotions prevents juvenile delinquency

Title

Creator

Thompson, Dorothy

Language

English

Source

Panorama XII (8) August 1960

Subject

Juvenile delinquents -- Psychology

Juvenile delinquency -- United States

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

For you, baby fawuJt By Dorothy Thompson Z"J few days before the discontinuance of the an cient Third Avenue El in New York, I decided, for old times’ sake, to take a last ride on it. I climbed the stairs to board at a midtown station, shortly after three in the afternoon. No one was on the platform except the elderly ticket seller and a dozen youths from a nearby high school. They were traveling on passes, free transportation furn ished public-school pupils, and their behavior was atrocious. The ticket seller asked them to line up to show their passes. This they refused to do, shov ing, crowding, and shouting at one another at the top of their lungs. He spoke to one girl who had crowded through, saying, “Please come back and show your pass.” “I showed you my pass,” she screamed back. “I’m sorry, but you didn’t,” the old man said. Now, still screaming reiteratively that she had shown it to “the old dope,” she flashed the pass through the wicket and banged it on the old man nose, shouting, “There’s your pass for you!” Their uptown train came in, and they galloped aboard. I was going through the downtown August 1960 15 gate, but had time again to ob serve their faces. They wore an expression of extreme aggres siveness. Not one looked happy. In none was there an expres sion of interest or affection. “Excuse me,” I said to the ticket seller. “Are they always like that?” “Usually worse,” he said biterly. “I’m scared of three o’clock. I have the feeling they might kill me — just for a joke.” It was a small incident, but I was unable to dismiss it from my mind. A few weeks before ( a boy of fifteen had been shot dead in a New York street by a seventeen-year old youth who be lieved him to be a member of a rival gang. When the murderer was arrested two teen-aged girl onlookers had cheered him as a hero. The papers were full of such stories, I had seen noth ing on the station but a display of bad manners. But beyond the bad manners, it was that facial expression that disturbed me. I knew what the ticket seller meant. It was frightening in it self. The wearers of this expres sion, whether they know it or not, belong to a tiny previleged group of the more than two bil lion people who inhabit this pla net, for only a small fraction of mankind has access to educa tion above the primary grades, and millions not even that. *"Yhese youths of fourteen to eighteen are not working as most of their grandparents were, helping to “pay their own way.” The municipality is pay ing their way; they don’t even have to trudge on foot to school. They have, <rfree for nothing,” access to centuries of human culture; great museums housing two millenia of art; the finest music for the turn of a dial or the adjustment of a record; li braries in which the wit and wisdom of ages are stored. The President of the United States speaks to them on televi sion; talented actors perform for them in their own homes; a vast entertainment business ca ters to their tastes; a multimillion-dollar clothing business dresses them within the bud gets of their parents’ income more lavishly than any youth except a small class of the rich have ever been dressed before. Great scientific enterprises work day and night to guard them from diseases. Youth clubs are organized in and out of school to provide for their re creation. In the great cities an ever-increasing number of them live in modern apartments, fur nished with every convenience, with part of the rent paid by the community. Public parks and play grounds are at their disposal. 16 Panorama They are, in fact, by any stand ards, in any time, “lords of crea tion.” Yet all this, which comes to them from others, they take for granted, as a “right”, and if it is not granted, feel, and are call ed, “underprivileged.” None of it moves them to gratitude, or awakens in them a sense of re ciprocity toward society. That the fatherly old ticket seller, calling for their passes, is, in fact, a cog in a mechanism operating for their benefit, and a fellow human being, is unre cognized. The public parks must be po liced against vandalism, and their shadows are jungles for gangs preying upon each other. Anyone who takes the trou ble daily to compile from any great metropolis newspaper re ports of legal misdemeanors and crimes committed by minors will be appalled at what he ac cumulates in a month, and na tional and local statistics en large the story. Whenever a pe culiarly savage and senseless crime occurs, the public is mo bilized; calls are issued for more law-enforcement agencies, more public expenditures for youth clubs, better co-ordination of so cial agencies, and the appoint ment of a new committee. Citi zens assess the causes; the schools