ing involved in this: training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something in the world. There was always something which really needed to be done; and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation with others."[1] In the modern family all this has been changed. It is often very difficult for the child to find any way in which his help will be of real use to the family, and it is consequently often very difficult for him to conceive the common purposes of the family. The community of will and purpose in the modern family is as real as ever it was, but because it is now so purely spiritual a thing, it is harder for the child to recognise its reality.
And there are other causes of a vague social kind which are affecting the efficiency of the family as a moral institution. " Thirty years ago, the large majority of women could enter upon their married life with the confidence of experience, gained as part of the usual equipment of their normal home surroundings. To-day, it is lamentably, almost ludicrously, frequent to find girls of twenty-one who have never washed an infant, cut out a night-gown, or passed disturbed nights with a teething youngster. There is a natural reluctance to perform duties with which we are unfamiliar; and the feeling of dislike, the sense of almost impotent despair with which many of them regard the possibility of having to undertake such offices, is a speaking comment on our present system of higher education for women."[2]
- ↑ J. Dewey: The School and Society, pp. 22-24.
- ↑ W. C. D. and C. D. Whetham: Heredity and Society, p. 91.
