 Chapter 7 of the Home Education series, Volume 2, Parents and Children, this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Brooke Favorite, www.alongsidemom.com. The Home Education series, Volume 2, Parents and Children, by Charlotte Mason. The parent as schoolmaster. The schoolmaster will make him sit up. Sit up, that is, come when he's called, apparently, for the remark concerned a young person who went on spinning his top with nonchalance, ignoring an intermittent stream of objugations from his mother, whose view was that bedtime had arrived. Circumstances alter cases, but is it unheard of in higher ranks of life to trust to the schoolmaster to make a child sit up after a good deal of mental and moral sprawling about at home? Reasons why this task is left to the schoolmaster. Oh, he's a little fellow yet, he will know better by and by. My view is, let children have a delightful childhood, time enough for restraint and contradiction when they go to school. We do not hold with punishing children, love your children and let them alone is our principle. They will meet with hardness enough in the world, childhood shall have no harsh memories for them. School will break them in, let them grow like young colts till the time comes to break them, all young things should be free to kick about. What's bread in the bone must come out in the flesh, I do not care much for all this clipping and shaping of children, destroys individuality. When he's older he will know better, time cures many faults. And so on, we might fill pages with the wise things people say, who for one excellent reason or another prefer to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a child sit up. And does the schoolmaster live up to his reputation? How far does he succeed with the child who comes to him with no self-management? His real and proud successes are with the children who have been trained to sit up at home. His pleasure in such children is unbounded, the pains he takes with them unlimited. The successful careers he's able to launch them upon exceed the ambition of those most wildly ambitious of human beings. Dare we say it, parents, quiet, sensible, matter-of-fact parents. But the schoolmaster takes little credit to himself for these happy results. Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are modest people, though they are not always credited with their virtues. His successes are with children who have been trained at home. You can do anything with so-and-so. His parents have turned him out so well. Observe, the master takes little credit to himself, by no means so much as he deserves. And why? Experience makes fools wise, and what then of those who add experience to wisdom? People send us their cubs to lick into shape, and what can we do? Now the answer to this query concerns parents rather closely. What and how much can the schoolmaster do to make the boy sit up, who has not been to the man or bread? No Suizhen will make you sit up if you are an oyster. No, nor even if you are a cod. You must have a backbone, and your backbone must have learned its work before sitting up is possible to you. No doubt the human oyster may grow a backbone, and the human cod may get into the way of sitting up. And someday, perhaps, we shall know of the heroic endeavors made by schoolmaster and mistress to prop up, and haul up, and draw up, and anyhow keep alert and sitting up, creatures whose way it is to sprawl. Sometimes the result is surprising. They sit up in a row with the rest and look all right. Even when the props are removed they keep to the trick of sitting up for a while. The schoolmaster begins to rub his hands, and the parents say, I told you so, didn't I always say Jack would come right in the end? Wait a bit, the end is not yet. The habits of school life are mechanical. The habits of school, as of military life, are more or less mechanical. The early habits are vital, reversion to these takes place, and Jack sprawls as a man just as he sprawled as a child, only more so. Various social props keep him up, he has the wit to seem to sit up, he is lovable and his life is respectable, and no one suspects that this easygoing Mr. John Brown is a failure. A man who had the elements of greatness in him and might have been of use in the world had he been put under discipline from his infancy. Mental sprawling exemplified in Edward Waverly Sprawling is an ugly word, but the attitude we are thinking of is by no means always inelegant. Scott gives a delightful illustration of one kind of mental sprawling in Waverly. Quote, Edward Waverly's powers of apprehension were so quick as almost to resemble intuition, and the chief care of his preceptor was to prevent him, as a sportsman would phrase it, from overrunning his game, that is, from acquiring his knowledge in a slight flimsy and inadequate manner, and here the instructor had to combat another propensity too often united with brilliancy of fancy and vivacity of talent. The indolence, namely, which can only be stirred by some strong motive of gratification and which renounces study as soon as curiosity is gratified, the pleasure of conquering the first difficulties exhausted and the novelty of pursuit at an end. End quote. And the story goes on to show, without laborious pointing of the moral, how Waverly by name was wavering by nature, was ever the sport of circumstances because he had not learned in youth to direct his course. He blunders into many most interesting misadventures because he had failed to get, through his studies, the alertness of mind and the self-restraint which should make a man of him. Many pleasant things befall him, but not one of them, unless we accept Rose Bradwardine's love, and when did women study justice in the bestowal of her favours? Not one did he earn by his own wit or prowess. Each advantage and success which came to him was the earnings of another man. The elder Waverly had