ss. The primary and serious responsibility of parents
is bound up with the education of a child. And the first truth to be
enunciated is that parents can no more leave to schools the intellectual
than to priest and church the moral training of a child.

I remember to have asked a father in a mid-Western city to which it
had been brought home that its schools were gravely inadequate--why
he, a man of large affairs, did not set out to remedy the conditions.
His answer was, "I do my duty to the schools when I pay my school
taxes." This was not only wretched citizenship but worse parenthood
and still worse economics. It does much to explain the failure of the
American school which is over-tasked by the community and pronounced
a bankrupt, because it cannot accept every responsibility which the
parental attitude dumps upon it. However much the school can do and
does, it cannot and should not relieve the home of duties which
parents have no right under any circumstances to shirk. A wise teacher
in a distant city once wrote to me, having reference to the peace
problem: "I personally see no hope for peace until something spiritual
is substituted for the worship of the golden calf. And as a teacher I
must say, if I speak honestly, that there is an increasing aversion to
solitude and work both on the part of parents and pupils, due to false
viewpoints of values and as to how the genuine can be acquired."

Two of the, perhaps the two, most important influences in the life of
the child are dealt with in haphazard fashion. Parents later wonder
where children have picked up their strange ideals and their
surprising standards. Not a few of the roots of later conflict can be
traced back to the earlier years, when children find themselves in
schools wholly without parental co-operation and flung at amusements
bound to have a disorganizing effect upon their lives. While parents
must accept the co-operation of the school, the latter cannot be a
substitute for the home nor the teacher a substitute for the parent.
The school cannot operate in the place of the home, though it may
co-operate with it. The school cannot do the work of a mother, not
even the work of a father.

The same is true of parents in relation to college and university.
Again I am thinking not of the youth who works and wins his way to and
through college but of that type of family in which a college
education for the children is as truly its use and habit as
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