In this task the parents must co-operate. The normal father, we are told, will object if his son brings home opinions other than his own. But, in sober truth, if the son brings home the same opinions as the fathers have always held, we are in a poor way. It was the fathers and the grandfathers who brought the world to its present pass. It is the sons who, starting with new principles from new beginnings, have got to set it on a better road. The _Saturday Review_ and _The Westminster Gazette_ offer us, in the quotations at the head of this chapter two little vignettes of parentage. Which would you have? The holidays occupy rather more than a quarter, and rather less than a third of the year. If you asked what the boys do in the holidays, you would ask a question that puzzles many boys themselves to answer. The waste of school holidays is even more striking than the waste of school terms. For education should not be, indeed, cannot be, limited to term time. The proportion of boys who require "rest" in the holidays, even for the first week or two, is small. A slack time, prolonged beyond a week or so, bores most boys consumedly and ought to bore them all. We are not thinking here of the favoured few who get their fill of fishing and field sports. Such things have their limitations, perhaps, but they offer at least a time of activity, resourcefulness, and keen enjoyment. Most boys, however, live in quiet homes in towns, far from the opportunity for such things, and how these pass the time is a mystery even to themselves, as many have confessed to us. In plain words, they _kill_ the time, and thereby acquire a most dangerous accomplishment. Some few, it is true, make themselves endlessly useful to their parents, and nothing could be better. But only a few homes provide scope for an "odd-jobs man" of this type. For the bulk, holidays are simply times of unemployment.