at
his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted
on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and
which was highly distasteful to him.

I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an
educator as the school itself. In this case the school would have taken
as little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. It would, in
all probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become so
much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into
anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their
guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question
that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of
the path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. The
youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a
mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with
little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him,
and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability.

Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, for
instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its
parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number of
years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many
German families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than
the tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically
weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced
into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar
temperament.

The boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. He spent every moment
he could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficult
scores of Wagner's music dramas. His taste, his musical memory, the
enormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technical
difficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. Yet his
parents determined from the first that he should study law, and enter
the legal profession.

I have never seen anything more painful than the deliberate
discouragement, during a period extending over several years, of the
boy's natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to force
him, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a profession
repugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallest
degree adapted.

Out of this promi