Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/17

 heavy and unbearable burden to the proletarian family.

Here also the Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia, owing to the care of the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare, great advances are being made, and already many things have been done in order to facilitate for the family the task of bringing up and supporting the children. There are homes fer very small babies, day nurseries, kindergardens, children's colonies and homes, infirmaries, and health resorts for sick children, restaurants, free lunches at school, free distribution of text books, of warm clothing, of shoes to the pupils of the educational, establishments—does all this not sufficiently show that the child is passing out of the confines of the family and being placed from the shoulders of the parents on those of collectivity?

The care of children by the parents consisted of three distinct parts: (1) the care necessarily devoted to the very young babies; (2) the bringing up of the child; (3) the instruction of the child. As for the instruction of children in primary schools and later in gymnasiums and universities, it has become a duty of the State, even in capitalist society. The other occupations of the working class, its conditions of life, imperatively dictated, even to capitalist society, the creation for the purposes of the young, of playgrounds, infants' schools, homes, etc., etc. The more the workers became conscious of their rights, the better they were organised in any specific State, the more society would show itself to be concerned with relieving the family of the care of the children. But