Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/824

706 individual without a constructive group sense. And there can be no developed society that is not integrated and composed of individuals each functioning fully and completely."

Admittedly there are some young children who won't accept companionship even when it is abundantly within their reach, remaining contented or timid recluses in a corner of the schoolroom until, in a month or a year, as the case may be, the social impulse comes to flower. But it is possible that the normal child longs forgroup contact with a longing so deeply seated that he is quite unable to formulate it. A boy of eight who had been removed for a year from a public school of ungracious atmosphere, burst one day into a lament for the educational privileges he was foregoing. "Did you like your school so much, then?" somebody asked him. "No, I didn't like it at all, but I loved recess."

But where there is a mother intelligently bent on supplying, not food and clothing alone, but all that her young child needs she will probably not overlook the matter of companionship nor forget that there is a fruitful modern science of applied psychology. Such a mother will naturally be aware that the whole matter of infant education goes much deeper than its animated surface might suggest. She won't make the mistake of supposing that it is a mere question of sand piles and plasticene, of dancing or dishwashing. She will know that the whole story isn't told even when a child comes to express himself with joy and freedom in a drawing or a bit of carpentry, when he comes to develop a really unwavering initiative or learns to dispense with all but the minimum of personal service. The really radical feature of the new education is one, after all, that parents can appropriate without the installation of a single "educational toy." And this, as has already been pointed out, is a new attitude on the part of the adult toward the child, a respect both theoretic and practical for his individuality and his person. One may suspect that it isn't of fundamental importance whether a child learns to read at four or at eight years old; whether he begins "number" by the old fashioned method of direct attack or by some one of the roundabout approaches that are continually being devised. But it is impossible to doubt that his being treated as a free human being rather than "kept in his place," may profoundly affect his entire development.

And it is perhaps not too speculative to suggest that this new