Spencer Heath Archive

Item 527

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

No date

     I correlate delinquency with compulsory schools. There may be other things than that. With relation to parental influence, it cuts two ways. First, it takes children forcibly away from the jurisdiction of their parents, physically, and secondly it sets up a separate authority over the children which not only displaces the parental authority but weakens the parental sense of responsibility for the child. Furthermore, under parental authority, there is very little regimentation. The child has some opportunity of being uniquely himself, pursuing his own individual tastes and capacities, whereas under political regimentation they are all subject to pretty much the same run of the mill.

“Well, is individual expression encouraged in the Chinese child?”

I doubt it. The pattern of the ancestor with them.

“But that’s not so with the Americans?”

Many can adjust to this regimentation, but a large minority, at least, must be forced and frustrated against their will, causing their natural energies to break out in devious and anti-social ways. Parents who are no longer responsible for the education of their children can have but little influence on their behavior. Without respon­sibility for their education, they cannot be responsible for their conduct or their morals. It is the age-old scourge of governmental tyranny substituting the degrading corruptions of slavery in place of the creative spontaneity of freedom.

“Don’t you think a better argument for the individual development of the child under home education is not so much that the home is apt to be less restricting on the child than the school, but that there’s more variety in home education? Every home does it a different way, so that there’s a wide variety.”

Not that the home is any less tyrannical than the school. All right then, I’ll put it in.

/Possibly Heath made some indication to strike that remark./

Moreover, home and family conditioning versus govern­ment regimentation affords a variety of options and influences for the exercise of juvenile freedom, but the diversity of family circumstance and organization affords a wide social milieu — /a/ variety of contacts and influences as wide as the diversity of circumstance and conditions from one family to another within the same circle of association. Out of all this variety comes a wider freedom, a greater number of options as to influence and association and as to types of normal activity most congenial to the individual personality and will. The more freedom there is in the environment, the least it resembles a penitentiary, the more favorable it is to the development of virtue and creative capacity.

This is not to say that discipline, even rigorous discipline, has no value, but that in the home it can be balanced by affection and respect, elements that are not found in penal institutions and in other institutional frameworks in any but a low and exceptional degree. There is in the home, as in all social institutions, at least the possibility of moral and esthetic, not to say spiritual, influences, none of which are to be found in political institutions.