not only fortune but force of character to make friends, so we are not made sad for the amiable young man for whom we must needs feel affection. He does nothing to carve out a way for himself, and he does everything to his own hindrance out of pure want of the power of self-direction, but his uncle has fortune and friends, and all ends well. For the sake, no doubt, of young persons less happily situated, and of parents who are not able to play the part of bountiful providence to sons and daughters whom they have failed to fit for the conduct of their own lives, the great novelist takes care to point out that Edward Waverly's personal failure in life was the fault of his education. His abilities were even brilliant, but I ought had waited upon I like from his earliest days, and he had never learned to make himself do the thing he would. Parents are apt to leave training in self-compelling power to the schoolmaster. Now it is this sort of bringing under that parents are apt to leave to the schoolmaster. They do not give their children the discipline which results in self-compelling power, and by and by, when they make over the task to another, the time for training in the art of self-mastery has gone by, and a fine character is spoiled through indolence and willfulness. But why will it not do to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a child sit up? It is natural for a child to be left free as a bird in matters of no moral significance. We would not let him tell lies, but if he hate his lessons that may be nature's way of showing he had better let them alone. We are not meant to grow up in a state of nature. We must face the facts. We are not meant to grow up in a state of nature. There is something simple, conclusive, even idyllic in the statement that so-and-so is natural. What more would you have? Jean-Jacques Rousseau preached the doctrine of natural education, and no reformer has had a greater following. It's human nature, we say, when Stormy Harry snatches his drum from Jack, when Baby Marjorie, who is not too, screams for Susie's doll. So it is, and for that very reason it must be dealt with early. Even Marjorie must be taught better. I always finish teaching my children obedience before they are one year old, said a wise mother, and any who know the nature of children and the possibilities open to the educator will say, why not, obedience in the first year and all the virtues of the good life as the years go on, every year with its own definite work to show in the training of character. Is Edward a selfish child when his fifth birthday comes? The fact is noted in his parents' yearbook and the resolve that by his sixth birthday he shall, please God, be a generous child. Here the reader who has not realized that to exercise discipline is one of the chief functions of parenthood smiles and talks about human nature with all the air of an unanswerable argument. The first function of the parent is that of discipline. But we live in a redeemed world, and one of the meanings which that unfathomable phrase bears is that it is the duty of those who have the care of childhood to eradicate each vulgar and hateful trait, to plant and foster the fruits of that kingdom in the children who have been delivered from the kingdom of nature into the kingdom of grace. That is to say all children born into this redeemed world. The parent who believes that the possibilities of virtuous training are unlimited will set to work with cheerful confidence, will forego the twaddle about nature whether as lovely in itself or as an irresistible force, and will perceive that the first function of the parent is that function of discipline which is so cheerfully made over to the schoolmaster. Education is a discipline. Discipline does not mean a birch rod, nor a corner, nor a slipper, nor a bed, nor any such last resort of the feeble. The sooner we cease to believe in merely penal suffering as part of the divine plan the sooner will a spasmodic resort to the birch rod die out in families. We do not say the rod is never useful. We do say it should never be necessary. The fact is many of us do not believe in education except as it means the acquirement of a certain amount of knowledge but education which shall deal curatively and methodically with every flaw and character does not enter into our scheme of things possible. No less than this is what we mean when we say education is a discipline. Where his parents fail the poor soul has one further chance in the discipline of life but we must remember that while it is the nature of the child to submit to discipline it is the nature of the undisciplined man to run his head in passionate willfulness against the circumstances that are for his training so that the parent who willfully chooses to leave his child to be broken in by the schoolmaster or by life leaves him to a fight in which all the odds are against him. The physique, the temper, the disposition, the career, the affections, the aspirations of a man are all more or less the outcome of the discipline his parents have brought him under or of the lawlessness they have allowed. Discipline is not punishment. What is discipline? Look at the word. There is no hint of punishment in it. A disciple is a follower and discipline is the state of the follower, the learner, imitator. Mothers and fathers do not well to forget that their children are, by the very order of nature, their disciples. Now no man sets himself up for a following of disciples who does not wish to indoctrinate these with certain principles or at the least maxims, rules of life. So should the parent have at heart notions of life and duty which he labours without pause to instill into his children. How disciples are lured. He who would draw disciples does not trust to force but to these three things, to the attraction of his doctrine, to the persuasion of his presentation, to the enthusiasm of his