The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert

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And I learned, from childhood, that the family experience can be very important to an individual. Family life teaches a person to shoulder his or her share of responsibility. It's also quite a supportive structure . . . and can stage rituals in which all of the members are able to participate. A child can develop a sense of self-reliance and self-worth through involvement in such activities.

PLOWBOY: Did you work on your plans to be " a author " during those farm days?

HERBERT: Yes, I used to write awful poetry and crude childish stories. I got my best storytelling practice, though, from being the yarn-spinner for all my cousins. Whenever the whole family got together, we youngsters would go off someplace by ourselves. The other children would come up with a title—something like "The Blood and the Vow"—and I'd have to make up a tale that fit it . . . one that, often as not, would scare the wits out of them.

PLOWBOY: How did you develop the concepts that have become the "hidden" messages in your stories?

HERBERT: First of all, my childhood days gave me some rockribbed ideas about the ways people should live together. To put my beliefs simply: I think we ought to be loyal to our friends . . . we ought to be truthful . . . we ought to be supportive of family members . . . and we ought to provide one another with help directly instead of delegating our good deeds to institutions.

I don't like governmental "helping"—or any kind of public charity system-because I learned early on that our society's institutions often weaken people's self-reliance and damage family bonds as well. Take education, for instance. The teaching of our young ought to be about equally divided between the family, which should lay the ground-work for the child's learning, and professionals who can pass on useful knowledge that the child's relatives might not have in their repertoire. Today, though, the professional education establishment assumes that the family doesn't know what its own members need or want. The result is a classic failure . . . an institutionalized system that does more harm than good.

Do you know that—in response to just that problem—my own family left the United States twice? On both occasions we went to live in Mexico . . . because I was not considered "qualified" to teach my children in the U.S., but could home-school them in Mexico. Our youngsters were taught at home when they were young, and they haven't suffered in the least from it.

PLOWBOY: So you think our country's methods of instruction have a lot to do with the destruction of many family values?

HERBERT: Absolutely. By the time you have three or four generations of people who are taught not to trust their families and their families' knowledge, individuals can really become separated from their roots. The effect is to make people feel like lost wanderers, or to cause them to think of themselves only in the role of their jobs . . . which is a complete misrepresentation of what it means to be alive.

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