oes, the best part of a child's life, the school must get
the smaller part, the home the larger part. The home will have the
responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary days as on
holidays, that the children will really become a part of the home both
in their work and in their pleasures. The children will be taken from
the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the home. The
mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life to the
children. Thus natural training in the spirit of Rousseau and Spencer
will be realised; a training for life, by life at home.

Such was the training of Old Scandinavia; the direct share of the child
in the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life
of our Scandinavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at
twelve years of age), unity, character, and strength. Things specially
made for children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings,
support given to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially
prepared for children,--these are the fundamental defects of our present
day education. An eighteen-yearold girl said to me a short time ago,
that she and other girls of the same age were so tired of the system of
vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home,
that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger,
corporal discipline, and drudgery.

One can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial
environment, the environment in which children and young people of the
present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for
the realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and
responsibility, instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the
school, the object of another's care.

What is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is
to be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do
conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days and holidays
without oversight, in every case where the child can help himself.
Instead of the modern school child having a mother and servants about
him to get him ready for school and to help him to remember things, he
should have time every day before school to arrange his room and brush
his clothes, and there should be no effort to make him remember what
is connected with the school. The home and the school should combine
together systematically to let the chil