Dealing with the problem - the back of all CONFLICTS Part #2

Some day we shall pass from negative and physical malgenics to positive and spiritual eugenics. The one is necessary to insure the birth of healthy and normal human animals: the latter will be adopted in the hope of making possible the birth and life of normal souls. For it is not an end to itself but means to an end, and that end the furtherance of the well-being of the immortal soul.


But in reality the eugenic responsibility of parents is a negative one and, being met, the second and major responsibility remains to be met. The former involves a decision; the latter the conduct of a lifetime. Once upon a time, it might have been said that parents are not responsible for the heredity of which they are the transmitters. Today, we charge parents with the responsibility of heredity which they bestow or inflict as well as with the further and continuous responsibility of environment. Whatever may be held with respect to the duty of parents as "hereditarians," there can be no doubt that it is the obligation of parents consciously to determine, as far as may be, the content of the home environment. I would go so far, and quite unjestingly, as to maintain that the least some parents can do for their children is through environmental influence to neutralize the heredity which they have inflicted upon them. Unhappily, it may be, we cannot choose our grandparents, but we can in some measure choose our grandchildren.

Parenthood and the begetting of children are not quite interchangeable terms. The continuity of parental functioning is suggested by the Hebrew origin of the term, child, which is etymologically connected with builder, parents being not the architects of a moment but the builders of a lifetime. This means that we are consciously to determine the apparently indeterminable atmosphere of our children's life and home. That this involves care of the bodily side of child-being goes without saying, but, as we have in another chapter pointed out, this stress seems to be needless. The primary and serious responsibility of parents is bound up with the education of a child. And the first truth to be enunciated is that parents can no more leave to schools the intellectual than to priest and church the moral training of a child.