disciples. So the parent has teachings of the perfect life which he knows how to present continually with winning force until the children are quickened with such zeal for virtue and holiness as carries them forward with leaps and bounds. Steady progress on a careful plan. Again the teacher does not indoctrinate his pupils all at once but here a little and there a little. Steady progress on a careful plan so the parent who would have his child a partaker of the divine nature has a scheme and ascending scale of virtues in which he is diligent to practice his young disciple. He adds to the faith with which the child is so richly dowered virtue and to virtue knowledge and to knowledge self-control. Having practiced his child in self-control he trains him in patience and to patience he adds godliness and to godliness kindness and to kindness love. These and such as these wise parents cultivate as systematically and with as definite results as if they were teaching the three Rs. But how? The answer covers so wide a field that we must leave it for another chapter. Only this here. Every quality has its defect. Every defect has its quality. Examine your child. He has qualities. He is generous. See to it that the lovable little fellow who would give away his soul is not also rash, impetuous, self-willed, passionate, nobody's enemy but his own. It rests with parents to make low the high places and exalt the valleys to make straight paths for the feet of their little son. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of the Home Education series, Volume 2, Parents and Children. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Brooke Favorite www.alongsidemom.com The Home Education series, Volume 2, Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason. Chapter 8 The Culture of Character Parents as Trainers What could I from my father, lusty life and vigorous will? What from my gentle mother, cheerful days and poet's skill? Says Goethe. For poets like the rest of us are born, not made, and get the most of what they are from their parents. But it did not take poet or modern scientist to discover this. People have known it time out of mind. Like father, like child, they said, and were satisfied, for it was not the way in earlier days to thresh out the great facts of life. How far does heredity count? Not so now. We talk about it and about it, call it heredity, and take into account in our notions at any rate, if not in our practice. Nobody writes a biography now without attempting to produce progenitors and early surroundings that shall account for his man or his woman. This fact of heredity is very much before the public, and by and by will have its bearing on the loose notions people hold about education. In this sort of way, Harold is a bright little boy, but he hasn't the least power of attention. Oh, I know he hasn't, but then poor child he can't help it. What's bread in the bone, you know, and we are feather-brained on both sides of the house. Now the practical education question of our day is just this. Can he help it? Or can his parents help it? Or must the child sit down for life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us, professional teachers, have been taking aim, rather, beside the mark. We talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief object of education, and we point to our results, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, physical, with a, see there, what culture can affect. For their education, children want chiefly opportunity. But we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given him. Just as the healthy child must have his dinner and his bed, so too does he crave for knowledge, perfection, beauty, power, society, and all he wants is opportunity. Give him opportunities of loving and learning, and he will love and learn, for tis his nature too. Whoever has taken note of the sweet reasonableness, the quick intelligence, the bright imaginings of a child, will think the fuss we make about the right studies for developing these is like asking, how shall we get a hungry man to eat his dinner? Many a man got his turn for natural science because as a boy he lived in the country, and had a chance to observe living things and their ways. Nobody took pains to develop his faculty, all he had was opportunity. If the boy's mind is crammed with other matters, he has no opportunity, and you may meet men of culture who have lived most of their lives in the country and don't know a thrush from a blackbird. I know of a woman who has developed both a metaphysical and a literary turn because as a girl of ten she was allowed to browse on old volumes of the spectator, the most telling part of her education, she thinks. An experiment in art education. Again I watched quite lately an extraordinary educational result of opportunity. A friend interested in a working boys club undertook to teach a class to model in clay. There was no selection made, the boys were mill boys, taken as they came in with no qualifications except that, as their teacher said, they had not been spoiled. That is, they had not been taught to draw in the ordinary way. She gave them clay, a model, one or two modeling tools, and also, being an artist, the feeling of the object to be copied. After half a dozen lessons, the things they produced cannot be called less than works of art, and delightful it was to see the vigor and spirit they worked with, the artistic instinct which caught the sentiment of the object as the creases made by a little foot which make a child's shoe a thing to kiss. This lady maintains that she only let out what was in the boys, but she did more. Her own art enthusiasm forced out artistic effort. Even taking into account the enthusiasm of the teacher, I wish we might always count on that factor. This remains a fair case to prove our point, which is, give them opportunity and direction, and children will do