JUVENILE CRIME AND PARENTS
Stn,—All the evidence, I think, is against Mr. C. A. Murray's view that citizenship is best taught to children by parents who may or may not have learned it themselves. The children are the parents of the future ; but at the moment to cry, "Leave it to the parents" is a counsel of perfection, and its practical inefficacy confronts us. Everyone has his favourite explanation of the slight increase of nastiness among children at the moment, and it is a part of Mr. Murray's explanation that their fathers no longer play with them. I should have said that a week-end walk across any public park would afford overwhelming evidence that
they do, and Mr. Murray himself concedes that Victorian fathers did not. But the point is that children are the only people compelled by law to sit down and listen, and that law was the first step towards the " universally-parental " nature of modern government which (no less than Mr. Murray) I deplore. However monstrous the burden which this must impose upon a long-suffering teaching profession, the children are there- fore the people we can reach immediately and directly.
How are we to reach the minds of parents—for at least Mr. Murray and I agree that it would be good to reach them if we could ? By C.O.I. posters like the " Switch Family Robinson " ? By short documentary films of the " This Means You " variety ? By pulpit exhortations to half-empty pews of the converted ? By door-to-door visits from District Moral Visitors ? " This is, indeed," as I said in the article to which Mr. Murray objects, "one of the jobs that devolve upon a universally-parental Govern- ment, but its instrument must be the Ministry of Education."
I agree entirely with him about the dangers of a totalitarian society ; but, while that is an epithet that may mean different things to different men, it seems clear to me that (to quote my article again) that danger "is a fact, whether we like it or not, whatever societies we form to arrest it, whatever Government we are likely to elect." Every Government in the civilised world, " free " or not, has assumed immense responsibilities in respect of its children, and lamenting the fact is like crying for the moon. To say, " Leave it to the parents " is, at this urgent stage, not even as excusable as crying.—Yours faithfully, R. H. CECIL.
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