714 THE FAMILY 



These have grown so that it is not uncommon to find a dozen of 

 these little societies within a single church with a congregation of 

 three hundred people. An incidental evil of this movement has been 

 the concentration of attention and effort on collections of people in 

 some central place of assembly to the neglect of the neighborhood 

 and the home as centres of work. 



But perception of this incidental evil has led to the invention of 

 the Home Department of the Sunday-school. This provides for the 

 use of the home as a place of Bible study for those who cannot or will 

 not attend at the place of public assembly. Its practical value in 

 additions to the Sunday-school already numbering 400,000 has 

 won for it great favor. But its higher aim of showing that a great 

 gain comes to the church when it brings the dormant forces of the 

 home into activity is its best credential. 



Interest has been awakened in the home as a factor in public 

 school education. Under the lead of our National Superintendent of 

 Education our people are beginning to see that there is more than one 

 social institution at work in education; that, as he puts it, the great 

 educational factors are the school, the church, the home, and the 

 vocation; and the problem is to get each of these to do its share in 

 the common task, and that in intelligent cooperation with each 

 other. While the public school has as yet nothing like the Home De- 

 partment of the Sunday-school, unless it be its required home study, 

 it is having more aid than formerly in progressive communities from 

 parental associations. It has already in some degree the benefit of 

 the conviction that educational work constantly goes on in the life 

 of the home and in the activities that engage the child outside the 

 school-room. There is, too, it can hardly be doubted, a deeper sense 

 of the fact that the educational processes of the adult in daily life are 

 not essentially unlike those of the school-room and that there is more 

 real unity between the study of the child at school and that of the 

 parent at his work than we once thought. This is giving an educa- 

 tional importance to the home that is slowly telling for its good as 

 well as for the good of parent and child. 1 



In philanthropy we may note a steadily growing recognition of the 

 place of the home in social reform. In Massachusetts and perhaps 

 elsewhere, the charitable institution where large numbers of children 

 have been gathered for care has given place to the single home. 

 For it has been found that the average home available for the care of 

 destitute children is a more natural, and, therefore, a better place, for 

 the training of a child than the artificial life of a great caravansary. 

 Poor relief is abandoning its former habit of reliance on the alms- 

 house and the gift of money. It now seeks to keep the family 



1 As this sjoes to press two educational experts tell me that the proper connec- 

 tion of the home with the school and the discovery of the educational fimctiou 

 of the home is now, in their opinion, the most urgent of educational problems. 



