The Magazine's Word: The Month of Harvest

At this time every year the pressure rises in our homes. It is the month of examinations, in which our children reap the fruits of what they have sown and tended.

And examinations, however light and easy they may be, have their awe and their overcast atmosphere. However negligent and lazy a student may be, he is without doubt won back shortly before the examination date, bent over study and hard work.

How many times have I asked myself: "Who, I wonder, bears the greater share of the worry of the examination — the student, or his parents?" And it has often seemed to me that the parents' anxiety and nervousness during examination time has many a time exceeded that of the student himself. For they, more than he, appreciate circumstances and consequences.

A group of educators has taken note of the psychological distress that afflicts the young at examination time, and has argued that it must be abolished and replaced with a sounder educational system. Another group opposed them, insisting that the examination is indispensable, however many its doubts and its faults. The debate arose and raged, and the knot is still a knot untied.

The examination, then, is "a crisis that must be crossed," and our duty, we mothers, in the face of this crisis, is to play the part of the wise captain as he steers his vessel through the storm toward the safe passages, so that it does not strike the rocks and break apart. Our duty is to keep to our homes during this particular period and to watch over our children's rest and their health, bodily and spiritual, so as to secure for them the serene atmosphere that spreads reassurance, calm nerves, and clarity of mind — and, in consequence, knowledge and self-confidence.

Ours is inescapably the age of science. Our children's excellence in their future lives depends on how much they have drawn from the springs of knowledge, whose depths are without limit. How grave, then, is our responsibility as mothers!