the greater part of their own education, intellectual, aesthetic, even moral, by reason of the wonderfully balanced desires, powers and affections which go to make up human nature. A cheerful doctrine this, which should help to swell the ranks of the unemployed, outlets for their energies a little direction, a little control, and then we may sit by with folded hands and see them do it. But, in fact, there are two things to be done. Powers to be developed, where a little of our help goes a long way, and character to be formed, and here children are as clay in the hands of the potter, absolutely dependent on their parents. But character is an achievement. Disposition, intellect, genius, come pretty much by nature, but character is an achievement, the one practical achievement possible to us for ourselves and for our children, and all real advance in family or individual is along the lines of character. Our great people are great simply by reason of their force of character. For this, more than for their literary successes, Carlisle and Johnson are great. Boswell's life is, and perhaps deserves to be, more of a literary success than anything of his masters, but what figure does he make after all? Two ways of preserving sanity. Greatness and littleness belong to character, and life would be dull where we all cast in one mold. But how come we to differ? Surely by reason of our inherited qualities, it is hereditary tendencies which result in character. The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered, devout, is so on the whole because that strain of character runs in his family. Some progenitor got a bent from his circumstances towards fault or virtue, and that bent will go on repeating itself to the end of the chapter. To save that single quality from the exaggeration which would destroy the balance of qualities we call sanity, two counterforces are provided, marriage into alien families, and education. The development of character, the main work of education. We come round now to the point we started from. If the development of character rather than of faculty is the main work of education, and if people are born, so to speak, ready-made, with all the elements of their after-character in them, certain to be developed by time and circumstances, what is left for education to do? Plausible reasons for doing nothing. Very commonly the vote is, do nothing, though there are three or four ways of arriving at that conclusion, as, what's the good? The fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth must be set on edge. Tommy is obstinate as a little mule, but what would you have, so is his father. So have been all the Joneses time out of mind, and Tommy's obstinacy is taken as a fact not to be helped nor hindered. Or Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes to anything she has in hand. That child is just like me, says her mother, but time will steady her. Fanny again sings herself to sleep with a Sicilian vesper hymn, her nurse's lullaby, before she's able to speak. It's strange how an ear for music runs in our family, is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent. Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes about sacred things, to call his father Tom, and generally to show a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people, think with pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy of repression. Do as your bid and make no remarks becomes the child's rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home. In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the science of the day. There's a tendency to lung trouble, the doctors undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the habit of delicacy is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there's no reason why the child should not die at a good old age. Once more, there are parents who are aware of the advances science has made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their children, but set them down as of the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man, which naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam. This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy, that is, unless the boy's fault be of a disturbing kind, a violent temper, for example, when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out of him. But the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish have been revealed by science. But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so not less surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish or decay. These it behooves us to make ourselves acquainted with, and the Christian parent who is shy of science and prefers to bring up his children by the light of nature when that of authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children's irreparable loss. The race is advancing. If the race is advancing it is along the lines of character, for each new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before it. We should have today the very flower and fruit that has been up preparing through the long lines of progenitors. Children have always been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort are the princes in the kingdom to come. In the kingdom are the children, you may read it in their eyes, all the freedom of the kingdom in their careless humor lies. And what mother has not bowed before the princely heart of innocence in her own little child? But apart from this, of their glad living in the sunshine of the divine countenance, surely our children are more so than those of earlier days? Never before was a jack and apes written or the story of a short life. Shakespeare never made a child nor Scott hardly dickens often as he tried. Either we are waking up to what is in them or the children are indeed advancing in the van of the times, holding in light grasp the grains of the past, the possibilities of the