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THE war is still with us, end we are apt to forget that victory will fall to the side whose soldiers and sailors have been brought up in the best homes. We depend. on men who were trained as children to be venturesome, hardy, and obedient but more than that, who learnt from their childhood to know the difference between striving for the right and for mere safety or pleasure, and to see the power of self-sacrifice. Long after the war is ended the problem of home training will continue; and on its solution by parents will depend not only the future of this country, but—as far as we can tell— the view of life and its duties and its hopes which will be formed by all the countless throngs of mankind. So inter- locked is the world becoming.
Therefore it is not inopportune to give a welcome to a first-rate little volume on the home training of children. Miss Sewell, a great educationist of early Victorian days, compiled two bulky volumes on the subject which would be far too solid for the tender digestion of the modern reader : yet they are full of most interesting matter, and only to be objected to as requiring much leisure. Mrs. Chitty, helped by Miss Soulsby, has done a very real service to parents by extracting the substance of this work into a portable and very readable little book, remarkably free from the peculiar defects of an abridgment, and for its purpose, I should say, the most useful treatise extant. For it represents the working of a powerful mind uniting masculine power of reasoning and admirable sense of proportion with a feminine intuition most necessary for successful dealing with children. The writer also had the gift of summing up much thought and experience into short telling phrases, each one of which gives food for reflection. some of these may be transcribed, and it will be seen that, though first committed to writing some time before the modern interest in education began to grow, they have not loaf, their freshness or their value, and in short are too com- pact of thought ever to become stale. "What we are apt to call conceit and wilfulness is often only the natural result of a too rapid growth of the intellectual as compared with the moral powers." Just when the sentence promised to be ordinary there comes a term which shows real insight, "Why do we thus act [spoiling children] ? . . . Because we are selfish. We lore ourselves better than our children." Perfectly true: and demanding bumble thought. "Truth is the foundation of respect, and unless we have the respect of the young we shall never have their love." Doubtless some modern parents seem to care for neither, but the large majority crave for love, and many fail to secure it. "Vanity is the exaggeration of an amiable desire to please. The reason why so much good advice which is meant to be good is received so badly by those to whom it is offered very often is, that in touching the fault the virtue is touched also ; and then the natural instinct of self-defence exhibits itself in the form of an excuse." If this were understood, we should abolish all of what schoolboys call "jaws "—the exhortations which are felt to be based on a want of understanding. This chapter on advice is masterly all through, and I venture to say could not have been written by any one but a great Englishwoman ; it exhibits the national
gift of light-handedness which has enabled us to bind together our Empire with the moral bond of sympathy.
Miss Sewell was a deeply religious woman, and her remarks on training in religion are worth careful study, but perhaps suffer from a certain ignoring of the intellectual side of the problem. This, indeed, is a defect, or rather a limita- tion, observable throughout, due, no doubt, to the fact that Miss Sewell's experience was among girls at a time when it was thought to be almost improper to be concerned with the feminine intellectual processes, and when the cult. of " accomplishments " reigned supreme, generally a "little French and the mandoline." Now the stir that has been made of recent years in our educational notions has been concerned with three out of the four departments of training: the spiritual, the moral, the intellectual, and the physical, the first being the one on which we have least to say in advance of 1850, and it is remarkable bow unanimously educationists agree as to the intellectual problem being the most elusive of all. That is to say, it provokes most discussion, and yet our failures in this department are apparently the most numerous. As to these Miss Sewell's book gives no direct help. She is wonderfully sound, sane, and sympathetic in all that concerns the moral and the spiritual probably she knew that, given wholesome guidance in these, the intellect would take care of itself ; and as for the physical, it would have been a useless encroachment on the medical sphere to give any advice whatever.
It is most interesting to mark how admirably Miss Sewell's practical hints forestall the modern problems, though of course quite unconsciously. With a little putting of two and two together we can see what she would have thought of the Montessori theory. She says: ..information is nothing : cultivation of the mind everything." But her general atti- tude towards discipline leads one to suppose that she would have instinctively avoided the dangers of license which some critics of the theory have forecasted. Again, . there is a vast divergence of opinion nowadays on the question of individualism and collectivity. Miss Sewell hardly touches on it directly, but her fine regard for authority makes it clear that pure individualism would never have satisfied her. She makes it plain in one noble chapter (xxi.) that among the first facts a child learns must be his own incorporation into the Christian family.
In short, I know of no educational writing which with such lucidity and firmness lays down the fundamental principles of moral and religious training. The limits within which Miss Sewell moves are very wide, and her advice is just as fresh and stimulating now as it must have been fifty years ago; and I am afraid even more needed. It would be, I am certain, a real help to any parents to read and think over these wise precepts. They would he useless, of course, to any who cannot assimilate them and reflect upon them; but then so is the Sermon on the Mount.
I conclude with one extract showing Miss Sewell's idea of the difference between human and divine action in the training of character " We talk as if human hearts were in our own hands to mould just as we will. It is all a mistake, founded on the supposition that we know what is safe, and good, and wise. We have only to watch the trees and flowers, the children we love so anxiously are just like them. What can we do for them? Plant, water, prune, train —it sounds like positive week, but look into it narrowly, and it is only negative. Rain and sunshine, dews and frosts, must be sent in the proportion which God sees fit, or our plant will not flourish; and if attempting to take the work out of His hands we remove it from its natural soil, and place it under shelter, and watch over it exclusively ourselves, it will die."
E. L.
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