attitude is, in part at least, a reflex of the markedly altered one that in our own day has come to prevail toward women. Until recently, even the most sympathetic student of childhood nevertheless regarded children as inevitably and properly a subject race. Just as a "good" woman was a submissive and conforming one, so a "good" child was an obedient child, merely. But women having claimed the right to think, speak, and act for themselves, a certain measure of release seems to have been granted childhood from a mere natural association of ideas. Not that being just to children is an entirely simple matter. A being who must be protected, yet mustn't be bullied, occupies a delicate position. And the doctrine that even a young child has definite individual rights is more difficult to put into action than it sounds. Even yet, few really believe or practise it. The corollary doctrine is naturally that these rights are the same, whatever the child's sex; but this also, simple as it sounds, has been very imperfectly practised. After developing to such beautiful and sane detail his memorable service to educational theory, Rousseau was capable of inventing that monstrous parody of all the "womanly" traditions that he called Sophie. And even Professor Dewey implies that while the typical boy may express his urge to activity in a hundred interesting ways, all with the approval of his enlightened modern teacher, the typical girl is expected to express hers in but two—dressmaking or preparing food.
Defining of the present character of infant schools is not of course the important matter, however interesting these may individually be. The essential point is that infancy is definitely emerging from those long dark ages of resistance to a grown-up world that urged it to be helpless, to be inactive, to be afraid. It is achieving a status of its own, and a status of peculiar significance. Far from being an age unripe for education, this little stretch of years that comprises the "first age" of man is the only age, according to the utmost wisdom that we can now summon, when education in the deepest sense matters at all. The age of historic neglect is the age on which the utmost energy should be expended.
Even to the least critical person, however, it will probably occur that education of this untraditional sort, education based on the delicate processes that have been suggested, can scarcely be turned over to the slightly equipped persons who have always taught young children or had charge of them, heretofore. The new sense in