future. It is the age of child worship and very lovely are the well brought up children of Christian and cultured parents. But alas, how many of us degrade the thing we love? Think of the multitude of innocence to be launched on the world already mutilated spiritually and morally at the hands of doting parents. The duty of cherishing certain family traits. The dutious father and mother on the contrary, who discern any lovely family trait in one of their children, set themselves to nourish and cherish it as a gardener the peaches he means to show. We know how that kiss made me a painter, that is, warmed into life whatever art faculty the child had. The choice or the plant, the gardener tells us, the greater the pains must he take with the rearing of it. And here is the secret of the loss and waste of some of the most beauteous and lovable natures the world has seen. They have not had the pains taken with their rearing that their delicate, sensitive organizations demanded. Think how Shelley was left to himself. We live in embarrassing days. It is well to cry, give us light, more light and fuller. But what if the new light discover to us a maze of obligations intricate and tedious? Distinctive qualities ask for culture. It is at first sight bewildering to perceive that for whatever distinctive quality, moral or intellectual we discern in the children special culture is demanded. But, after all, our obligation towards each such quality resolves itself into providing for it these four things. Nourishment, exercise, change and rest. Four conditions of culture. Exercise. A child has a great turn for languages. His grandfather was the master of nine. The little fellow, Lisps in Latin, learns his mensa from his nurse, knows his declensions before he is five. What line is open to the mother who sees such an endowment in her child? First let him use it, let him learn his declensions, and whatever else he takes to without the least sign of effort. Probably the Latin case endings come as easily and pleasantly to his ear as does seesaw Marjorie Dahl to the ordinary child. Though no doubt Marjorie Dahl is the wholesome kind of thing. Nourishment, let him do just so much as he takes to of his own accord. But never urge, never applaud, never show him off. Next let words convey ideas as he is able to bear them. Buttercup, Primrose, Dandelion, Magpie each tells its own tale. Daisy is Day's eye, opening with the sun and closing when he sets. That well by reason it men call in May, the Daisy or else the eye of day. Let him feel that the common words we use without a thought are beautiful, full of story and interest. It is a great thing that the child should get the ideas proper to the qualities inherent in him. An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and once in ideas behave like living creatures, they feed, grow and multiply. Change, next provide him with some one delightful change of thought, that is with work and ideas all together apart from his bent for languages. Let him know with friendly intimacy the out of door objects that come in his way. The red start, the rose shaper, the ways of the catus worm, forest trees, field flowers, all natural objects, common and curious near his home. No other knowledge is so delightful as this common acquaintance with natural objects. Or again someone remarks that all our great inventors have in their youth handled material, clay, wood, iron, brass, pigments. Let him work in material. To provide a child with delightful resources on lines opposed to his natural bent is the one way of keeping a quite sane mind in the presence of an absorbing pursuit. Rest. At the same time change of occupation is not rest. If a man ply a machine, now with his foot and now with his hand, the foot or the hand rests but the man does not. A game of romps, better so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions, nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill. Work and waste of brain tissue necessary. This speaking broadly is the rationale of the matter. Just as actually as we sow or write through the instrumentality of the hand, so the child learns, thinks, feels by means of a material organ, the very delicate nervous tissue of the cerebrum. Now this tissue is constantly and rapidly wearing away. The more it is used, whether in the way of mental effort or emotional excitement, the more it wears away. Happily rapid new growth replaces the waste, wherefore work and consequent waste of tissue are necessary, but let the waste get ahead of the gain and lasting mischief happens. Therefore never let the child's brain work exceed his chances of reparation, whether such work come in the way of too hard lessons or of the excitement attending childish dissipations. Another plea for abundant rest is that one thing at a time, and that done well, appears to be nature's rule, and his hours of rest and play are the hours of the child's physical growth. Witness the stunted appearance of children who are allowed to live in a whirl of small excitements. A word more as to the necessity of change of thought for the child who has a distinct bent. The brain tissue not only wastes with work, but, so to speak, wastes locally. We all know how done up we are after giving our minds for a few hours or days to any one subject, whether anxious or joyous. We are glad at last to escape from the engrossing thought and find it a weariness when it returns upon us. It would appear that set up the continuous working of certain ideas, and a certain tract of the brain substance is, as it were, worn out and weakened with the constant traffic in these ideas. And this is of more consequence when the ideas are moral than when they are merely intellectual. Hamlet's thoughts play continuously round a few distressing facts. He becomes morbid, not entirely sane. In a word he is eccentric. Danger of eccentricity. Possibly eccentricity is a danger against