Science in Public Affairs 



Its development through adolescence to maturity 

 is the realisation of its potency for evolution or 

 for degeneration. The process of growth is, in 

 the proper sense of the word, the education of 

 the child, that is to say, the drawing out of its 

 potencies. In its training and education the 

 primary factors are three. These are the heredi- 

 tary predispositions of the child, the resources 

 available for its education, and finally, the ideals 

 of the mother. It is the last which is perhaps the 

 most important for the progress of culture, for of 

 the three factors the ideal of the mother is the 

 most variable, the most modifiable, and therefore 

 the most subject to control and guidance. The 

 mother's ideal is a compound of the types of 

 humanity that have most appealed to her in actual 

 life, in romance, and in history. In other words, 

 it is, whether she knows it or not, the historical 

 or racial imagination of the mother that determines 

 her ideals. She directs the education of her child 

 towards her personal ideals of strength, of health, 

 and of wealth, towards her personal ideals of 

 beauty in person, of wisdom in thought, of good- 

 ness in deed. And in proportion as these different 

 aspects of the mother's ideal of manhood and 

 womanhood harmonise into an imaginative unity, 

 a synthetic reality, in that proportion she has an 

 educational policy for her child. For a policy is 

 but a name for a system of dealing with one's 

 resources for a definite purpose. In short, a policy 

 is a scheme for the development of potencies in 



the direction of an ideal realisation. 



224 



