Sec. 1.  AN IDEAL COMMUNITY

For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for communal living.  No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a condition of unmitigated anarchy.  A free society cannot consist of units not free.  The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as persistently irritating and perplexing stumbling-blocks in many a home simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and relation with the normal life in which it is set.  Society environing the home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy, individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection.  In social living outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt to compel children to do the will of one.

Sec. 2.  COMMUNITY INTERESTS

The home organized as a social community will give to every member, according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from every member the free contribution of his powers.  Its rules will be made by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of all.  The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.

To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home.  Two plans at least are possible:  first, the “head of the home” may go forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with the other “head”; or, second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all.  Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of deference to the wishes and wisdom of others.  Of still greater importance is another practical issue of such a plan—­that every member of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened responsibility.  Instead of thinking of any household possession as father’s or mother’s, or even mine, it becomes ours.  The parents no longer need to say, “Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money to replace it.”  The children know that already, and they have the same pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as they have in that which is peculiarly their own.  A habit of mind results from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights of others which is simply right social thinking.