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