modern parent is at heart deplorably unregenerate-but we do not think ourselves entitled to think so. I cannot illustrate the modern mother's frame of mind better than by quoting some verses written by Mrs. Dearmer, a lady whose picture-books are one of the many things which make the child of to-day much luckier than his fore runners: 1 think the world is really sad, I can do nothing but annoy; For little boys are all born bad, And I am born a little boy. It doesn't matter what's the game, I said one day on mother's knee, "We shouldn't worry any more In those strange lands with queer new toys; But here we stamp and play and roar, And wear your life out with our noise. "The savages would never mind, And you'd be glad to have us go; There nobody would be unkind For you dislike your children so." Then mother turned, and looked quite red I do not think she could have heard; She put me off her knee instead Of answering one single word. She went, and did not even nod. What had I said that could annoy? Mothers are really very odd If you are born a little boy. The mother's contrition, which Mrs. Dearmer indicates in this delicate, roundabout way, is quite true to life nowadays; but the average matron of the early Victorian period would have known nothing of such heartburnings. Mrs. Dearmer's lady finds her children troublesome at times-which is quite natural-but she is inclined to think that it is very wrong of her to be so intolerant. Her grandmother would have packed the infants promptly out of the room, and never troubled to justify herself for doing so. To be with their elders was a privilege which children had to merit by good behavior, and being good meant being quiet. Even Miss Edgeworth, who in many ways anticipated the modern theories, was quite clear about that. To her mind the duty of children not to annoy their parents was much more peremptory than the duty of parents to amuse their children; whereas nowadays we are distinctly taught that parents have no right to be annoyed. I should greatly like to call up Miss Edgeworth from the shades and ask her to comment, for instance, on Mrs. Dearmer's poem. She would explain, I think, to the parent how, by a judicious mixture of rewards and punishment, even a person who has the misfortune to be born a little boy can be induced to enjoy himself quietly in a corner; and to the little boy, undoubtedly, she would say, that if he wishes other people to be agreeable to him he must be agreeable to other people, and consequently must not shake the table when his mother is writing (see "Little Frank," passim). She certainly would never insist, as a good many people do nowadays, that it is essential to the health of little boys that they should "stamp and play and roar," and consequently that grown-up people have just got to put up with it. The case of the Edgeworths is really instructive. "It was the lot of Maria Edgeworth," observes Mrs. Oliphant, in a very charming chapter of the "Literary History of England," "to be trained in one of those somewhat appalling family seminaries of all the virtues, where nothing escapes the sys tem of education, and everything is made subservient to the moral discipline of the house." Mr. Edgeworth was a gentleman of independent means and no occupation, who had a turn for natural science and a passion for lecturing his company; and this passion he indulged for the benefit of his children. The most exacting Froebelian could not expect any parent to take himself more seriously as a parent than did Mr. Edgeworth, and it is only fair to say that his children adored him. Yet I do not feel the least desire to emulate the virtues of this model father. I do not find that he made any endeavor to enter into his children's pleasures; he did his best to make them take up his own whims, and to become little patterns of the great exemplar who sat daily at the head of the long breakfast table. The model parent, in short, in this instance, was a prig and a maker of prigs; and that is, in my humble judgment, what the model parent is fatally apt to become. "Come, now, let us live for our children." Such, it appears, was the message which Froebel, the great apostle of modern theories on education, delivered. Let us educate them so that, I suppose, they in their turn may live for their children, and the world be perpetually full of parents sacrificing their own lives to make their children so moral that these in their turn will repeat the sacrifice, and so on ad infinitum. For if there is one thing about which the modern theorist is more clear than another, it is that character, not instruction, is the object of education. We are to teach our children, not how to be good-for the assumption is that children are not bad, and that if they do what they ought not to, it is the fault of their education, or of their hereditary tendencies-but how to be observant, how to be cheerful, even how to play. In many cases the adoption of these theories has an ironical result; the modern mother is so profoundly convinced that this business of edu cation is a difficult and subtle business, only to be conducted by an expert, that she packs her children out of the house as soon as they can walk, and salves her conscience by paying the bill. In Miss Edgeworth's novels you find innumerable complaints of the fashionable lady who made over her child to a foster-mother, and found the little creature a great nuisance when it returned to her. Nowadays those ladies would have no trouble in the matter; they could commit their infants to a system, and explain to the next person who took them into dinner how essential it was that the early training of a human creature should be entrusted to a person who had minutely studied the mental processes of children and understood the harmoniously proportionate development of body and mind. Mrs. Rawdon Crawley would have been an enthusiastic advocate of the Kindergarten if it had existed in her time, and if she could have found some one to pay the fees for