6.  What modes of self-expression should be used by pupils of elementary schools? of high schools?

7.  What may the vitalized teacher do to assist in the development of self-expression?  What should she refrain from doing?

8.  Suggest methods whereby the teacher may discover the content of the child’s world.

9.  How may the child’s experience, imagination, and expression be interrelated?

10.  Why is the twentieth century called the “age of the child”?

CHAPTER IV

THE CHILD OF THE FUTURE

=Rights of the coming generations.=—­Any school procedure that limits its interests and activities to the present generation takes a too restricted view of the real scope of education.  The children of the next generation, and the next, are entitled to consideration if education is to do its perfect work and have complete and convincing justification.  The child of the future has a right to grandfathers and grandmothers of sound body and sound mind, and the schools and homes of the present are charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that this right is vouchsafed to him.  In actual practice our plans seem not to previse grandfathers and grandmothers, and stop short even of fathers and mothers.  The child of the next generation has a right to a father and a mother of untainted blood, and neither the home nor the school can ignore this right.

=Transmitted weaknesses.=—­If these rights are not scrupulously respected by the present generation, the child of the future may come into the world under a handicap that all the educational agencies combined can neither remove nor materially mitigate.  If he is crippled in mind or in body because of excesses on the part of his progenitors, the schools and hospitals may help him through life in a sorry sort of fashion, but his condition is evermore a reminder to him of how much he has missed in comparison with the child of sound body and mind.  If such a child does not imprecate even the memory of the ancestors whose vitiated blood courses through his stricken body, it will be because his mind is too weak to reason from effect to cause or because his affliction has taught him large charity.  He will feel that he has been shamefully cheated in the great game of life, with no hope of restitution.  By reason of this, his gaze is turned backward instead of forward, and this is a reversal of the rightful attitude of child life.  Instead of looking forward with hope and happiness, he droops through a somber life and constantly broods upon what might have been.