their teachers? And domestic science--did not mothers teach
that, not only to their girls, but to their boys also, with a degree of
thoroughness not surpassed even by that of the best of modern domestic
science teachers? The subjects to be brought to the notice of children
appear to be so fixed; the things to be learned by them seem to be so
slightly alterable! It is only the place of instruction that has
shifted. Such a quantity of things once taught entirely at home are now
taught partly at school.

It is the fashion, I know, to deplore this. "How dreadful it is," we
hear many a person exclaim, "that things that used to be told a child
alone at its mother's knee are now told whole roomfuls of children
together in school!"

Certainly it would be "dreadful" should the fact that children are
taught anything in school become a reason to parents for ceasing to
teach them that same thing at home. So long as this does not happen,
ought we not to rejoice that children are given the opportunity of
hearing in company from their teachers what they have already heard
separately from their fathers and mothers? A boy or a girl who has heard
from a father or a mother, in intimate personal talk, of the beauty of
truth, the beauty of purity, the beauty of kindness, is fortified in an
endeavor to hold fast to these things by hearing a teacher speak of them
in a public, impersonal way.

Indeed, is not this unity between the home and the school the great and
unique fact in the education of the children of the present time? They
are taught at home, as children always have been, and doubtless always
will be, an "array of subjects"; and they are taught at school, as
children perhaps never before were, other aspects of very nearly all the
matters touched upon in that "array." My old schoolmate said that
Saturday had lost the glory it wore in her school-days and mine; but it
seems to me that what has actually occurred is that the five school-days
of the week have taken on the same glory. The joys we had only on
Saturday children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, _and_ Saturday!

It is inevitable, I suppose, that they should handle our old delights
with rather a professional grasp. One day recently a little girl, a new
acquaintance, came to see me. I brought out various toys, left over from
my childhood, for her amusement--a doll, with the trunk that still
contained her wardrobe; an autograph album, with "verses" an