THE NEGLECTED AGE
THAT celebrated claim of the Jesuits that it is a child's first seven years that determine all the later drift of his life is striking enough, one would suppose, to challenge serious examination. Yet while the words have become common counter their real significance has been practically ignored. Until almost the other day, the child too young to go to school—as we used to think of schools—had rather terribly to take his chances in a world that persisted in treating him either as a nuisance to be held in check or a plaything to be intemperately fondled. It is true that provision for something more than the material needs of babyhood is now beginning to be made. But this is an effort so recent, so unrelated to all the old mechanical systems and traditions, that it can be described only as revolutionary.
An indirect sort of revolution, however. Educational congresses haven't known it was going on and family councils haven't yet come to distrust their own adequacy. It is the psychological laboratory that is responsible. Neglect of the young child is a matter in which school and home have heartily abetted each other. Yet the very charge of neglect will seem in both quarters perversely paradoxical, inasmuch as for years past schools have been offering education-and-water through the kindergarten, and reasonable health regimens have made their way into every home at all enlightened. Unreflecting parents, jealously retaining their monopoly of the most critical period of life, will in fact guilelessly protest that at no time is their parenthood so consciously a passion as during this early and most dependent stage.
It happens that while psychologists have been discovering how very early in life the conditions that we still have to sum up under the misused name of education, should properly be supplied, the lay onlooker, finding many things wrong with the world, has come to the conclusion that here lies the clue to some of them. It isn't primarily through observing the charming speech and gesture of, for instance, the baby of three, that one becomes fervently com-
