because it is largely unintelligible. "These elders, our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect, but only a certain blend of envy—of their good luck—and pity—for their inability to make use of it. Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless features of their character that, having absolute licence to indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good of it. They might dabble in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in the most uncompromising Sunday clothes; they were free to issue forth and buy gunpowder in the full eye of the sun—free to fire cannons and explode mines on the lawn: yet they never did any one of these things. … On the whole, the existence of these Olympians seemed to be entirely void of interests, even as their movements were confined and slow, and their habits stereotyped and senseless. To anything but appearances they were blind."[1] It is quite true that to many children the virtues of "grown-ups" seem flat, and their lives dull. In these cases the attitude of the child is naturally not imitative but antagonistic.
Wholesale opposition will, no doubt, be very rare, except where sympathy between parent and child is entirely absent. Where sympathy does not exist between parent and child, or between teacher and pupil, the fault is very rarely the child's. If the teacher cannot create a sympathetic atmosphere in the class-room, the children's attitude to him will be antagonistic rather than imitative. And nothing could well be more fatal to the moral education of the child.
- ↑ Kenneth Grahame: The Golden Age, pp. 4-6.
