TEE SCHOOL AND THE FAMILY 8g 



tenement districts gives a fairly large birth rate and a high infant 

 death rate, but every advance in temperance and thrift decreases the 

 birth rate. 



It has been said that we must look to the country for men and to 

 the city for ideas. But the trouble is that the city takes from the 

 country its men and supplies it with ideas and ideals which are unfit. 

 If paternalistic legislation and philanthropic efforts are of any use, 

 they should be directed to the support of the family farm and the 

 country home. A measure such as the protective tariff which builds 

 up the manufacturing center and the city at the cost of the country 

 should be regarded as intolerable. Measures such as agricultural 

 experiment stations, the rural postal delivery and postal express should 

 be welcomed. We need most of all to make life in the country attrac- 

 tive and fine, to lessen routine and incessant labor, to make each church 

 and school a center for the social, intellectual and artistic life of a 

 community. 



The country school is at present no such place. Its general tend- 

 ency is not to prepare children for usefulness and happiness in country 

 life, but rather to make them inefficient and uncomfortable there and 

 to send those who are more clever and ambitious away to the city. 

 And the school shares with the city the bad preeminence of being one 

 of the principal causes now working to break up the family. 



It has been noted above that in so far as the school gives children 

 interests not centered in the home, the family is inevitably weakened. 

 This may be necessary in the interests of wider socialization, but in 

 its methods and results the school contrasts unfavorably with the 

 church, especially with the unreformed churches and the Hebrew syna- 

 gogue. The sacraments of the church — baptism, confirmation, mar- 

 riage, burial — are closely interwoven with family life; its services, 

 ceremonies, fasts and fetes are shared together by parents and children. 

 In spite of inconsistencies in creed and in practise, the religious insti- 

 tutions both of the west and east tend by their observances and by their 

 non-rational sanctions strongly to support the family. The school 

 supersedes the church as a socializing factor to the injury of the family. 

 In so far as this result is due to the methods by which the schools are 

 conducted and the kind of instruction given, every effort should be 

 used to find remedies or palliatives. In so far as it is due to the par- 

 tial rationalization that follows, we are face to face with a difficult 

 problem. 



It may be thought that people are not likely to become too reason- 

 able; nevertheless perhaps the principal danger to our civilization is 

 the checking of instincts by rationalistic considerations. The instincts 

 for mating, for forming a home and for the care of the young are pre- 

 human and very strong. But like other instincts, they are only com- 



