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I’'HE DOMINANT SEVENTH IN EDUCATION. 721 
avery perfect cadence has its fundamental or key tone, and the chord of 
the dominant seventh determines this key. 
We hear much in these days of harmony in education. That, however, 
is a very old thought. Plato gave as the type of the cultured man one 
who is harmoniously constituted. Let us see what the centuries evolved 
out of Plato’s idea of harmony. To be harmoniously constituted means 
in this age to be physically, spiritually, ethically, and intellectually devel- 
oped. All the superiority that we can claim for this conception over that 
of Plato’s is, possibly, a little finer discrimination, that is all. We cannot 
improve very much on Plato’s idea of a harmonious constitution. It is 
the idea of “man” that has changed. In Plato’s time “ man” meant a 
few favored Athenians, but now it has come to mean not only the citizen, 
but the slave, and even woman. In a word, education has become the 
oirthright of humanity, and to secure to each individual his right, four 
great institutions have been established ; the family, the church, the state 
and the school. According to the popular idea, however, the school is 
alone responsible for the education accorded to man. The school is 
axpected to produce the perfect cadence, the tonic chord. 
But we have seen that there is a chord, namely the dominant seventh, 
which precedes the tonic chord, and determines what its fundamental 
tone or key shall be. Now if the school is to produce the tonic chord, 
what period of education is to produce the dominant seventh ? When is 
it that the key of our harmony is determined ? It is the period prior to 
‘he kindergarten period—the home period. That is the dominant seventh 
mn education, for it is then that all those forces that make or mar the har- 
mony of our lives are aroused and given direction. Of all the stages of 
development through which a child passes on his way to maturity, none 
provides him with more unqualified tutors than does this period, for it 
must be remembered that the care of infants devolves upon the young 
parents, and not upon those whose experience has afforded a certain 
amount of empirical knowledge, together with a deeper sympathy for 
humanity. Usnally their education is left, as Spencer says, ‘to the 
chances of unreasoning customs, impulse, fancy—joined with the sugges- 
sions of ignorant nurses and prejudiced grandmothers.” 
Let us see what modern pyschology and child-study has to say concern- 
ng some of the ‘‘unreasoning customs” that everywhere obtain in the 
10me training of children. 
With regard to the treatment of the will—I cannot say training of the 
will,” for there is little conception of that—there are two opposing theories. 
One is that the will should be broken, and the other is that the child 
should be allowed his own way until he is old enough to understand the 
whys and wherefores. Neither of these theories contains even so much 
as a suggestion concerning the real nature of the will nor its proper 
training.