be warned against certain dangers
which may beset him from other vicious or ignorant children; and of
course the child's temperament, his heredity, the weakness or strength
of his desires in the direction of sense pleasures, and the amount of
will-power he possesses will guide the parent in the nature and amount
of such instruction. Some mothers whose children have strong animal
instincts are afraid to instruct them on that account. Such children are
in peculiar need of watchfulness and knowledge, and the right kind of
instruction does not tend to waken the senses. Of course no child should
be sent away to school without an impressive warning against certain
habits all too prevalent among boys in boarding schools. Here it may be
wise to let him know something of what he will be sure to see or hear,
that he may not be taken unawares, puzzled and tempted by things which
to him will seem not to have come within the experience of his parents
if they said nothing to him about them. The boy warned by his parents of
the falsity of the strange doctrines he may hear preached by these
unguided youths will not readily be deluded. The pure but ignorant boy
going for the first time into the new life of the school, looking up to
the older boys with that peculiar veneration the younger boy almost
always feels for the older, moved in his senses by what he hears and
sees, may speedily forget such home warnings as seem vague and
pointless, and he may yield himself to a course most disastrous to his
future.

How can it fail to be the duty of every parent to protect the child
against the chance of making these fatal mistakes through ignorance?
Young people cannot be kept wholly out of reach of temptation, nor would
it be best for them if they could be. Far better is it so to strengthen
the moral fibre that they can resist.

From time to time there appears in our best publications an appeal from
some noted educator for the better instruction of youth at home, and
their almost universal plea is that the youth be told by the mother the
facts needed to give him a reverence for womanhood.

XIII

THE TRANSFORMATION

The most difficult problems of the educator are found in connection with
changes which take place in the child at the age of adolescence or
puberty. This age has never been so carefully and systematically studied
as at the present time, and it is proving an unsuspected key for solving
many puzzling problems of racial e