He objected to the dissociation of school and
home life--to that relegation of domestic interests and duties to
the background, which large and highly-organized schools, and
teachers much above the home level, must necessarily involve. And
yet more strongly, and, as it may still seem to many minds, with
convincing reason, he objected to an eleemosynary system, which
"precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature
can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial."
"The Spartan," he said, "and other ancient communities, might
disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country,
which we cannot have. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments,
without the possibility of substituting others more capacious. What
can grow out of it but selfishness?" The half-century which has
elapsed since Wordsworth wrote these words has evidently altered the
state of the question. It has impressed on us the paramount necessity
of national education, for reasons political and social too well
known to repeat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted the
incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister manner, by
vastly increasing the number of those homes where domestic influence
of the kind which the poet saw around him at Rydal is altogether
wanting and school is the best avenue even to moral well-being.
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