The chief of these evasions is still the doctrine of what we call “parental responsibility.” Some day the idea that a parent is the best-fitted person to train a child will be regarded as a medieval superstition. The parent is as amateurish in training children as in cooking or making frocks. The notion that “nature tells” a mother what to do is part of the crude psychology of the Schoolmen. From the moment of birth, and during the months before birth, the human mother has no inspiration whatever. She goes by tradition, by the crude advice of elders and neighbours, as every observer of the arrival of the first baby knows. A cat acts by what we call “instinct,”—by certain neuromuscular reactions which natural selection has perfected,—but a human being has intelligence instead of instinct, and the first thing intelligence enjoins is that experts ought to be trained for particular duties. The death-rate in every civilised country has gone down enormously since we ceased to rely on motherly instinct, or grandmotherly fables. A time may come, therefore, when the State will receive a bearing woman in a properly appointed home, and will care for the child from the moment of birth until, in its later teens, it is equipped for work. I will suggest in the next chapter that this ought by no means to be regarded as the completion of education; here I am concerned only with the earlier part. Many are convinced that this is the last and logical term of the development on which we have entered.
