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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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This has been particularly the case in America, where industrialism and industrial individualism have attained their greatest development, and where those tendencies have not been counteracted by a feudal tradition.
The categorical character of the debt of gratitude owed by children to their parents for having brought them into the world has come to be more critically viewed. The value of the family group as an educational agent has been more than questioned. The paternal family has afforded in some measure a haven sheltered from the sharp conflicts and competitions of individualistic society, where sentiments of social affection have had a better opportunity of developing than in the fray of competitive strife. But against that advantage are to be set grave and pernicious effects. Parental influence rests upon an arbitrary and objectionable authoritarian principle. By its very nature that principle gives rise inevitably in the children subjected to it, to resentment and revolt more or less secretly smouldering under the imposed disguise of reverence, duty, and obligatory affection. That very situation sets all other family influence upon a foundation of insincerity and hypocrisy which tends to extend to all. The educative direction given to that influence by the great majority of parents is ignorant and baneful. In times when the movement of thought and of changing values is rapid, parents must needs represent, as a general rule, the more backward, effete, and obsolete types of opinion, and this is the more likely to be the case the higher the value which they set upon the dogmatic sanctity of family authority. In proportion as the sentimental influence of the family is greater so is its paralysing influence upon the generation rising up within it. Parenthood bestows no special qualification for the educative functions which traditional family sanctification assigns to parents. The paternal or the maternal claim to determine the education of their children, the political, social, or religious instruction which they shall receive, is no less a tyrannous abuse when exercised by parents than if it were exercised by public censors and "licencers of thought". Children do not "belong" to parents, as the tradition of ancient Rome transmitted to modern societies proclaims. The concept of domination or possession first developed in human society with the paternal family is as arbitrary in any other relation as in that of patria potestas.
The fiction that parenthood constitutes a sacrifice for which the child, even when grown to manhood or womanhood, remains beholden, commonly leads on the part of the parent to the claim of a real sacrifice from the son or daughter of their independant development. In some greater or less measure that sacrifice
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 377. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/59&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
