Can the school prepare for parenthood? / by John Russell.

  • Russell, John
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Can the school prepare for parenthood? / by John Russell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    restores. I should wish them further to be as ready—or as unready—to talk with their trusted teachers about such things as they are to talk—or be silent—about the deepest things of the soul. Upon some such foundations I could, I think, usefully build. I should show my children incidentally in their nature-lessons how the law of fatherhood and motherhood is the law of everything we call life, and I should introduce them in the case of plants and animals to the principle, and some of the results, of selective parenthood. And so I should hope to lead them gradually to discover, almost for themselves, that the physical quality of the bodies with which men and women are born is not an accidental thing—an arbitrary so-called “ act of God ”— but is dependent upon the physical quality of their parents and of their parents’ parents. And I should hope in the sociological (or applied science) lessons to lead them to the further conception that the mental and spiritual qualities which, on the one hand, have held the world so long in evil bondage, and, on the other, have broken so many chains, are also inherited qualities, and therefore under control—a control which, however slight and uncertain to-day, will steadily grow as knowledge grows. They would then (I should hope) go out of school-life into world-life with a foundation-sense of the significance in human affairs of human quality, and of our paramount duty to our own bodies, and further with a burning unquenchable faith in human progress, and a determination to take no part in the wanton propagation of evil in the spirit or in the flesh. “ Keep thy heart with all diligence,” runs my own school motto, “for out of it are the issues of life.” “Keep thy body also with all diligence,” lam sometimes tempted to add, “for out of it are issues of no less moment.” That in general terms is what I think it would be wise to do, and what I think every proved schoolmaster and school¬ mistress should be not only free to do, but expected to do. And yet in this grave matter, as in other grave matters, so timid and so divided is public opinion, that I have to be practically silent, “letting I dare not wait upon I would.”
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