her. Still, the people who merely find in modern theories an excuse for washing their hands entirely of parental duties are rare; the average mother desires her children's presence; so does the average fatherin moderation. But the parent who is theory-bitten is apt to turn a pleasure into a duty and to destroy the whole value of domestic intercourse. The other day a friend of mind was talking to a proud father about his child-a delightful little girl, fresh and dainty, as charming as a kitten. "What good company she must be for you!" said my friend. "Yes," the father answered, "and how sad to think there will be an end of it all in a year!" My friend naturally inquired if there was any reason to be alarmed-any impending separation. It was not that. In a year the little girl would reach the age of three. “And, you know, it is recognized that when a child comes to three you must never say anything before it without thinking of the effect that will be produced on the child's character." This is a true story, and the man was an intelligent man, and quite serious. Can one conceive of anything more lamentable? A person in ordinary society who should never speak or act without weighing the probable moral effect of his word or action would be simply intolerable; but his neighbors would, in all likelihood, never find him out; they would simply put him down as a bore. Now, one of the facts that we all admit is the perfectly appalling insight of the pupil into the teacher's mind an insight narrow and unjust, but all the more appalling on that account. If a parent were to assume this attitude in his intercourse with his child, the child would find him out instinctively before it was five years old; it would know that it was being consciously moulded, and it would resent the fact, as it ought to. And if, instead of a child, there were children, they would talk it over among themselves and laugh at the inefficacy of the method. No human being likes to be "influenced," least of all by some one who is trying to conceal the process; and the modern theory is, I imagine, that children should not be preached to or exhorted, but that they should be unconsciously guided in a desirable direction. The result would be one of two things: either the child would submit knowingly to the process, and would thereby lose much of its natural and invaluable instinct of self-assertion-would be trained, in short, to undervalue and diminish its own individuality; or else -and this would be, happily, a much more frequent occurrence-it would develop character by an instinctive rebellion against the directing influence. Character is not a thing that can be given or imposed from without; it can only grow; though it is quite possible to produce a morbid and unhealthy growth, like that of a flower in a greenhouse. The people who talk about developing character are like those who seek to create health by administering a succession of drugs; for my own part, I believe that both character and health are best promoted by judicious letting alone. There is often worse mischief done by parental interference than by parental neglect; I appeal to Mr. George Meredith and the example of Richard Feverel. The best thing that can happen to a boy is to be brought up in a simple and natural way-living, that is to say, for the early part of his life among people who are kind to him, but whose orders he has to obey without questioning, and who are for the most part occupied with their own interests-who live their own lives and let him live his. But if from the moment a child comes into the room the father and mother have to put a constraint upon themselves-to shape their conduct and conversation for the particular end of his moral advantage-instantly the conditions become forced and unnatural. The behavior and talk of ordinary decent people have in them nothing that can hurt a child; for the most part, if they go on without reference to him, the child is sublimely unconscious of them, engrossed in his own concerns; for the rest, they appeal to his curiosity, as they ought to do, and wakens in him that vague speculation which is the beginning of independent thought. His character is forming itself, both by obedience to rules and by collision with them, and it does not need the administration of perpetual moral prescriptions-prescriptions of which no doctor can foretell the effect. Nothing can compensate to a child for the loss of a country bringing up; not because in the country he learns to observe Nature (one of the things about which the modern theorist is stark mad)-for the same child who in the country picks up the names of wild flowers, and can tell you the markings of every bird's egg, will get by heart in London all the regimental facings or the list of river steamers, information quite as valuable as the other-but because in the country he is far more left to himself. He can run about and associate with the farin laborers, learning something of a class whom he may never come across in after life; contract friendships with unwashed and ragged little boys, and in their company continually get his feet wet-physically and morally, too, if you like without the least apprehension of catching cold. In town he is under observation all the time, watched over by some one possessing a theory of what is good for his soul and body. It is in town chiefly that children suffer from that physical and moral coddling which is the deadly vice of the modern parent. A lady was explaining the other day that a certain portrait of her son had been completed only with great difficulty. At every sitting the child's temperature went up to such a degree that she almost feared that the portrait must be given up; it was too strong an excitement! Indeed a chief objection to the plan of living for our children is the tendency of anxious parents to create some occupation for their anxiety. An old-fashioned mother would have had other things to do than to run about taking her little boy's temperature