Dealing with the problem - the back of all CONFLICTS Part #3

The failure of the American school which is over-tasked by the community and pronounced a bankrupt, because it cannot accept every responsibility which the parental attitude dumps upon it. However much the school can do and does, it cannot and should not relieve the home of duties which parents have no right under any circumstances to shirk. A wise teacher in a distant city once wrote, having reference to the peace problem: "I personally see no hope for peace until something spiritual is substituted for the worship of the golden calf. And as a teacher I must say, if I speak honestly, that there is an increasing aversion to solitude and work both on the part of parents and pupils, due to false viewpoints of values and as to how the genuine can be acquired."




Perhaps the two most important influences in the life of the child are dealt with in haphazard fashion. Parents later wonder where children have picked up their strange ideals and their surprising standards. While parents must accept the co-operation of the school, the latter cannot be a substitute for the home nor the teacher a substitute for the parent. The school cannot operate in the place of the home, though it may co-operate with it. The school cannot do the work of a mother, not even the work of a father.


The same is true of parents in relation to college and university. Again I am thinking not of the youth who works and wins his way to and through college but of that type of family in which a college education for the children is as truly its use and habit as golf-playing by the father after fifty. College education should be offered to youth as opportunity or reward, or parents will come to be shocked by the futility of it and the almost uniformly evil sequelae thereof. And parents have the right as upon them lies the duty to insist that their sons shall not loaf and rowdyize through four years at college and, when they do acquiesce in the ways and manner and outlays of the college-loafer and the college-rounder, they must not expect a bit of parchment to convert him into an alert, ambitious, industrious youth. If they do, as they are almost certain to do, the conflict will begin.