Letty Fox by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page A

mild voice that it was God’s own mercy I had the brains and brawn to survive such flub-dub, for any other child would be turned into a Simple Simon by such methods and why didn’t they leave children now primeval jellies when they would be safe from any influence.
    I burst into shrieks. My mother went out, followed by my father. When my father returned he did not argue with Mr. McLaren, to my disappointment.
    They went into a discussion of systems of education, the Scottish style, old-style, and the French style, which he believed in, and the University of Hard Knocks, against the present fad for spoon-feeding and the bedevilment of parents which, it seemed, was the one I was going through. My father appeared to agree with Mr. McLaren. My mother could scarcely control herself, and put me into bed with a good many bumps, jerks, and frowns. Then she hurried out to take part, and began repeating a great deal of the stuff she and the ladies talked over when they came to visit.
    â€œThat’s an undisciplined and unlettered little monkey,” said Mr. McLaren. “She’s been to school for nearly two years and can she so much as read or write?”
    My father passed the sherry. My mother said a delicate and talented child would not receive proper attention in the public schools. They had forty, fifty, sixty, seventy in a class; it had been estimated that the teachers in a certain school had not one minute of time per day to give to each child in individual attention; and what of general health? Then, what about conservative, no reactionary ideas, brought subtly or with a shillelagh into the brains of innocent children in the public schools?
    â€œYou knock ’em out again,” said McLaren calmly. “What are you here for? If you can’t take care of your own children, give up the family system and go in for communal living! Can she add two and two? No.”
    â€œShe has not felt the urge,” said Mother; “they do not force the children; they learn the play way, they learn by co-operation; there is no urging of the individual, it leads to the competitive spirit. Education isn’t a treadmill and it isn’t the star system. And then we must wait for the child’s need to unfold itself.”
    â€œHoly Methusalem,” said old McLaren, “and has she got to wait for the urge for everything her whole life long? Then she’ll know no more than her A B C when she’s a hundred, for that baby will more likely be a female wrestler.”
    My father laughed, and McLaren told them, in their circumstances, they ought to take advantage of the free schools. But Mother spoke up for me, saying that I never would be a member of the community of dirty little foreign children, that I belonged to one sort of people and to one kind of society and their object was to push me up to better things than they had ever known, not to drag me down to the level of dirty little slum children, whose heads were as full of gangster ideas as of lice. Did McLaren even know what words those children used in the street, right outside the house? Letty had brought home two or three of them already.
    Not liking to miss the fun, I raced into the room and joyously heaved a slipper over the electric light. I at once gave vent to these juicy words from my listening post. Mr. McLaren gave me an awful look which caused me to run behind my father’s chair, upon which I then climbed with loud shrieks of victory. My mother was explaining to Mr. McLaren that if she now whipped me or washed my mouth out with soap (the old Scottish method apparently), I would be repressed, these words would be repressed in me for the rest of my life, and I would either take to filthy pictures years later or would become a nervous pale girl who would attract no one and never would succeed; my real personality would never emerge because they would have imposed their old-world behavior patterns upon me. “She is not