which the parents of well-descended children must be on the watch. These are born with strong tendencies to certain qualities and ways of thinking. Their bringing up tends to accentuate their qualities. The balance between these and other qualities is lost, and they become eccentric persons. Mr. Matthew Arnold writes down the life and the work of a great poet as ineffectual, and this is, often enough, the verdict passed upon the eccentric. Whatever force of genius and of character, whatever lovely moral traits they may have, the world will not take them as guides for good unless they do as others do in things lawful and expedient. And truly there is a broad margin for originality in declining to hunt with the hounds in things neither lawful nor expedient. Causes of oddity in children. What is the mother's course who notices in her most promising child little traits of oddity? He does not care much for games, does not get on well with the rest, has some little den of his own where he ruminates. Poor little fellow, he wants a confidant badly. Most likely he has tried nurse and brothers and sisters to no purpose. If this goes on, he will grow up with the idea that nobody wants him, nobody understands him, will take his slice of life and eat it with a snarl all by himself. But if his mother have tacked enough to get at him, she will preserve for the world one of its saving characters. Depend upon it, there is something at work in the child. Genius, humanity, poetry, ambition, pride of family. It is that he wants outlet and exercise for an inherited trait almost too big for his childish soul. Rosa Bonheur was observed to be a restless child whose little shoes of life were a misfit. Lessons did not please her and play did not please her, and her artist father hit on the notion of soothing the child's divine discontent. By apprenticing her to a needle woman. Happily she broke her bonds and we have her pictures. In the case of pride of birth it is well that the child should be brought face to face and heart to heart with the great humility of our pattern. But that being done, this sense of family distinction is a wonderful lever to raise the little world of the child's nature. No bless oblige. He must needs add honor and not dishonor to a distinguished family. I know of a little boy who bears two distinguished family names, Browning Newton, let us say. He goes to a preparatory school where it is the custom to put the names of defaulters on the blackboard. By and by his little brother went to school too, and the bigger boy's exhortium was, we'll never let two such names as ours be stuck up on the blackboard. The dreariness of a motiveless life. Amongst the immediate causes of eccentricity is the dreariness of daily living, the sense of which falls upon us all at times, and often with deadly weight upon the more finely strung and highly gifted. Oh dear I wish I was in Jupiter, sighed a small urchin who had already used up this planet. It rests with the parents to see that the dreariness of a motiveless life does not settle sooner or later on any one of their children. We are made with a yearning for the fearful joy of passion, and if this do not come to us in lawful ways, we look for it in eccentric or worse in illegitimate courses. The mother to whom her child is as an open book must find event for the restless workings of his nature, the more apt to be troubled by, the burden of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, the more finely he is himself organized. Fill him with the enthusiasm of humanity, whatever gifts he has let them be cultivated as gifts for men. The thing best worth living for is to be of use, was well said lately by a thinker who has left us, and the child into whose notion of life that idea is fitted will not grow up to find time heavy on his hands. The life blessed with an enthusiasm will not be dull, but a weight must go into the opposite scale to balance even the noblest enthusiasm. As we have said, open for him some door of natural science, some way of mechanical skill, in a word give the child an absorbing pursuit and a fascinating hobby, and you need not fear eccentric or unworthy developments. We must save our splendid failures. It seems well to dwell at length on this subject of eccentricity, because the world loses a great deal by its splendid failures. The beautiful human beings who, through one sort of eccentricity or another, become ineffectual for the raising of the rest of us. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of the Home Education Series, Volume 2, Parents and Children This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Brooke Favorite, www.alongsidemom.com The Home Education Series, Volume 2, Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason Chapter 9 The Culture of Character The Treatment of Defects The Ultimate Object of Education Suppose the parent see that the formation of character is the ultimate object of education. See too that character is, in the rough, the inherited tendencies of the child, modified by his surroundings, but that character may be debased or ennobled by education. That it is the parent's part to distinguish the first faint budding of family traits, to greet every fine trait as the highest sort of family possession to be nourished and tended with care. To keep up at the same time the balance of qualities by bringing forward that which is of little account, the more so when they must deliver their child from eccentricity, pitfall to the original and forceful nature. Suppose they have taken all this into the role of their duties. There yet remains much for parents to do. The Defects of Our Qualities We are open to what the French call the defects of our qualities, and as ill weeds grow apace, the defects of a fine character may well choke out the graces. A little maiden loves with all the passion and devotion of a woman, but she is exacting of