But most homes will do little of this, and both home and school fall short in pledging the new life to the common good and in guaranteeing to the state her just due.  Frequently the home provides lavishly and at sacrifice for the comfort and even luxury of the children and exacts nothing in return.  Mothers slave for sons and neglect, until it is too late, those just returns of service which make for honor and self-respect.  Graft begins in the home, and it is amazing what pains we take to produce an ingrate and perforce a poor citizen.

Similarly, the boy attends the “free” schools.  Here is further advantage without the thought of service in return, something for nothing—­the open end of the public crib.  But the public schools are not exactly free schools.  Everything, whether at home or school, costs, and someone pays the bills.  The prospective citizen should be made to realize this, and it would do him no harm actually to compute the cost.  Through home and school, society is making an investment in him.  Let him estimate in dollars and cents his indebtedness for food and clothing and shelter, travel, medical care, education and recreation, and all the other items of expense which have entered into his care and training for the fourteen or seventeen years of his dependency.

Such an exercise, which cannot include those invaluable offices of parental love and personal interest, may have a sobering effect, as will also a conscious appreciation of the social institutions and utilities which are the gift of former and contemporary generations of toilers.

But how can the schoolboy come into the self-respect of partnership?  Probably by building up the consciousness of “our school” and by being sent from home with the idea of helping teacher and school in every way to accomplish the most and best for all concerned.  Ordinarily the home supplies the child with no such suggestion and in some cases works even counter to the school and against good citizenship.  The teacher is added to the ranks of the child’s natural enemies, where unfortunately the policeman has long since been consigned; and the school?—­that is something for which he carries no responsibility.  Actual experiment of the opposite kind has proved most gratifying, and this immediate attitude toward his first public institution sets the child’s will toward the practice of good citizenship in the years that lie ahead.

The curriculum of the elementary schools of Chicago makes a very thorough attempt to train the child in good citizenship, an attempt beginning with the anniversary days of the kindergarten and proceeding throughout the eight grades.  In addition to history, civics of the most concrete and immediate kind is so presented that the child should be brought to an appreciation of the city’s institutions and organized forces and of the common responsibility for the health and security of all the people.  The same policy is pursued, unfortunately with diminishing attention, throughout the high-school course, and yet the superintendent of schools testifies that public education is failing to secure civic virtue.  The children have not come into partnership with the school and other agencies of the common life, they have not achieved a nice sense of the rights of others, they have not been lifted to the ideal of service as being more noble than that of efficiency alone.