The child’s mind, so suggestible to facts, seems to be almost impervious to what we call spiritual influences. He lives in a world hermetically sealed to our interests and concerns. Parents and teachers make the most conscientious efforts to influence their children, but they would better realize that they can influence them only in the most indirect way. The best thing they can do for the children is to feed their curiosity, and provide them with all the materials that will stimulate their varied interests. They can then leave the “influence” to take care of itself. The natural child seems to be impregnable to any appeals of shame, honor, reverence, honesty, and even ridicule,--in other words, to all those methods we have devised for getting a clutch on other people’s souls, and influencing and controlling them according to our desires. And this is not because the child is immoral, but simply because, as I have tried to show, those social values mean as yet nothing to him. He lives in a splendid isolation from our conventional standards; the influences of his elders, however well-directed and prayerful they may be, simply do not reach him. He lives unconscious of our interests and motives. Only the “good” child is susceptible, and he is either instinctively submissive, or is the victim of the mechanical imposition of standards and moral ideas. The child works out what little social morality he does obtain, not under the influence of his elders, but among his playmates. And the standards worked out there are not refined and moral at all, but rough ones of emulation and group honor, and respect for prowess. Even obedience, which we all like to think of as one of the indispensable accomplishments of a well-trained child, seems to be obtained at the cost of real moral growth. It might be more beneficial if it were not too often merely a means for the spiritual edification of the parents themselves. Too often it is the delight of ruling, of being made obeisance to, that is the secret motive of imposing strict obedience, and not our desire simply that they shall learn the excellent habits that are our own. One difficulty with the child who has “learned to mind” is that, if he learns too successfully, he runs the risk of growing up to be a cowardly and servile youth. There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated. Life will present so many inevitable necessities to the child when he gets out into the world that it seems premature to