gentleman from Cambridge and the maiden lady Understander are
convinced that the future of the race depends upon leaving the Child
untrammelled to select its own amusements. A friend of mine, during
his wife's absence once on a visit to her mother, tried the
experiment.

The Child selected a frying-pan. How it got the frying-pan remains
to this day a mystery. The cook said "frying-pans don't walk
upstairs." The nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar,
but that there was commonsense in everything. The scullery-maid said
that if everybody did their own work other people would not be driven
beyond the limits of human endurance; and the housekeeper said that
she was sick and tired of life. My friend said it did not matter.
The Child clung to the frying-pan with passion. The book my friend
was reading said that was how the human mind was formed: the Child's
instinct prompted it to seize upon objects tending to develop its
brain faculty. What the parent had got to do was to stand aside and
watch events.

The Child proceeded to black everything about the nursery with the
bottom of the frying-pan. It then set to work to lick the frying-pan
clean. The nurse, a woman of narrow ideas, had a presentiment that
later on it would be ill. My friend explained to her the error the
world had hitherto committed: it had imagined that the parent knew a
thing or two that the Child didn't. In future the Children were to
do their bringing up themselves. In the house of the future the
parents would be allotted the attics where they would be out of the
way. They might occasionally be allowed down to dinner, say, on
Sundays.