But environmental influence is more than a mouth-filling phrase. Parenthood and the begetting of children are not quite interchangeable terms. The continuity of parental functioning is suggested by the Hebrew origin of the term, child, which is etymologically connected with builder, parents being not the architects of a moment but the builders of a lifetime. This means that we are consciously to determine the apparently indeterminable atmosphere of our children's life and home. That this involves care of the bodily side of child-being goes without saying, but, as we have in another chapter pointed out, this stress seems to be needless. The primary and serious responsibility of parents is bound up with the education of a child. And the first truth to be enunciated is that parents can no more leave to schools the intellectual than to priest and church the moral training of a child. I remember to have asked a father in a mid-Western city to which it had been brought home that its schools were gravely inadequate--why he, a man of large affairs, did not set out to remedy the conditions. His answer was, "I do my duty to the schools when I pay my school taxes." This was not only wretched citizenship but worse parenthood and still worse economics. It does much to explain the failure of the American school which is over-tasked by the community and pronounced a bankrupt, because it cannot accept every responsibility which the parental attitude dumps upon it. However much the school can do and does, it cannot and should not relieve the home of duties which parents have no right under any circumstances to shirk. A wise teacher in a distant city once wrote to me, having reference to the peace problem: "I personally see no hope for peace until something spiritual is substituted for the worship of the golden calf. And as a teacher I must say, if I speak honestly, that there is an increasing aversion to solitude and work both on the part of parents and pupils, due to false viewpoints of values and as to how the genuine can be acquired." Two of the, perhaps the two, most important influences in the life of the child are dealt with in haphazard fashion. Parents later wonder where children have picked up their strange ideals and their surprising standards. Not a few of the roots of later conflict can be traced back to the earlier years, when children find themselves in schools wholly without parental co-operation and flung at amusements bound to have a disorganizing effect upon their lives. While parents must accept the co-operation of the school, the latter cannot be a substitute for the home nor the teacher a substitute for the parent. The school cannot operate in the place of the home, though it may co-operate with it. The school cannot do the work of a mother, not even the work of a father.