return and jealous of intrusion, even with her mother. A boy is ambitious, he will be leader in the nursery, and his lead is wholesome for the rest, but there is the pugnacious little brother who will not follow my leader, and the two can hardly live in the same rooms. The able boy is a tyrant when his will is crossed, there is the timid, affectionate little maid who will even tell a fib to shield her sister, and there is the high-spirited girl who never lies, but who does now and then bully, and so on without end. What is the parent's part here? To magnify the quality, make the child feel that he or she has a virtue to guard, a family possession, and at the same time a gift from above. A little simple reasonable teaching may help, and let us beware of much talk. Have you quite finished, mother? said a bright little girl of five in the most polite way in the world. She had listened long to her mother's sermonising, and had many things on hand. A wise word here and there may be of use, but much more may be done by carefully hindering each defect of its quality from coming into play. Give the ill weeds no room to grow. Then again the defect may often be reclaimed and turned back to feed the quality itself. The ambitious boy's love of power may be worked into a desire to win by love his rest of little brother. The passion of the loving girl may be made to include all whom her mother loves. Children with defects. There is another aspect of the subject of heredity and the duties it entails. As the child of long lineage may well inherit much of what was best in his ancestors, fine physique, clear intellect, high moral worth, so also he has his risks. As someone puts it, not all the women have been brave, nor all the men chased. We know how the tendency to certain forms of disease runs in families. Temper and temperament, moral and physical nature alike, may come down with a taint. An unhappy child may, by some odd freak of nature, appear to have left out the good and taken into him only the unworthy. What can the parents do in such a case? They may not reform him. Perhaps that is beyond human skill and care. Once he has become all that is possible to his nature, but transform him so that the being he was calculated to become never develops at all, but another being comes to light blessed with every grace of which he had only the defect. This brings us to a beneficent law of nature, which underlies the whole subject of early training, and especially so this case of the child whose mother must bring him forth a second time into a life of beauty and harmony. To put it in an old form of words, the words of Thomas A. Kempis, what seems to me the fundamental law of education is no more than this. Habit is driven out by habit. People have always known that use is second nature, but the reason why and the scope of the saying these are discoveries of recent days. A malicious child. A child has an odious custom, so constant, that it is his quality will be his character if you let him alone. He is spiteful, he is sly, he is sullen. No one is to blame for it, it was born in him. What are you to do with such inveterate habit of nature? Just this, treat it as a bad habit, and set up the opposite good habit. Henry is more than mischievous, he is a malicious little boy. There are always tears in the nursery, because with pinches, nips and bobs, he is making some child wretched. Even his pets are not safe. He has done his canary to death by poking at it with a stick through the bars of its cage. Howls from his dog, screeches from his cat, betray him in some vicious trick. He makes fearful faces at his timid little sister, sets traps with string for the housemaid with her water cans to fall over. There's no end to the malicious tricks, beyond the mere savagery of untrained boyhood, which come to his mother's ear. What is to be done? Oh, he will grow out of it, says the more hopeful who pin their faith to time. But many an experienced mother will say, you can't cure him, what is in will out, and he will be a pest to society all his life. Yet the child may be cured in a month if the mother will set herself to the task with both hands and of set purpose. At any rate, the cure may be well begun, and that is half done. Special Treatment Let the month of treatment be a deliciously happy month to him, he living all the time in the sunshine of his mother's smile. Let him not be left to himself to meditate or carry out ugly pranks. Let him feel himself always under a watchful, loving and approving eye. Keep him happily occupied, well amused. All this to break the old custom which is assuredly broken when a certain length of time goes by without its repetition. But one habit drives out another. Lay new lines in the old place. Open avenues of kindness for him. Let him enjoy, daily, hourly, the pleasure of pleasing. Get him into the way of making little plots for the pleasure of the rest. A plaything of his contriving, a dish of strawberries of his gathering. Shadow rabbits to amuse the baby. Take him on kind errands to poor neighbors, carrying and giving of his own. For a whole month the child's whole heart is flowing out in deeds and schemes and thoughts of loving kindness, and the ingenuity which spent itself in malicious tricks becomes an acquisition to his family when his devices are benevolent. Yes, but where is his mother to get time in these accroching days to put Henry under special treatment? She has other children and other duties and simply cannot give herself up for a month or a week to one child. If the boy were ill, in danger, would she find time for him then? Would not other duties go to the wall and leave her little son for the time her chief object in life? Moral ailments need prompt attention. Now here is a point all parents are not enough awake to. That serious mental and moral ailments require prompt, purposeful, curative treatment to which the parents must