A Word for Parents
Dick Barton returns this week—lean, bronzed and tremendously muscular (I make no doubt) after his summer vacation. I expect the usual wails from educationists. They forget the blood-and- thunder paper-backs of their own youth, and grieve at these aerial melodramas. My complaint, contrariwise, is that Barton is too moral, too clearly and too pallidly a " white " man.) I further expect the old lament of parents that this serial keeps the children from their home-work. I would ask parents: "Who is master in your house, you or the B.B.C. ? This complaint by parents seems to me much like their protest about television plays which arc " not suitable for children." Television plays are shown at 8.3o p.m.—when children should be in bed. Is it not altogether too humble, or too lazy, of parents to go on delegating their authority ? They have fallen into the habit of entrusting not only their children's education, but their food, to the schools ; their discipline to the Juvenile Courts ; and their amusement to the films and the B.B.C. If they disapprove of Dick Barton, or cannot fit him in to the domestic evening, the remedy
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