"
If we were wise enough, therefore, we should recognize all education, in
the great sense of that word, to be _as for parenthood_. That ideal will
yet be recognized and followed for both sexes, as it has for long been
followed, consciously as well as unconsciously, by that astonishing race
which has survived all its oppressors, and is in the van of civilization
to-day as it was when it produced the Mosaic legislation. The time is
not yet when one could accept with a light heart an invitation to
lecture on fatherhood to the boys at Eton. Boys to-day are taught by
each other, and by those who give them what they call "smut jaws," that
what exists for fatherhood, and thus for the whole destiny of mankind,
is "smut." When such blasphemies pass for the best pedagogic wisdom, to
preach parenthood as the goal of all worthy education is to run the risk
of being looked upon as ridiculous. But the time will come when the
hideous Empire-wrecking Imperialisms of the present are forgotten, and
when we have a new Patriotism--which suggests, first and foremost, as
that word well may, the duty of fatherhood; and then, perhaps, "smut
jaws" will not be the phrase at Eton for discussion of those instincts
which determine the future of mankind.
But girls are our present concern, and we may indeed hope that, though
the day is still far when the motto of Eton will be education as for
fatherhood, yet the ideal of education as for motherhood may yet triumph
wherever girls are taught within even a few years to come.
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