A boy of six whom once I knew, when his mother prepared to teach him to read, countered her with the grave announcement that, in his opinion, “mothers were not meant to teach.” It is a more reasonable view than appears at first sight, at all events for English children. To them the combination of intense love and a desire to teach is too overwhelming: they prefer a more dispassionate interest in a matter which seems to them one in which all emotion may conveniently be avoided. It is too much at an immature age to be called on to respond to an intellectual and an emotional stimulus combined, and it is unfair from a child’s point of view to be made to feel that laziness or inaccuracy, periodical faults in all of us, are not only faults but failures in devotion towards those for whom devotion is a natural habit. Most English parents, though after some ineffectual struggles against this natural reluctance, acquiesce in the truth of it. The time of the Goodchilds has gone by, and education has been much improved. The acquiescence—to tell the truth—is apt to go too far, and the process of education is left to machines called teachers without any interest at all on the part of the parents. The English mother, I think, is little preoccupied about education. To her it is only one of the many processes of equipment necessary for a child in its passage to an age of discretion—a more elaborate process for boys than for girls, but likely to bring more tangible results. About material and physical well-being she will occupy herself endlessly, to the dismay of masters and matrons, but she will pay comparatively small attention to the development of an intellect, unless her own is exceptionally well developed, in comparison to the development of muscle and character. If her children respond feebly to the teaching they are given, she will resign herself, not without a secret sympathy for them, to having stupid children, but without inquiring whether possibly there is some psychological trouble at the bottom of this failure, which a new adjustment and fresh guidance might overcome: if, on the other hand, the response is conspicuously successful, she rather wistfully regards the soaring of their young intellects beyond her ken, wondering “how she came to have such clever children.”