is volume, "Product and Climax,"[J] hints at a real difficulty:
"We want our children to retain the plasticity of youth, and yet we
believe in a disciplinary education and love to put them at difficult
tasks, having no end but rigidity of action and a narrower viewpoint.
At the same breath we ask for heroes and demand more democracy."

What is really involved when the matter is reduced to its simplest
terms, is seen to be a new conception of the home. For many centuries,
it has been a world or realm wherein parents filled a number of roles
or parts,--chief among these regents on thrones, dispensers of bounty,
teachers of the infant mind. Any survey of the home today that surveys
more than surface things must take into account one other figure,--or
set of figures,--the figure of a child. And the child not as the
subject of the parental regent, however wise, nor yet as the
unquestioning pupil of the parental tutor, however infallible! The
home can no longer remain, amid the crescent sway of the democratic
ideal, a kingdom with one or two or even more thrones, nor yet a
debating society. Shall we say parliament, seeing that in Parliament
and Congress it is reputed to be the habit of men to plead for truth
rather than for victory?

The home must become a school wherein parents and children alike sit
as eager learners and humble teachers, a school for parents in the
latter days in the arts of renunciation and for children in the fine
arts of outward courtesy and inward chivalry. In such a classroom the
child will learn to think non-filially for itself, though it will not
cease to feel filially. Under such auspices, the child will be neither
a manageable nor an unmanageable thing but a person bent upon
self-direction and self-determination through the arts of
self-discipline. In the interest of that self-discipline which
parental example can do most to foster, let it be remembered by
parents that no rule is as effective with children as self-mastery,
that the only convincing and irrefutable authority is inner
authoritativeness. Spencer has laid down the ideal for the home: "to
produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed
by others." If parents are so unwise as to postpone and deny the right
of children to live their lives until after their parents are dead, it
may be that these will die too late for their own comfort. Parents who
rely upon parental authority, whatever that may mean, in dealing with