blame homes and churches; the parents blame the schools; the sociologists blame “living conditions,” and so ad in finitum, in a circle that only gets back to where it started. Yet I submit that the fault lies primarily in one place: in education; and that the basic fault is a misconception of the purpose of education, and the means by which it can be effect ed. This misconception rests on the thesis that knowledge is the source of power, in the indivi dual and in a society; that a suf ficiently “informed” population is capable of satisfactory selfgovernment; that conduct is pri marily controled by reason; and that the purpose of education is to create “individuals efficient in their own interest.” PUT this phrase in quotation marks because it is not mine. Fully a generation ago I read a book by the British sociolo gist, Benjamin Kidd, called The Science of Power. It was writ ten during the early stage of the First World War and is long out of print. I only lately re obtained the volume, which had been borrowed from me and not returned. Benjamin Kidd observed, then, the growing savagery in Western society—the savagery of class and international con flicts, the ever-increasing sav agery of war and the ever grow ing cult of naked force, accom panying enormous material and scientific progress. He believed August 1960 17 the eventual result would be the decline and fall of Western civilization, in which prediction he was by no means alone. Power in a society, he declar ed—the force that makes for survival—rests upon the trans mission and improvement of the cultural inheritance, and this transmission and refinement is not accomplished by the train ing of the individual intellect, the inculcation of skills or the arguments of reason, but by the “emotion of the ideal," awaken ed in very small children—in whom he believed it was inhe rent and natural — and culti vated to maturity. The ideal is “other-regarding" emotion, that subordinates the interests of the individual to the interests of the community; the interest to succeed to the interest to ac hieve; the interest to get to the impulse to give; the interest of the present to the interest of the future; the instinct of agression to the instinct of altruistic prot ectiveness. The child, in short, cannot be made a worthy member of so ciety by appeals to his self-in terest; he cannot be rendered immune to aggressive urges by indoctrination that “crime does not pay.” He is not made good or bad by external material liv ing conditions; or by a greater or lesser amount of intellectual training; or by a higher or lo wer I. Q. His actions and atti tudes as a child largely deter mine his actions and attitudes 18 Panorama as an adult. But these are not inspired by his brain, but by his feelings. He becomes what he is encouraged and trained to love, admire, worship, cherish, and sacrifice for. This training cannot be incul cated by appeals to self-inter est, by fear of discipline, by preachings, or by ambition for individual recognition as some one above and apart from hu man society. The affectionate instincts which preclude aggres siveness grow in response to af fection and out of the desire to be loved, which means to be ho nored. In all this manners play an important role, for good man ners are nothing more or less than the expression of conside ration for others. It is futile to tell a child that earliest age into attitude or pos ture of respect. Schools that insist on clases’ standing when teacher .enters the room do not do so for the sake of the teach er’s prestige, but for the sake of the children. The teacher is to be respected for herself and her function. To say that education must encourage individual “self-ex pression” begs the question. What kind of “self-exoression”? The first expressions that need to be engendered are those of courage, industry and helpful ness. The desire to help is pre sent in nearly every small child. A toddler will say, “Me help mummy.” Only too often his help is impatiently rejected as impending rather than contri buting to performing the task, but in rejecting it a creative so cietal impulse is being suppress ed in the child. A modern catchword is, “The child dpes not exist for the school, but the school for the child.” A little thought expose the fatuity of this slogan. The school is an institution of the community and exists to serve it; to transfer to the child its highest ideals, and so guide, train and enlighten him that he will, as a member of the com munity, cherish its highest ideals, emulate its best beha viors, protect its safety, feel a duty for its well-being, and thus ensure its freedoms and its sur vival as the condition of his own freedoms and survival. The freer the society, the more dispersed its powers, the more essential is the develop ment of its personal and social character. The school is the child’s first encounter with society, and its primary task is to help him. to become socially acceptable and socially