Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/720

700 treated simply as a piece of mechanism which has to be put in order for certain definite and servile ends. The idea which dominates State education is the idea of the struggle for life, human being pitted against human being in the scramble for material goods. We do not blame the State for this, for we do not hold it to be capable of organizing education on any higher plane. It can keep an intellectual machine shop, but it can not in any systematic manner provide for the higher needs of growing souls. It may go so far as to enunciate bald moral precepts; but it can not pronounce the master words which speak to the conscience and dominate the life.

So, as we have said, when the citizen pays his taxes and packs his children off to the public school, all is not done. If the citizen thinks the education of his children has been sufficiently provided for, there is a large chance that he will before very long be rudely awakened to a sense of his error. He will find that character is something the proper formation of which demands more care and pains than either he or the public school had thought of bestowing, and that for want of the necessary attention in this direction his children are showing a serious lack of any power of self guidance or self-control. Thousands of parents are to-day precisely in this position, with children on their hands to whose moral cultivation no proper attention has been paid either at school or at home, and who consequently show alarming signs of making shipwreck of life. The parents thought—so far as they thought about it at all—that the schools would see to the matter, and the schools threw back the responsibility on the parents: between the two stools the children have come to the ground. What parents should be made to understand once for all is that if they leave the moral interests of their children wholly in the hands of the public school, those interests will not and can not be adequately provided for. Teachers may individually do their best, but the public school as an institution can not strike the note that is necessary for complete education. It can not strike the note that Epictetus struck in the sentence above quoted; and yet, as we have said, unless the child can be taught self reverence, he will never learn to reverence anything, and his whole life, aimless in any noble sense, will drift among the shoals of circumstance.

Deeply interested as we are in this view of the question, it was with great pleasure that we read a few weeks ago a letter in The Nation from Mrs. Elizabeth Burt Gamble, President of the Detroit Educational Union, describing what had been done in that city toward supplementing the work and influence of the schools by the concerted efforts of the mothers of the pupils. The problem, as Mrs. Gamble expresses it, is to carry more of the home into the school and more of the school into the home. The plan of action was to invite the mothers of each school district, "regardless of creed, color, nationality, or environment," to meet periodically—once a month—for the discussion of "topics best suited to aid in the proper development of the child." The co-operation of the teachers of each district was invoked, and the meetings were as a rule held in the school house after the regular school work for the day was over. Each district league conducted its proceedings in view of the needs and peculiarities of the particular neighborhood, but the central union prepared a syllabus of work for general use. In this syllabus were suggested such topics as the