“No,” I assented, “most assuredly I am not. It is pretty hard to find the Juvenile Prig on this soil nowadays outside of the most inhuman ‘books for the young.’ And we all are glad of it. You may remember the passage in the Chesterfield letters in which the father writes to the son: ‘To-morrow, if I am not mistaken, you will attain your ninth year; so that for the future I shall treat you as a youth. You must now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies. No more levity; childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming of a child would be disgraceful of a youth.’ We certainly have outgrown that view of things, and the American youngster comes nearer being without hypocrisy than any product of civilization that I ever have studied. But what have we in place of the piety and affectation? What is the working result of so much independence? Are not the American girl children, as well as the boys, a trifle irreverent?”
“Yes, I know,” admitted the Professor, “the American child often seems a shade too unawed. Balzac says somewhere that modesty is a relative virtue—there is ‘that of twenty years, that of thirty years, and that of forty years.’ Our ancestors believed in a severe, hypocritical modesty for the young, trusting that they would get over it. They did worse than that when they asked youth to anticipate the hypocrisies of age. The same elegant person whom you have just quoted once wrote to that same son: ‘Having mentioned laughing, I want most particularly to warn you against it; and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.’ Although Chesterfield insisted that he was ‘neither of a melancholy or cynical disposition,’ he was proud to be able to say to his boy ‘Since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.’ The next time you feel inclined to say mean things about the Puritans remember that declaration by the Earl. Now, the American seems to me not only to look at children differently, but to look at life differently, and any new traits in the American child probably represent one fact as much as the other. The American idea—I say idea, but I mean the American habit; we explain our habits and call the explanation a theory—merely obliterates age discriminations. The American child is simply the diminutive American. The American girl is her mother writ small. I don’t think that she is a whit more independent or irreverent than her mother.”
“You don’t mean to say, Professor, that a child should not, for instance, be taught to keep a proper silence in company.”
“Not an absolute silence. A child either has a right to be in a company or it has not. If it is in the company it has a right to be articulate like the other members of the company. If it is a sensible child it will listen to its elders, not because they are its elders but because they are its betters, because they know more, are more competent to speak. If it is not sensible it will be made to suffer for its foolishness, just as older members of the company are made to suffer. From my observation, children naturally brought up take their reasonable place very naturally in company.”
“My fear is, Professor, that your naturalistic method overlooks much of what we have become accustomed to think when we speak of ‘breeding.’ Now, children, even American children, do not acquire this instinctively. Breeding includes restraint, externally applied restraint—I don’t mean applied with a slipper or a rattan, though restraint to have a really fine catholicity should, in my opinion, include these symbols—but restraint inculcated by a wise, or at least a wiser, authority. I believe sincerely that we have, in the past, tried to bend the twig too far. But the beneficial results of guiding twigs has been, I think, indisputably proved. Taking away too many guides and supports must have its dangers. I think of these things when I see the unhampered American girl of to-day. She is a lovely spectacle. Yet I sometimes wonder, in a trite and old-fashioned way, if her sort of training or absence of training is going to make her a woman who will know how to manage a household and children. I can see clearly enough that she is going to know how to manage a husband; but the house—and the children—”
The Professor was musing. “Your anxiety makes me think of the early criticisms of the kindergarten. ‘What!’ they used to exclaim, ‘a mob of unmanageable brats and no ferule?’ Yet it is so. Your misgivings overlook, I think, the latitudes of training, the obligations of breeding. The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking. If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the United States have greater liberty than children in any other country. The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on grown-up folks from various quarters. If he decides—and he does so quite reasonably I think—to include his children, he is bound to stand with the emancipated.”
“Professor,” I said, “your words are soothing. They are alluringly optimistic. I don’t want to reform the American child. I like him—and especially her—as at present conditioned. I believe that the irreverence is largely a seeming irreverence—an irreverence toward traditions rather than toward people and principles; which simply is saying what we should say of grown-up Americans. And I believe that in any case the boy will knock his way out somehow. But the girl—I am not doubting her; I am not believing that she is so petted a darling as Paul Bourget, for instance, seems to think she is. I am not questioning the intrinsic charm of her style, the piquing prophecies of her mind, the perfection of her beauty, the delight of her companionship; I am wondering whether this immediately agreeable sort of product is going to meet the requirements of life as it is opening up to us in this land, if—”
“Well,” swung in the Professor, “if you were going to have a worry, it is a pity you couldn’t have had a new one—the new ones keep us busy enough. You are very trite this time. You sound like a reformer—”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried.