The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

Small is … small

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

LETS, or local exchange trading systems, boil down to being localised barter clubs each of which has its own purely digital or recorded currency or credit system. Participants keep their own individual accounts which are, in effect, a register of the credits they earn or spend depending on the goods or services exchanged.

An important difference between this and a conventional money system is that we are not talking about a quid pro quo exchange being effected between participants. In some ways it resembles or aligns with a model of generalised reciprocity which lies at the heart of a socialist society but there are important differences as well.

Timebanks, unlike LETS schemes, do not have their own local currencies as a metric for keeping tabs on transactions. The only metric used is time spent in making a labour contribution. Moreover, and again unlike LETS schemes, the way in which labour time is evaluated is strictly egalitarian. Thus, one hour of labour performed will equal one ‘time credit’, regardless of the type of service performed.

By contrast, in the case of LETS schemes, there is some scope for negotiation over the price of the service or good offered in terms of the local currency (and hence, also, the possibility of a degree of transactional inequality). This makes such an arrangement somewhat closer in certain respects to a conventional market economy than is true of Timebanks.

Both LETS schemes and Timebanks are examples of highly circumscribed, or localised, ‘exchange rings;’ by their very nature they cannot be implemented on the large-scale society-wide basis. What that means, in the case of both LETS schemes and Timebanks, is that they will be rather restricted with regard to the range of activities individuals can engage with these arrangements.

Since they basically involve face-to-face interactions, this suggests that the forms of activities this might entail would be more along the lines of some form of personal service such as repairing someone’s car or computer or tidying up their garden. Obviously, you could not really operate a modern railway system or a power station on the basis of a LETS-type arrangement.

However, this is not to detract from the value of such arrangements as a means of coping within existing capitalist society. There are also certain benefits to be gained in terms of fostering a kind of outlook more conducive to a post-capitalist society. In these cases, the emphasis is very much on forging relationships with other individuals and building local communities. Thus, the underlying logic is radically different from that pertaining to market transactions which are quid pro quo by nature and socially atomising in their consequences.

Workers’ co-ops

Most of the advocates of so-called ‘market socialism’ have seen its basis as the state ownership of the means of production. However, that particular version needs to be distinguished from earlier versions, such as ‘Proudhonian socialism’ or ‘mutualism’, that go back to the 19th century and which have enjoyed somewhat of a revival following the collapse of Russian state capitalism

These versions envisage a role for the market in ‘socialism’ but emphasise, instead of state ownership, various kinds of worker-owned institutions – such as co-operatives and credit unions – as the instruments through which such a system of ‘market socialism’ would operate.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to see quite how they connect with the basic ideas of socialism as a post-capitalist society. The classical or Marxian concept of socialism derived from the observable fact that the process of production was becoming increasingly socialised. There is nothing that is produced today that does not involve, directly or indirectly, the labour inputs of countless numbers of workers right across the world. Hence socialism – at least as it was traditionally conceived – entailed bringing the pattern of ownership of society´s productive resources into line with the character of modern production itself.

In other words, social ownership of the means of production is the logical expression of the social character of production. But social (or common) ownership also, of course, logically entails the complete exclusion of buying and selling since the latter implies private, or sectional, ownership of these means.

It does not matter that the members of a co-operative, say, might own it in common amongst themselves (and hence, to the exclusion of everyone else). It is still a form of sectional ownership. The relationship of such a co-operative to the world around it is, essentially, a capitalist one since it has to purchase its inputs and sell its outputs – not to mention, generate profits in order to effectively compete as well as compensate its workforce in the form of wages. These are all, needless to say, the tell-tale indicators of a capitalist mode of production.

In effect, what the exponents of this form of ‘market socialism’ advocate is the continuation of private, or sectional, ownership of the means of production as far as the wider world is concerned — even if one might grant that, internally, the set-up pertaining to a co-operative, say, may well be a lot more equitable compared to a conventional business and that working for such an institution may likewise be a lot more congenial.

There is also the point to consider that the scope for co-operatives is quite limited in the context of the pattern of capital ownership within the larger capitalist society and may even diminish should the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few giant corporations become more pronounced than it already is.

