THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS Change from childish to adult friends--Influence of favorite teachers--What children wish or plan to do or be--Property and the money sense--Social judgments--The only child--First social organizations--Student life--Associations for youth, controlled by adults. In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence enforces one general law--that of keeping our good-will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. Their early lies are often saying what they think will please. At bottom, the most restless child admires and loves those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and mind. But the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. They have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of life. To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting the ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowledge. This is true education of the will and prepares the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of conflict. This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.[1] And yet, "at no time in life will a human being respond So heartily if treated by older and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a superior. The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good discipline."[2] Parents still think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein when they should loosen it. Many young people feel that they have the best of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they must remain in them. If the training of earlier years has been good, guidance by command may now safely give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be heroic. The one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is dullness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great stringency. Least of all, at this stage, can the curriculum school be an ossuary. The child must now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that interests him.