s, is largely hidden. It is a very great
mistake to isolate children, especially to separate off one or two
children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to
the other element of social danger which I may mention next.

3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually
close relationship between children in youth, such as childish
favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home,
etc. We have in these facts--and there is a very great variety of
them--an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing
down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed
influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis
of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure,
teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and
students to room together; but that has been with view to the
possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is
certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as
teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that.
Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and
roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of
what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl
whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new
environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self--her
very personality; it is nothing less than that--utterly new channels
of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the
lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the
structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the
greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she
is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in
the morning, with one other person, a "copy" set before her, as
immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single
personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining
cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers,
mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room! They need all that
they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them
plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the
soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life
itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in