suade that obstructionist parent in whose hands a young child's chances of development usually lie. It is not unfair to insist that this is most often the male parent. His anxious conservatism, precisely the quality from which you hope to keep his child free, leads him to conceive of education as a thoroughly exact process, having mainly to do with Latin and Mathematics, a process to which he sees the human intelligence as normally first exposed at about the age of twelve and as in point of fact reducible to the two-fold feat, first of "getting into" college, and second, of staying there. Such a parent will demand to know what in the world a school can accomplish for his tumultuous and unlettered three-year-old that the child's mother (who may nevertheless delegate her privilege to a nurse-maid) cannot do better—can't do, in fact, by divine and exclusive right. Argument probably won't convince him, nor would libraries full of psychological treatises. The shortest cut is to take the skeptic by the hand and persuade him to "visit school," to yield himself to a personal impression.
This adventure of course no longer consists of accepting a chair on the teacher's platform—a vanished symbol, that platform—and pretending that you yourself are familiar with the textbook at whose contents young performers are making desperately ingenious guesses with the teacher's covert aid. On the contrary, babyhood at school is too busy to be aware of you. It is almost as if you were invisible. Garmented, therefore, in your invisibility, you pick your way about like an awkward fascinated giant among sand-piles and gold-fish bowls, coloured modelling clay and tiny tool benches. You stumble against a creditably authentic "house" that a group of children have built of blocks and within which they are conducting a domestic drama. You gasp at the savage eloquence of the bright crayon drawings that are pinned on the walls. You wonder, if you are a parent, why nobody goes near that youngster of three who, with phenomenal concentration, is teaching himself the use of a saw—why nobody either does it for him or tells him to stop. You concede that although rupture with academic tradition seems complete, yet infancy is safe, happy, active—however much that may mean to you. You will cling parentally to your secret reservations as to discipline and authority and the danger lying in the free use of sharp-edged tools, yet you may admit that it might be convenient to have the children away from home at
