For parental love--as any parent will tell you--is a bond that constrains too tyrannically on both sides to permit of real friendship, which is a relationship between equals. The child goes to school in order to cease to be a son or daughter--and incidentally in order to permit the two harassed adults at home to cease in some measure to be father and mother. The child must become a free human being; and he can do so only if he finds in school, not a new flock of parents, but adults who can help him to learn the lesson of freedom and friendship. But that is something which I can discuss better in dealing with the subject of Love.
Remember that it is not my fault that we find ourselves discussing so inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing what education can do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy, and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love; who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are beginning to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied in prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of women of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences against sexual morality, but a thousand less definable but not less real offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described as attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of education in dissolving those influences.
It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew in an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a long-forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the parental rôle in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman likes to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband; she likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was to her in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is at any moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from using these infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to have to mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally a bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him wise and obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has something else--the capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of these rôles. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is comradeship, is friendship.