Robin Cox

Letter: Have We Socialisation? (1922)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Editorial Committee of the
 Socialist Standard.

Comrades,

An article appearing in this month’s Socialist Standard over the initials J. D., entitled “Remedies,” needs your careful attention; an otherwise admirable article is marred in its conclusion by the astounding statement that the remedy for unemployment, poverty and overwork suffered by the working class is the socialisation of the means of production and distribution. Since how long has the socialisation of those means been the one remedy for the above mentioned social evils, poverty, etc. ? Seeing that capitalism and its mode of production has long since achieved the aforesaid socialisation of the means of production and distribution, what is there to trouble about; and why, like other journals still working for this end, such as Justice, Labour Leader, Socialist, continue to agitate and advocate and waste time over bringing about what is already accomplished? It is better to be exact than misleading in our teaching, and if J. D. and yourselves will show in our next or some succeeding number of the Socialist Standard that the only remedy for poverty, unemployment and overwork lays in the direction of social ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community, you will have done what is necessary so far as the article needs correction; and in the interest of truth, and of the hitherto good name of the Socialist Standard, I trust you will see the necessity of giving the correction as prominent a place as the statement that caused me to write you.

Yours fraternally,

Hy. Martin.

P.S.—The exactness I mean is not in the metaphysical sense.

Reply.

Mr. Martin has discovered a mare’s nest. The means of production are socially operated because the laws, methods of management, and the interaction of the various members of society who take part in wealth production, are all adapted to serve the present economic system.

But both the means of production and the products are privately owned. Hence there does not exist the Socialisation—or the making into a social system—of the means of production and distribution. This can only exist when social operations are combined with social ownership of both means and results of production. In other words, when Socialism is established.

Editorial Committee.

Children's Street Games (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Free-for-all sample investigation recently conducted by this writer revealed that, of a hundred and fifty children around thirteen years old, only one knew a commoney from an alley taw and none at all could play Jimmy Knacker. On the other hand, almost every one was au fait with TV panel games, space-travel and the Hollywood pantheon. Childhood pleasures have undergone a minor revolution, with most adults uncertain of its merits against the recollection that they had to make their own amusements in their young days.

That is true enough, but it means little. It would be more accurate to say that people of all ages “made their own amusements,” in the not-so-distant past and now take them second-hand, canned and standardized: the front-room piano and the family party have faded equally with Hopscotch and Tip-cat. Television, films and the other leisure-machines are obvious factors in the change, but its real nature lies much deeper in modern society.

Children's games are traditional. Many of them, like skipping, see-saws and swinging, began as ancient work-rituals: the reason why each had its immovable “season.” Hoops were an autumn pastime, marbles were for Lent, and skipping belonged to springtime. So did whipping tops; Greek and Roman boys played with them, as well as leap-frogging and doing the labyrinth mime we know as Hopscotch. And there were the war games—Tom Tiddler's Ground, Prisoner's” Base, and half a dozen others which existed five hundred years ago under names like The Last Couple in Hell and Barley-Break: the hunting and hiding games; the courtship games— Queen Anne, Drop Handkerchief and so on.

There was more than just playing them. Each had its proper ritual, beginning with a counting-out rhyme to choose the victim or the sides. Most, excepting the ones where breath was needed for vigorous action, depended on accompanying chants or songs. There were scores of them, from ball-bouncing and skipping rhymes to things like:

“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high.
Snowflakes flutter from the sky—
Lizzie Gordon’s going to die
For want of the Golden City."

Though the past tense has been used, they are still played, of course. Some of the rhymes have taken strictly modern imagery, like this one for skipping:

“Hi. Roy Rogers, how about a date?
Meet you round the corner at half-past eight.
I can do the rumba. I can do the splits.
I can wear my skirt up high above my hips.”

All of it has become increasingly rare, however. It is not merely that new amusements have superseded traditional ones, or even that road traffic has made the streets dangerous playgrounds. Children's play is functional, a part of the social pattern, and its transformation is part of the change in urban social life that has taken place in modem times.

