> > kelley
>============
>
>You mean we don't socially engineer childhood now?
>
>Ian
good point. here's why we probably ought not to try to do more without looking at what miles talked about:
::Those who insisted on the importance of the family adopted self-defeating
strategies of defense. The guardians of public health and morality
simultaneously exalted the family as the last refuge of privacy in a
forbidding society and insisted that the family could not provide for its
own needs without expert intervention. Some of them had so little
confidence in the family that they proposed to transfer its socializing
functions to other agencies; others wanted merely to improve the quality of
family life through ambitious programs of 'parent education,' marriage
counseling and psychiatric social work. The difference between these
strategies distinguished social democrats and progressives from
conservative practitioners; yet both programs intensified the very "crisis
of the family" to which they claimed to hold out the solution.
Too little attention has been paid to the ways in which public policy, sometimes conceived quite deliberately not as a defense of the family at all but as an invasion of it, contributed to the deterioration of domestic life. The family did not simply evolve in response to social and economic influences; it was deliberately transformed by the intervention of planners and policy-makers. Educators and social reformers maintained that the family stood as the obstacle to what they conceived as social progress: immigrant families in particular preserved separatist religious traditions that retarded the growth of the political community, and the national state. Accordingly, reformers sought to remove children from the influence of their families, which they also blamed for exploiting child labor, and to place the young under the benign influence of the state and school.
The Progressive movement sought to regulate anarchic business conditions, reduce social and economic inequality through educational reform and taxation, and promote cooperation between workers and capitalists, government and industry. According to Perkins Gilman, another prominent reformer: "There is no more brilliant hope on earth today than this new thought about the child and children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state, instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal ownership--the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked indulgence, of the private home." For Gilman, the family institutionalized selfishness, whereas civilization teach us to care for "the child" not only our children. Motherhood stops at the child and is vigorously against children.
Opponents of child labor proposed to transfer children from parental exploitation to the loving care of the school. According to Ellen Richards, one of the founders of professional social work, the school was "fast taking the place of the home, not because it wished to do so, but because the home does not meet its functions." For the physicians, social workers, penologists, and other involved in the Progressive movement, the family produced misfits, emotional cripples, juvenile delinquents and potential criminals, according to this reasoning. "If the state is to have good citizens...we must begin to teach the children in our schools, and begin at once, that which we see they are no longer learning in the home."
The belief that the family no longer provided for its needs justified the expansion of the school and of social welfare services. "Social, political and industrial change," Stuart Hull, a prominent educational reformer, claimed,
have forced upon the school responsibilities formerly laid
upon the home. Once the school had to teach the elements
of knowledge, now it is charged with the physical, mental
and social training of the child as well. Breakdowns in
family morale underlie crime and social disorganization.
Through children's aid societies, juvenile courts and family visits, they sought to counteract the widespread "lack of wisdom and understanding on the part of parents, teachers, and others," while at the same time reassuring the mother who feared, with good reason, that the social worker meant to take her place in the home. By the 1920s, psychiatric social workers went to great lengths to put such fears to rest. Yet, they simultaneously extended the profession's claim to stand in loco parentis. Charlotte Towle, for instance, argued that the social worker stood in a "parent-child" relation to her clients. Those who came to her for help experienced a "deep-lying need to be guided by a parental hand," making it necessary for the social worker "to play in secure fashion the mature parent role in social leadership."
In order to justify their appropriation of parental functions, the "helping professions" in their formative period--from 1900-1930--appealed many times to the analogy of preventative medicine and public health. Educators, psychiatrists, social workers, and penologists saw themselves as doctors to a sick society, and they demanded the broadest possible delegation of medical authority in order to heal it. The medical profession, they claimed, had learned to prevent disease rather than simply relieving its symptoms, and social pathologists had to master the same lesson.
In early modernity, Philip Rieff has observed, the church or cathedral stood as the symbolic center of society; in the nineteenth-century, the legislative hall took its place, and in our time, the hospital and penal colony. With the medicalization of society, people came to equate deviance not with crime, much less with sin, but with sickness, and medical jurisprudence replaced an older form of justice designed to protect private rights. With the rise of the "helping professions", society invaded the family in the first three decades of the 20th century and took over many of its functions. The diffusion of the new ideology of social welfare had the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By persuading the family to rely on outside technologies and the advice of outside experts, the apparatus of mass tuition--the successor to the church in a secularized society--undermined the family's capacity to provide for itself and thereby justified the continuing expansion of health, education and welfare services.
The "helping professions" had liberated people from old constrictions only to expose them to more repressive scrutiny of church and state only to subject it to medical and psychiatric scrutiny or the manipulation of the advertising industry. Insisting on the privacy of sex and marriage, they gave the most intimate acts unprecedented publicity. Upholding the family as the last stronghold of spontaneity, they sought to expel from marriage, love and sex precisely the irregular, the unpredictable, and the unmanageable. The "repeal of reticence" lifted the shroud of sexual ignorance but imposed the new constraint of an allegedly scientific technique, in the light of which sexual "performance" would be judged and found wanting. lawgiver and priest retired from sexual supervision only make way for the doctor, whose supervision was far more thorough. The older authorities and proscribed acts that threatened the stability of the community; the rest they left to discretion. Doctors, on the other hand, sought to shore up the psychic stability of the individual and therefore omitted nothing from their gaze. The disenchantment of erotic life dispelled many superstition but reduced it to a routine. the establishment of medical and industrial jurisdiction over marriage thus defeated its own purpose, to strengthen the last bastion of privacy.
_Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged_
no, we don't.