Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EDUCATION FOR INDIVIDUALITY I THERE is a little bay in one of the rooms of our house, the width of a window, the depth of a child's crib, which, in the blue-print, was for the baby. The young couple who built this house had right intentions in the blue-print. They told the architect what to do, and he did it; but the young pair weakened and kept a bureau in the little bay instead. That couple belong to the passing generation. They built at a time when at least one window in a house of forty was still dedicated to the chance of children; whereas my generation has become altogether practical, clearly recognizing in the blue-print the greater convenience of bureaus. If children come, as they do sometimes, it is quite by accident; and you build hospitals for accidents. In short, accidents ultimately are a charge on the general public, to be provided for out of the public funds. The public machinery for saving parents from their children approaches perfection. When some mechanical contrivance is found for manufacturing babies, the public will then have assumed the entire child-responsibility. At the present time a public something or somebody— creche, or nurse, " home "-kindergarten, cradle-roll, scout-master, camp, or school — attends the babe from birth straight through to business, or debut — where a public caterer provides the refreshment, a public orchestra the music, a public house the ballroom, and only the general public is lacking to complete what, since the christening, has been a public affair. On my daily in-and-out-of Boston I pass the Y.M.C.A., the Huntington School, the Forsyth Dental Infirmary for school-children, the Children's Hospital, Miss Winsor's school for girls, the Boston School of Physical Education, Saint Joseph's Industrial School, t...