ng by the father after fifty. The college-habit, I have
said, is a bit of form when it is not a penalty visited upon a youth,
who, after an indifferent or worse record at a preparatory school,
must be forced into and through college. All of the consequences of
college-education except a degree many somehow manage to avert.
College education should be offered to youth as opportunity or reward,
or parents will come to be shocked by the futility of it and the
almost uniformly evil sequelae thereof. And parents have the right as
upon them lies the duty to insist that their sons shall not loaf and
rowdyize through four years at college and, when they do acquiesce in
the ways and manner and outlays of the college-loafer and the
college-rounder, they must not expect a bit of parchment to convert
him into an alert, ambitious, industrious youth. If they do, as they
are almost certain to do, the conflict will begin.

CHAPTER III

SOME PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES UNMET

I have sometimes thought that a glimpse of the want of deep and
genuine concern touching the education of children is to be gotten in
the rise of summer camps in great numbers during recent years. I do
not deny the place or value of a camp for children and youth. I have
come into first-hand contact with some admirable camps for boys and
girls and, as I looked at some visiting parents, could not avoid the
regret that the separation between parent and child was to be of a
brief summer's duration. Two months in the year of absence from the
home can hardly suffice to neutralize the effect of ten months of
parental presence and contact. I quite understand that the ideal
arrangement in some homes would be to send the child to camp during
the summer months and to send the parents out of the home, anywhere,
during the rest of the year, an arrangement that is not quite
feasible in all cases.

My query is--granted the value of the camp, how many parents have
thought the problem through for themselves, a query suggested not by
the inferior character of some camps, but by the celerity with which
the camp-craze has swept over the country. In many camps children are
sure to profit irrespective of the character of the home whence they
are sent, but surely there are some camps a stay in which can but
little benefit children. Now why do camps so speedily multiply, and
why are children being sent to them in droves? The real reason is
other than the oft-cited difficulty of