Education today means schooling—the mass imposition of basic knowledge, skills and attitudes. In its real sense, however, education is the process of adapting children to the world they have to live in. Obviously that process is not limited to school: it takes place at home, in the streets and everywhere, and play is part of it. Through play, young children have learned from older ones the ways and ethics of their communities and the essentials of co-operative living. That is still the case in present-day primitive societies, and it was so in ours until recent times.

This was the real function and significance of all the children's games and songs. Little girls singing "Poor Jenny is A-weeping” or “Wallflowers” were not merely playing an ancient ring game but learning to accept and evaluate the fact of death; just as the Drop Handkerchief game was imitation and rehearsal of the conventions of pairing and courtship; just as, in even the rough games, everyone learned to behave co-operatively so that the game could go on and be enjoyed. Folklore, morality, sex, sociability—all were learned through play, together with agility of hand, foot and eye.

The division of labour in our society is such that one generation’s experience means little to the next. That in itself is one reason why lore and attitudes are no longer commonly handed down. More than that, however, the division is marked out in childhood. Children seeming to have special ability are creamed off, classified and made conscious of the separation at anything from seven years old. So are the “backward” ones. Hewers of wood and plan-makers in prospect are labelled and stratified and pressed along divergent roads without much common ground between.

It is common nowadays to speak of parents’ having abdicated in favour of teachers and administrators, as if the working class were directly to blame for the State’s having assumed charge of their children. In fact, anyone who tried to keep his child out of it all would find things made very difficult for him. The real point is that, as community life has fallen away, the formal communal function of education has been taken over to an ever-increasing extent by specialists with the State’s authority behind them. In the first place it was to instill simple knowledge; now, there are few aspects of childhood life it does not touch.

Thus, the function of children's games has largely ceased to exist. Physical agility is no longer acquired climbing trees, or with rope tied to the railings; it is the concern of the Physical Training teacher, who has hoops and ropes and climbing frames and calls them "apparatus.” Rounders, touch and stump-cricket? in the "organized Games” lesson on the Council’s playing-field. The rituals, codes and knowledge have been transmuted into rules. In “The Reasonable Life,” Clifford Gessler’s delightful book about the Polynesians, children are described as playing with and learning from one another without adult direction; our society, on the other hand, has led to direction in practically every human activity—including those of childhood.

One result of the handing-over of communal and personal responsibilities to authority-bearing specialists is that many people have come to take it as the natural order; the authorities should do this, that and something else. Another, in part, is the amount of tension and frustration which characterizes life in the modern world; the outstanding frustration—and one unprecedented in history—is that of people’s desire for association with and acceptance by their fellows. It is worth considering the matter, however in relation to the lives of children themselves. There is a great deal of alarm nowadays about the apathy and recalcitrancy said to be rife in State elementary schools; there are the juvenile delinquency figures —and, of course, the Teddy Boys.

Why do numbers of young people today adopt and display anti-social attitudes? Various immediate causes are fairly obvious; for example, statistics from all over the world show a clear relationship between delinquency and broken or unstable homes. The bigger, more important point is that anti-social behaviour is a matter of the organization of society. In this case, its strongest single cause is the absence of former communal, co-operative living and thinking.

The Teddy Boy is one product of an un-social society. He has grown up in a world where life is individualized and behaviour depends less and less on communal sanction. He has been educated insofar as knowledge and attitudes have been more or less forcibly inculcated from above: in the wider sense of education, of learning in and from a community, he has not been educated at all. And the dominant ideals of the Capitalist world, the mainspring of his behaviour-pattern, are of ends justifying means and might being right.

Thus, the disappearance of traditional children’s games is part of a change in social life which has taken place in our time and has added fresh problems to those inherent in our society. The latest generations of children know only a world which is atomized, congested but lonely, which can teach them little about co-operation and social harmony. Criticisms of schooling and of the behaviour of young people are easy and plentiful. The real criticism, however, is of society. The millions spent on our educational systems are directed to training children to take their places as workers and consumers. In a world organized for human satisfaction and not for profit, the purpose would be very different.

Robert Barltrop

“The Reasonable Life” is published by The John Day Company of New York and Longmans Green of Toronto. It describes everyday life among the Polynesians of the South-East Pacific, who have not so far had the good fortune to discover tension, neurosis and the other benefits of Capitalist society.