The Children of the Dream [antikvár]

An Experiment in Nature How intimate is the link between the nature of a society and how its children are raised? Or, as we have so often asked: is man the father of society, or society the father of man ? This question becomes no less burning with the passing of millennia. Today it is posed by the Israeli kibbutz but also by the communes of China and by the Soviet experiments with raising children in institutions. Here in America it is posed by the slum child. Can such children, if they continue to live in the slums, still learn to become citizens who will for ever do away with the very conditions that bred them ? Or does a better life for them depend on their removal from the slums in their formative years ? Reflecting on this riddle of society and child, David Rapaport once remarked that ' The upbringing of children in the agricultural collectives in Israel is for the social scientist what an "experiment of nature" is for the natural scientist [1958].' For many years, before he wrote this, we had talked together of the theoretical issues raised by such a method of rearing children, and of our serious dissatisfactions with those reports we had seen on how kibbutz children grow up. He was critical of them on the basis of his first-hand experience, having lived in an early kibbutz, and of his profound understanding of human psychology; I on the basis of my experience with the institutional rearing of children, which contradicted the claims that to rear children in groups must be damaging to mental health. Each of us felt that no one had yet explored kibbutz educational methods for 'what they can teach us about the relationships between instinctual drives, ego, and environment, that is to say, about the relationship between the life of a IS