creative. Apart from society the “individual” has no meaningful existence. But socie ty is not the sum total of the individuals comprising it, at any moment. It is a continuity that they inherit and carry on. They do not inherit it as in dividuals, through their genes— August 1960 19 but as part of a general cons ciousness and conscience re garding what is beautiful, true admirable, and worthy to be cherished and emulated; in short, of what is good for man kind. All societies have their more and moralities or they are not human societies but jungles. The first function of education is, therefore, not to turn out bet ter or worse laborers, house wives, stenographers, mathema ticians, engineers, and so on— each activity representing but one function of a human per son—but to send on their way new members of the communi ty who, through their characters (largely conditioned by emo tional response), will contribute something over and above whatever they do for a living. Society is transcendent to the individual. Apart from pure ly biological inheritances, it creates the individual. The so cietal impulses alone preserve society and through society the individual. “No man is an is land unto himself.” jIll crime, in whatever ca7 tegory, consists of only one thing: malicious offense against a fellow human being or beings. Those who merely hurt the feelings of others with out feeling uncomfortable them selves are in an emotional con dition to commit graver misde meanors. Courtesy—a “mere” matter of manners—is an ex pression of the “other-regard ing" emotion. Internal feelings are reflected in external beha vior, but external behavior also contributes to the cultivation of internal feelings. It is hard to feel aggressive while acting con siderately. Good manners may be only skin deep to start with, but they seldom remain so. Children are imitative. Rude, quarrelsome and violent parents are likely to have children of similar behavior. But the home alone does not condition the emotional behavior of the child, who, above all, imitates his con temporaries and those adults whom they, as a group, admire. The school has the advantage over the home in that it is a society of children. Their emo tional response to that society will determine their later emo tional response to the world at large. Only the stimulation of the emotion of the ideal in very small children, where it exists latently, will create a society approaching the ideal: a so ciety instinctively protective; one that does not invite ag gression by aggressiveness, but will instinctively defend against aggression, not out of hate but out of love. If we looked back upon our own, what teachers do we remember—o r what about them do we remember? The lessons they taught us, well or ill? 20 Panorama We remember only the teachers we loved, only those whose characters we instinctively re spected and emulated. It seems to me that far too much empha sis is put today upon pedagogi cal training, especially for tea chers in primary schools, and far too little upon selection for character. It also seems to me that too much importance is attributed to intelligence tests as placing children in educable or uneducable categories. The child, with an I.Q. of 69 is not, as an indi vidual,, going to make the mark in the world that the child with an I.Q. of 30 may. But he may be just as good a human being. For goodness and badness, with rare exceptions — like sanity and and insanity—are not con ditioned by the brain but by the emotions. Our prisons and in sane asylums are filled with peoplp who have nothing wrong with their' brains but whose emotions are deranged and whose societal impulses have never been cultivated or have gone awry. No country is more health conscious than ours, and parti cularly of the health of child ren. We are concerned about their nutrition and have devel oped it into a science; Lu.idreds of millions of dollars are read ily obtainable for research, es pecially into the diseases that aifect children. And this is all very well. But penal institutions are nevertheless filled with wednourished inmates. Four times as many people die each year from bullet wound as are lost from polio; and more hospital beds are required for mental cases than for any other one disease. Criminals become so not irom hardening of the arte ries but from hardening of the heart, and few cases of insanity have direct pathological causes; the overwhelming majority are due to emotional derangements of frustrated egos. Society can protect itself only if its educational institu tions foster the protective, other-regaraing emotions in child ren. The insights for such a de velopment seldom come out of the pedagogy books. They are the insights of all great religious teachers; of those who have con cerned themselves to create good people in a good society. August 1960 21

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15-21

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