SOCIAL QUARANTINE FIRST

Man is social first and individual afterward.

That is, without a social system man cannot exist.

Without social advantages and economical division of labor a human being ceases to be a man and becomes a very helpless animal.

It is only in the midst of social aid and protection and by the help of intelligent coÖperation that man may develop an individuality having civilized attributes.

Social Quarantine is of first importance because a strict recognition of it applied to children during the habit-forming period of their growth will render greatest aid to morals and religion and also to health. An appreciation of God and that stimulating, rational and healthful reverence for good that constitutes true religion must needs follow as a natural result of Perfect Moral and Social Quarantine.

Perfect Social Quarantine minimizes causes for fear-thought and thereby destroys the arch enemy of energy, growth and happiness.

To minds that have been protected during the first years of life by being surrounded by wholesome suggestions, it is scarcely necessary to preach against the passion of anger and the self-abuse of worry, while religion comes intuitively to such, because fearlessness is the normal condition of a protected mind and religious sentiment of some sort is the natural tendency of pure thought.

The attitude of pedagogy toward character-formation from the earliest times has been faulty. That is, the approved methods of one generation have, in turn, become classed with the methods of barbarism in the following generation, and will continue to be so shelved by succeeding generations until all the systems shall recognize a strict social quarantine as the first duty of instruction and cultivation.

What is Social Quarantine?

Social Quarantine means throwing a perfect cordon of care around tender souls coming into a nation or community so that none shall escape contact with the wholesome suggestions and adequate nourishment that are essential to growth and habit-forming according to the best intelligence of the Science of Child-Life.

Social Quarantine requires the extension of the crÈche and kindergarten systems and the provision of parental farms and manual-training schools to meet all needs, and it promises in return a crop of material for good citizenship whose character and efficiency shall save at least one-fourth of all taxation and add a proportionate percentage to the productive equipment of society.

Until the time of Froebel, society had depended on family quarantine to protect it against the evils that beset childhood, without furnishing models by which families might learn to know the best methods of care. In seaport quarantine the use of independent, State or municipal systems is securely supplemented by a national system, with the effect that there is a double cordon of protection, so that there is the least danger of a weak point to menace a whole country by its neglect. Perfect Social Quarantine, such as here recommended, would have the quality of a national, State or community quarantine to supplement the hallowed family institution, always ready to render service wherever needed.

If you cannot force a horse to drink, it is none the less criminal not to supply him with water. If society does not wish to coerce the family institution into complying with scientific methods of child-care, it is none the less criminal not to supply facilities so that none shall escape care who need and seek it.

The experience of kindergartners has taught that incompetent parents do not need coercion, or even coaxing, to submit their children to care, and that the greater the strenuousness of the need the easier the compliance following it.

Nowhere did Christ say, "Let childhood follow any course until it has formed habits of evil and ruined its digestion, and then send it to me for right teaching." "Suffer little children to come unto me (for what they may need to start them aright) and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven," is a burning protest against the possibility of child neglect such as prevails.

Christ's protests were misunderstood by his followers, who tried to reconcile them with the old traditions, until Saint Froebel suggested a practical application of Christ's injunctions, but out of that method wonderful results have already been obtained and marvelous possibilities have been uncovered.

Children cannot say, "Get thee behind me, Satan," with the authority of quarantine, because they do not know what "satan" is, but "satan" or evil constantly lurks about them and they cannot help but absorb it unless they are carefully protected. If the family is incompetent to protect, society should stand ready to do so until no child can escape care, and the responsibility of one neglected soul should hang heavily on the conscience of every member of a community until there is no more neglect.

Not one word must be said to the detriment of that sacred institution, the family. It is the basis of society and of our civilization. Nothing can replace the family as a means of good influence, but it is imperative that it should be supplemented with models of the best kind known to the best intelligence in order to raise the average efficiency to the highest possible point.

Parental Love itself, unless guarded by the restraint of superior intelligence, may become a bad teacher through over-indulgence or through carelessness or neglect resulting from a form of blindness especially peculiar to young parents. To these, bad temper is an evidence of "spirit," and waywardness is proof of qualities of leadership. To young parents the "spirit" of their "own flesh and blood" cannot be bad spirit and "leadership" cannot contemplate a wrong direction; and yet these tendencies generally become perverse with indulgence.

According to primeval usage which was imposed by once sacred traditions that have become misfits in present civil and social codes, society attacks evil in front, instead of on the flanks, where it is weak, or in the rear, where it is impotent to oppose good. Neglect of children from the time of birth until the primary school age of six or seven years has furnished a nursery of bad habits and warped character out of which to supply a strong foe to established order and industry for society to fight and punish, when a tenth part of the effort and expense applied at the right end would have effected an ideal social condition.

If it is desired to fight hereditary tendency or evil environment, the time to do it is before it has become a fixed impression and a habit-of-thought, and the kindergarten has proved that the evil suggestions of depraved home environment are easily amenable to the good influence of strong counter-suggestion if applied early enough to prevent an indelible impression being fixed upon the memory.

There has been a sort of national social quarantine for several years, but at the wrong ports of entrance. More or less effective attempts have been made to turn back paupers, criminals, insane persons and imbeciles from landing on our shores. We have had personal experience of a cruel case of ill-judged interpretation of the law that refused a young woman to land, who was none of these outcasts in fact, but whose fault was approaching maternity without a marriage certificate to legalize it. In the case in point the quarantine resulted in murder, for the young mother was in no condition to be sent back to sea and a fright experienced on the voyage resulted in the death of the child and serious illness to the young mother.