at odd times. If we are to be continually fussing over our children's health, there results a formidable demand upon our actual time, and what is worse, upon the leisure of our thoughts. This is in itself undesirable; but the worst is that we are now in a fair way to bring up a race of valetudinarians. The little boy who is used to have his temperature taken when he sits for his picture, will certainly injure his health when he comes to be a man by the simple fact of thinking too much about it; and I should greatly fear that the little girl whose father sets a watch upon his lips in her presence from the time she is three years old, will grow up into a moral valetudinarian, who is the worst type of prig. Happily the best meant experiments on character often lead to results as widely different from those that are naturally to be expected as they are from the consummation contemplated by the experimentalist. Nature is too hard for any theory or system. It is quite possible that children who have been brought up to expect that a reason shall be given them for whatever they are told to do, or even children who have been taught to believe that obedience is not necessary unless they approve of the reasons given, may take their place in life without friction or annoyance to themselves or their neighbors. They have inherited instincts of self-adaptation, which will guide them a great deal more surely than their own crude reasonings. But in all probability they will have been a nuisance to themselves while they were growing up, and certainly will have been a nuisance to their parents. I believe in the experience of the race as against any individual theory, and the experience of the race advises that children should be taught to do what they are bid without asking for reasons. They will infallibly reason for themselves on the injunctions; they will judge their parents, and if the orders are unreasonable, will judge them adversely; that is the menace which it behooves parents to bear in mind. But a child does not expect to be considered in all things; and it seems to me that if we set out to live for our children, instead of living for our own ideas and work in the world, we shall be putting things on a topsy-turvy basis, and sending our children out into life equipped with a terribly undue sense of their own importance. The adult mind has other work to do than to concentrate itself exclusively upon the interests of a domestic circle; and I think the best plan is for decent, clean-minded people to go their own way in freedom, not constrained by the presence of their children, nor continually condescending to the undeveloped intelligence. Depend upon it (as the Spectator says), this continual stooping of the back is good neither for the one who stoops nor for the one who is stooped to. Mr. Edgeworth (to revert to our great example of the model parent) acquired a habit of imparting instruction which made him intolerable in all societies, and while he was teaching to his children (there were nineteen or twenty of them by four or five successive spouses) the theory of soap-bubbles and how to make a model of a water-mill, he left the entire management of his estate to his eldest daughter; and upon his death the eldest son, imbued with all this valuable mechanical knowledge, proved perfectly incompetent to deal with troublesome tenants, and directly a land crisis came handed the books of the estate back to the much-overworked Maria. His intelligence had been studiously developed, as Froebel would have dictated, along the line of least resistance; he had not been taught the lesson of doing something that he understood nothing about, just because he had got to do it. That is where the modern theorists seem to me hopelessly in error. Both for the moral and the intellectual part they adopt a system of spoon-feeding. They do not trust nature, which if you provide food, will generally provide the digestion. And the modern parent, so far as I can see, gulps down wholesale what one may call the mud-pie theory of education. Education used to begin with the A B C; but if you send your children to a Kindergarten, the children will be taught to regard the alphabet as a very advanced branch of knowledge. They will be taught educational games; a whole class of them lie down on the floor and crawl, pretending to be caterpillars; then they get up and flap their hands about because they have become butterflies; that is a lesson in the life-history of the insect world. They model in clay in order that they may learn that a pig has four legs and a tail; they plait rushes in order that they may contribute to the harmonious development of all their faculties by acquiring manual dexterity; they build houses with bricks that they may learn how to carry out a design. I have heard of an instructress of Kindergarten teachers who made her pupils devote an hour a day to learning how to hop like frogs, that they might be able to impart that accomplishment. Even if you do not send your children to a Kindergarten, its theories invade your domestic happiness. People give you complicated Kindergarten toys, and the unfortunate parent has first to learn how to work the toys, and then to teach the children how to work them. But as for reading, that is considered to be too great a strain on the budding intelligence. me By Froebel's system even the rudiments are expressly prohibited till a child is six, and, so far as I can make out, reading is discouraged afterwards. A very clever parent was explaining to not long ago that his very clever little son was not taught to read because little boys invariably put themselves into unhygienic attitudes over a book. They read doubled up, and that is bad for their digestion; or they read lying on their stomachs, and that is bad for their eyes. For my own part, I would risk the hygiene for the sake of the education. The only valuable knowledge is the knowledge which we acquire for ourselves; and to teach a child how to read is to |