The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Parent's National Education Union Notes.

We receive many enquities about the P.N.E.U., and are glad to be able to tell our readers of the Public Meeting to be held, by the appointment of the Bishop of London, on June 3rd, at 3.30 p.m. The Parents' Review goes to press before the date of the Committee Meeting at which particulars of place of meeting and speakers will be finally settled; but by the time the May number is in the hands of our readers, cards for the meeting will be ready. Application for cards may be made to the Hon. Org. Sec., Miss Sharland, 82, Sinclair Road, West Kensington Park, W.

A stamped and addressed envelope should be enclosed with the application, which should be made early.

We hope that many of our readers will make a point of attending, that they may hear the objects and methods of the Parent's National Education Union fully set forth, and may learn how simple a matter it is to establish a "Branch" in any neighbourhood.

The object of the promoters is to overspread the country with a great national educational league of parents of every condition; and thus to testify that parents form an educational body, whose regard for the interest of the children is as intelligent as it is profound.

The strength of our position lies in the word body. The good and the great amongst us show what great things individual parents have done and are doing. But the duty of even the best parents does not end with their own children; there are certain duties of fellowship and calling, recognised, perhaps, in every vocation but that of the parent. The clergyman owns responsibilities to his brother clergy; the doctor, the artist, the army man, above all, the teacher, products by free give and take with the members of his profession; the parent, alone, sands aloof, as one who should say: I have nothing to give and nothing to get; I am sufficient unto myself. This aloofness of parents is hardly intentional; it is a mere relic of the sentiment of our barbarian days, the feeling we express in the saying, "The Englishmen's house is his castle." We are waking up to the fact, that, by this exclusion and seclusion we sustain a great national and personal loss; we lose much of the enthusiasm which kindles with the consciousness that many are striving together in a great cause.

It is no arbitrary reward which is attached to the assembling of two or three together for Christian worship; we warm ourselves at each others' fires, and glow with the heat we get. Let but the heads of two or three families meet together to talk over the bringing up of their children, and the best and wisest parents will go home with new insight, renewed purpose, and warmer zeal.

We shall learn by degrees that education is, like religion, a social principle as well as an individual duty; and, meeting on this higher ground, we shall find out the best of one another as we never should in the common intercourse of business or society.

Typed by happi, January 2016