Never was it more necessary for parents to face for themselves this question of education in all its bearings. Hitherto, children have been brought up upon traditional methods mainly. The experience of our ancestors, floating in a vast number of educational maxims, is handed on from lip to lip; and few or many of these maxims form the educational code of every household.
But we hardly take in how complete a revolution advancing science is effecting in the theory of education. The traditions of the elders have been tried and found wanting; it will be long before the axioms of the new school pass into common currency; and, in the meantime, parents are thrown upon their own resources, and absolutely must weigh principles, and adopt a method, of education for themselves.
For instance, according to the former code, a mother might use her slipper now and then, to good effect and without blame; but now, the person of the child is, whether rightly or wrongly, held sacred, and the infliction of pain for moral purposes is pretty generally disallowed.
Again, the old rule for the children’s table was, ‘the plainer the better, and let hunger bring sauce’; now, the children’s diet must be at least as nourishing and as varied as that of their elders; and appetite, the craving for certain kinds of food, thitherto a vicious tendency to be repressed, is now within certain limitations the parents’ most trustworthy guide in arranging a dietary for their children.
That children should be trained to endure hardness, was a principle of the old regime. “I shall never make a sailor if I can’t face the wind and rain,” said a little fellow of five who was taken out on a bitter night to see a torchlight procession; and, though shaking with cold, he declined the shelter of a shed. Nowadays, the shed is everything; the children must not be permitted to suffer from fatigue or exposure.
That children should do as they are bid, mind their books, and take pleasure as it offers when nothing stands in the way, sums up the old theory; now, the pleasures of children are apt to be made of more account than their duties.
Formerly, they were brought up in subjection; now, the elders give place, and the world is made for the children.
English people rarely go so far as the parents of that story in French Home Life, who arrived an hour late at a dinner-party, because they had been desired by their girl of three to undress and go to bed when she did, and were able to steal away only when the child was asleep. We do not go so far, but that is the direction in which we are moving; and how far the new theories of education are wise and humane, the outcome of more widely spread physiological and psychological knowledge, and how far they just pander to the child-worship to which we are all succumbing, is not a question to be decided off-hand.
At any rate, it is not too much to say that a parent who does not follow reasonably a method of education, fully thought out, fails – now, more than ever before – to fulfil the claims his children have upon him.