became more than
a pretty foil to the educated man, she became something like his
superior and his elder; little by little she has begun to teach him who
once was her master and still in fond delusion believes he is.

It cannot be said that the mother has until very recently liked
education. She has suffered from the prejudice that afflicted her own
mother, who thought that because she had worked samplers all girls must
work samplers; the "old" woman's daughter, because she went to
Cheltenham, tends to think that her little girl ought to go to
Cheltenham. It is human rather than feminine, for generations follow one
another at Eton and at Harvard. But more than feminine, I think it is
masculine because, until very recently, woman has disliked education,
while man has treated it with respect; he has not loved it for its own
sake, but because he thought that _nam et ipsa scientia potestas est_.
Not a very high motive, but still the future will preoccupy itself very
little with the reasons for which we did things; it will be glad enough
if we do them. Perhaps we may yet turn the edges of swords on the blasts
of rhetoric.

An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in
the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one
prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows
something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes
that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is
no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said,
"What's that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is
perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or
herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that
the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather
he desires to develop the child's personality, and in its early years
this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the
beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in
for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled
precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their
personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan't." This will
pass as all things pass, the old child and the rude child, just like the
weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new
generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time
that was no