This is the present interpretation of what should constitute "strict" social quarantine, but these sources of social disorder and misery are insignificant and comparatively harmless when compared with those accompanying the immigrants arriving hourly from the Creator, through the port of Birth, brought hither on the wings of the mystic stork.

There is no reason to quarantine against these little immigrants themselves, for among them there may be a Washington, a Franklin, a Lincoln, a Bergh, a Bolivar, a Peabody, a Margaret Haughery, a Plimsol, or a Froebel; and of the rank and file there may be a whole army of altruists whose mission from abroad is to bring strength and happiness to the land of their chance and involuntary adoption.

We must accept and even welcome these Immigrants by birth without restrictions or credentials until they are able to speak for themselves and render an account of our stewardship in their behalf. Until that time our social administration is unworthy the name of civilization unless the duty of our strength to their weakness—of our loyal hospitality to their involuntary guesthood—shall have been fulfilled, even to the last waif among them.

The duty of society is not fulfilled while it has furnished only partial protection to a limited number of these wards, and not until it has found out and served the last one of them with whatever mental or physical nourishment it may need to supplement that which chance of birth has furnished. It is not only a duty to them, but to ourselves and to our own children, who are subject to the influence of these other immigrants in the community, no matter how isolated they, or we, may seem to be.

The experience of the kindergarten, where intelligently administered, already proves that care of children during that tender period ranging from earliest perceptions to seven or ten years of age is capable of securely forming character for life, perfecting the naturally good and greatly modifying hereditarily bad tendencies so that the good habits thus formed can be traced through the whole course of development in the higher schools and even out into the competition of life.

There is good in every child. It is the duty of the kindergartner to find that good, and efficient ones do it, straining energy where most needed, and finding greatest pleasure in the hardest problems.

That this efficiency is due to the merit of the inspiring motive and the kindergarten method is proven by the fact that the same earnestness and happiness in results obtains in all lands where the system is in use and is not confined to isolated places. We have personally seen it illustrated in the kindergartens of Holland and Germany as well as in the United States.

But there is no longer intelligent controversy about the efficiency of present methods in use in Character-Forming schools where habit and character are the first aims, leaving special intellectual attainment and religion to follow as natural results in due course.

What these little immigrants become in character must be the result of the conditions we prepare for them, and with which we surround them after arrival. We are responsible for the conditions to which they are condemned or by which they are favored, and hence all criminality or enforced idleness is part of the responsibility of each member of a community and in proportion to his intelligence or wealth. Society has heretofore neglected and persecuted the parents, but let us not perpetuate a barbarous inheritance for their children.

It is therefore proper to place social quarantine first in respect of importance.

No one form of quarantine can replace other forms, for there is need of protection at every gate by which evil may enter. The function of social quarantine is to teach moral or individual quarantine. Evil finds its way into the mind and becomes a bad habit-of-thought through fear in some of its many forms of expression. It is an easy matter to teach a child the difference between fearthought and forethought and to guard the mind against a tendency to fear. Social quarantine itself would eliminate the chief cause for fear and at the same time stimulate energy for useful accomplishment of some kind.

The old idea that necessity is the only mother of effort was operative only in primeval times when man was yet very much of an animal, when might was the recognized title to right, and before mankind had passed "over the center," as it were, in evolution, and before he came within the atmosphere of the dominant influence of attraction towards the highest ideals.

It is only necessary to refer to the cases around one in every community to note that the spirit of work in normal man is never satisfied, any more than the spirit of play is ever satisfied in children before they are warped out of shape by unwholesome surroundings.

Society has placed its quarantine against the germs of idleness and disorder at only one gate, and it begins to fight them only when they have established entrenched camps within the borders, and have already begun their depredations.

Between the outer gate of Birth and the inner gate of Individual Responsibility it has not only left open fields of temptation, but it has permitted the digging and maintaining of masked pitfalls of vice that the youth of the slums or of careless parents can scarcely escape. It is true that there is a theoretical protection offered through laws forbidding the entertainment of minors in saloons and other nurseries of vice, but many children roam at will among these pitfalls and cannot escape the influence, while all children, lads especially, no matter how isolated or protected, are sometimes drawn into these maelstroms by accident, or the allurements of the depraved ones already engulfed within them, who are eager for company to share their misfortune and disgrace.

Society practically abandons its Apprentice Citizens to haphazard instruction during the most important period of character-formation, and confronts them with punishment when full-grown tendencies to idleness and evil may already have become habits.

Within the past few years organized detachments of society have essayed to offer protection on humanitarian grounds and thereby have unconsciously helped to avoid the necessity of expensive correction by placing outposts as near to the gate of birth as possible, the crÈche being the outer sentinel and the kindergarten guarding one of the inner gates of entrance into life, but the full benefit of protection cannot be felt, and there is in reality no quarantine at all until no child can escape the care of these blessed institutions.

We are not pleading for an untried experiment but we are appealing for organized effort to utilize already successful and approved means to close up the last gap of neglect through which the germs of evil and discord and idleness and waste may enter, and thus derive, for a small additional cost, the tenfold benefit of complete over partial protection. We are pleading for support that shall enable us to find the waif of our story, and the only possible means of rescuing him is to "corral" all waifs in need of care. We are pleading that the conscience of our nation may not be soggy with the responsibility of one neglected, helpless one at home even while we fight in the cause of freedom abroad.