t mastered the high art of patiently hearing another
opinion? Graham Wallas[G] would urge: "A code of manners which
combined tolerance and teachability in receiving the ideas of others,
with frankness and, if necessary courageous persistence in introducing
one's own ideas.... Whether we desire that our educational system
should be based on and should itself create a general idea of our
nation as consisting of identical human beings or of indifferent human
beings" is the problem with which Wallas[H] faces us.

In the world without men may flee from one another but the walls of
the home are more narrow. And within the home-walls, for reasons to be
set forth, the merest differences of opinion, however honestly
conceived and earnestly held, may be viewed as pride of ancient
opinion on the one hand and forwardness of youthful heresy on the
other. Parents are no more to be regarded as intolerably tyrannical
because of persistence in definite opinions than children are to be
viewed as totally depraved or curelessly dogmatic because of
unrelinquishing adherence to certain viewpoints. I am naturally
thinking of normal parents, if normal they be, who would rather be
right than prevail, not of such parents as imagine that they must
never yield even an opinion, nor yet of children surly and snarling
who do not know the difference between vulgar self-insistence and high
self-reverence. For the father a special problem arises out of the
truth that the mother presides over the home as far as children are
concerned and as long as they remain children, and he steps in to
"rule" ordinarily after having failed through non-contacts to have
established a relationship with children. This is the more
regrettable because often it becomes almost the most important
business of a father, through studied or feigned neglect, to
neutralize the over-zealous attention of a mother, such attention as
makes straight for over-conventionalization.

To regard differences of opinion as no more than differences of
opinion will always be impossible to parents and children alike until
these have learned how to lift these things to and keep them on an
impersonal level. And of one further truth, previously hinted at,
parents and children must become mindful,--that what, viewed
superficially and personally, is their clashing, is nothing more than
the wisdoms of the past meeting with the hopes of the future--past and
future embodied in declining parent and nascen