“My point is,” I went on—the Professor and I never take the slightest offence at each other’s interruptions—“my point is that it almost seems at times as if the unmarried should, in such an emergency, assume, if they did not feel, a certain diffidence. To tell you the truth, Professor, if it were not for you, I should doubt whether the unmarried had a developed sense of humor.”
“That is simply pitiful,” flung the Professor. “Can you not see that it is a sense of humor that keeps many people from marrying? But that is not the point. Who is better fitted than Mr. Spencer, who has enjoyed freedom from an entangling alliance, who is unbiased by social situation or personal obligation, to discuss with scientific judiciality the problems of child-rearing?”
“Theoretically, Professor, that is all right. But when Mr. Spencer advises more sugar, it is awfully hard to forget that Mr. Spencer never, presumably never, sat up nights with a youngster who had the toothache. It is all very well for Mr. Spencer to suggest that when a child craves more sugar it probably needs more sugar, but the parent who manages his offspring on that basis is going to lose sleep. A good rule, if you will permit me a platitude, is a rule that works. The way that children should be brought up is the way they can be brought up.”
“My friend,” said the Professor—
Now, I am several years older than the Professor. By sheer age I am entitled to her deference; but the Professor can ignore years as well as sex or previous condition of servitude. Her impersonality is adjusted to time, to space, and to matter. I am simply a Person.
“My friend,” said the Professor, “it is another platitude that there is a right way to do everything, even to bring up children. The way children are brought up probably is not right, and no theory or method of bringing them up is, of course, or could be more than relatively right. But in getting as near the right as we humanly may there is no wisdom in despising the advice of the spectator. The man digging a hole in the ground may be less competent than a man not in the hole to perceive that presently the earth is going to cave in. As a matter of fact, old maids, for example, have been known to bring up children very well indeed, for the reason, possibly, that nothing is more detrimental to successful authority over children than relationship to them. All experience shows that the scientific, the abstract management of children is more successful, in the average, than the traditional parental method. This scientific method, I need not say, is not less kindly than the other; it actually is more kindly. Witness the absolute triumph of kindergartens—”
“Now, Professor,” I interposed, foreseeing the spectacle of Froebel and Plato moving down arm-in-arm between the Professor’s periods, “understand me—”
“A very difficult thing at times,” she murmured.
“Understand me—I am speaking now with my eye on the American child.”