Character molding

I am a pacifist. Should I try to make my children pacifists?

Humanity can be divided into two classes: those who have accepted Father and have thus become members of the Establishment, and those who have rejected Father and have become rebels. The former make up the great majority.

In the upper classes, many lads challenge the Father Philosophy at 20; at 50, they vote Tory.

A father can he a pacifist and at the same time an un­satisfactory father. He may be a fuss-pot; he may be moral about sex; he may have a religion that does not appeal to youth. In a pacifist home as well as in any other kind of home, there may be children who protest against the subtle molding.

No, I don’t think you should make a conscious effort to convert your family to your way of thinking. If the home has a love basis, your sons and daughters will unconsciously be influenced by your ideas, and the chances are that your children will accept pacifism.

My friend, I don’t think anyone should attempt to form his child’s life or thoughts. We must be ready to accept be­havior from our offspring—and beliefs, too—that go against our grain. One pacifist father I knew had a son who was mad about flying. The only way to learn flying was to join the local flying corps training school. The father sternly forbade his entering a military establishment. The son ran away and joined the R.A.F. That father should have bowed to his son’s wishes.

We must not try to live our children’s lives for them. I am a Humanist, but I would not dare to try to convert my child to Humanism or to any other creed or conviction. I will answer my daughter’s queries, but I wouldn’t think of beginning a campaign to get her to think in the way I do. She sees the way I live. If she approves of that way, she may follow it. But nothing I could ever say would be more eloquent or meaningful than my behavior has been.

The same observation applies to convictions. My child by this time should know what I believe in. No need to convince her one way or the other. She’s had ample time by observance to find out whether she agrees or disagrees.

No, live and let live, I say.

I discount so much appearing in psychoanalytical liter­ature about hidden motives.... the pacifist is a sadist over-compensating for his unconscious cruelty, or the pacifist is a physical coward rationalizing his motives to avoid being killed in battle. One might just as well say that the tortur­ing Gestapo was over-compensating for a strong uncon­scious love for the Jews. And if all this attributing of thought and action to unconscious motives is right, one would think that psychoanalysts themselves, having discovered their own unconscious drives, would be wonderful men free from all complexes. Having met dozens of them in my time, I can assure you that analysts don’t behave much different from most other people.

My wife and I are active in furthering civil rights. We are dead against the war in Vietnam. Our children, a boy of 18 and a girl of 16, have no desire Jo take part in civil rights marches. They won’t even wear an anti-bomb badge. We are disappointed in them. Should we try to get them to follow in our footsteps to a freer world?

Certainly not! Anyway, you couldn’t if you tried.

You should not expect your children to he replicas of yourselves. They are possibly fed up with the whole she­bang, for in your home there must be so much talk about your beliefs and your actions. Maybe those kids of yours are so busy protesting against their home pressures, they have no energy left to protest against the treatment of Negroes.

A “liberal” home is not always a liberal home. You can’t convert anyone by talking or by preaching. Oh, yes, a Billy Graham can convert a mass of people whose emotions have been dammed up for years, but, in most cases, how long such a conversion lasts is questionable. Parents should not try to convert their children to anything!

The opposite holds true, too. I have just answered a school girl in Chicago. I wrote, “Don’t try to convert your parents to a belief in Summerhill. You say they are against it. Anything you say to them will not alter their belief one iota.” There are cases of true conversion, but only when the convert has been unconsciously seeking conversion for some time.

Your children reject your philosophy of life. Leave it at that; you have no control. Even if your boy became a member of the Klu Klux Klan, or if your girl went out on the streets, you could do nothing about it. I make the guess that the two of them feel they’ve had enough indoctrination at home to last a lifetime.

It is perhaps easier to indoctrinate hate than love. All those white children in the deep South I see on TV have faces full of hate when they stone Negro children. That hate is not natural; it was forced on them all the way from baby­hood. Hate seems to breed hate more easily than love breeds love, hence the sickness of humanity. To have a hating parent must be one of the worst handicaps a child can ever have.

Again, I say to you parents: leave your children alone. If it is really in them, they will find their own way to protest against all that is ugly and hateful in life. If they truly believe the downtrodden should be succored, they will find their own way to help. If they are impervious to others’ needs, nothing you might say will make one whit of differ­ence.

A youth of IV said to me: “I march in the anti-bomb marches in London and all the time I keep thinking of their futility, for I know that our minority has absolutely no power to alter the policy of the men who rule us.” Right, or wrong, he has a point.

Free children are not propagandizing rebels; they often wear anti-nuclear badges, but none was arrested for sitting down with Bertrand Russell in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, I think I am the only Summerhillian who was tried for sit­ting down as a protest. I sat down in Scotland at the Polaris Base, and got 60 days or a fine of £10. I didn’t try again because I concluded that it was a method that cut little or no ice.

No, freedom does not make rebels. And here an awk­ward question arises: To rebel against the Establishment, must one have first suffered bitterly from it? As Shelley puts it:

Most wretched men are cradled into poetry through wrong;

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Coming back to your question: Parents must try to see the point of view of their children, ft could be that your youngsters feel deeply about the matters that concern you, but also feel—though they won’t express it—that pragmati­cally, you’re all wet in your approach.

In my teaching, I have never intruded my own per­sonal problems, so that if you ask any of my pupil’s questions about my personal life they would not know the answer. What are my politics, my attitude to religion, to doctors and to drugs? They would not know. Happily they would not care.

The greatest danger is for a teacher to impress his pupils with his own creeds. The business of teaching is to stimulate thinking—not to implant beliefs.

Suppose a man seriously believed that the earth is flat, and he spent his leisure marching along with a huge banner to proclaim his truth—I can hardly imagine that any son would be likely to march with him. Would you deem such a boy disrespectful or ungrateful? Your beliefs and your passions are your own: don’t foist them on your children.

How can I imbue my children with an attitude of love and reverence for life when all about them they experience hatred and prejudice and hostility and war?

This is a poser. How can you?

Yet we manage to do it in Summerhill. Our ex-pupils will never be haters of Negroes or Jews, nor will they be warmongers. Our kids grow up to be charitable and toler­ant, but certainly not ignorant of the sick world they live in. Give a child a happy home and a happy school and the risk of his becoming a hater will be small, indeed.

At Summerhill, we have many small children. We have cats and hens and geese that wander about the children’s paths with no fear at all; indeed, it is sometimes hard to get the cackling geese to move out of the way. Give children love and freedom and they will automatically have a rever­ence for life, both animal and human. I know of no other way.

Our reform schools for delinquents with their strict discipline and punishment breed hatred all the time. Every spanking father makes his child hate and fear. Every stupid roaring teacher has the same effect. The only hope for this sick world is a new generation of children who are allowed to love life and not to hate it.

But, alas, the vast majority of children are damned from the beginning—damned by discipline, by preachings, by punishment, damned by indoctrination by people who, in their time, were led to hate life.

So when I go to a teacher’s conference and listen to speeches about exams and careers, I just feel sick. The only good education in home or in school is one that allows the emotions to be free.