devote themselves for a short time, just as they would to a sick child. Punishing him nor letting him alone, the two lines of treatment most in favor, ever cured a child of any moral evil. If parents recognized the efficacy and the immediate effect of treatment, they would never allow the spread of ill weeds. For let this be borne in mind, whatever ugly quality disfigures the child, he is but as a garden overgrown with weeds, the more prolific the weeds, the more fertile the soil. He has within him every possibility of beauty, of life and character. Get rid of the weeds and foster the flowers. It is hardly too much to say that most of the failures in life or character made by man or woman are due to the happy-go-lucky philosophy of the parents. They say, the child is so young, he does not know any better, but all that will come right as he grows up. Now a fault of character left to itself can do no other than strengthen. An objection may be raised to this counsel of short and determined curative treatment. The good results do not last. It is said, a week or two of neglect and you lose the ground gained. Henry is as likely as ever to grow up out of the tiger order, a steer forth or a grand court. But here science comes to help us to cheerful certainty. There is no more interesting subject of inquiry open just now than that of the interaction between the thoughts of the mind and the configuration of the brain. The fair conclusion appears to be that each is greatly the cause of the other, that the character of the persistent thoughts actually shapes the cerebrum, while on the configuration of this organ depends in turn the manner of thoughts we think. Automatic brain action. Thought is for the most part automatic. We think, without intention or effort, as we have been accustomed to think, just as we walk or write without any conscious arrangement of muscles. Mozart could write an overture laughing all the time at the little jokes his wife made to keep him awake. To be sure he had thought it out before, and there it was ready to be written. But he did not consciously try for these musical thoughts, they simply came to him in proper succession. Coleridge thought Kubla Khan in his sleep and wrote it when he awoke, and indeed he might as well have been asleep all the time for all he had to do with the production of most of his thoughts. Over the buttons she falls asleep and stitches them on in a dream. Is very possible and likely. For one thing which we consciously set ourselves to think about, a thousand words and acts come from us every day of their own accord. We don't think of them at all. But all the same only a poet or a musician could thus give forth poetry or music. And it is the words and acts which come from us without conscious thought which afford the true measure of what we are. Perhaps this is why such serious weight is attached to our every idle word, words spoken without intention or volition. We are getting by degrees to Henry and his bad habits. Somehow or other the nervous tissue of the cerebrum grows to the thoughts that are allowed free course in the mind. How science hardly ventures to guess as yet. But for the sake of illustration let us imagine that certain thoughts of the mind run to and fro in the nervous substance of the cerebrum until they've made a way there. Busy traffic in the same order of thoughts will always be kept up for there is the easy way for them to run in. Take the child with an inherited tendency to a resentful temper. He has begun to think resentful thoughts. Finds them easy and gratifying. He goes on ever more the ugly traffic becomes more easy and natural and resentfulness is rapidly becoming himself. That trait in his character which people couple with his name. One custom overcomes another. But one custom overcomes another. The watchful mother sets up new tracks in other directions and she sees to it that while she is leading new thoughts through the new way the old deeply worn way of thinking is quite disused. Now the cerebrum is in a state of rapid waste and rapid growth. The new growth takes shape from the new thought the old is lost in the steady waste and the child is reformed physically as well as morally and mentally. That the nervous tissue of the cerebrum should be thus the instrument of the mind need not surprise us when we think how the muscles and joints of the tumbler, the vocal organs of the singer, the finger ends of the watchmaker, the palate of the tea taster grow to the uses they are steadily put to and much more both in the case of the brain and all other organs grow to the uses they are earliest put to. This meets in a wonderful way the case of the parent who sets himself to cure a moral failing. He sets up the course of new thoughts and hinders those of the past until the new thoughts shall have become automatic and run of their own accord. All the time a sort of disintegration is going on in the place that held the disused thoughts. And here is the parent's advantage. If the boy return, as from inherited tendency he still may do, to his old habits of thought, behold there is no more place for them in his physical being. To make a new place is a work of time and in this work the parent can overtake and hinder him without much effort. A material register of educational efforts. Here indeed more than anywhere, here indeed more than anywhere, except the Lord build the house they labor but in vain that build it. But surely intelligent cooperation in this divine work is our bound in duty and service. The training of the will, the instruction of the conscience, and so far as it lies with us the development of the divine life in the child are carried on simultaneously with this training in the habits of a good life. And these last will carry the child safely over the season of the infirm will, immature conscience, until he is able to take, under direction from above, the conduct of his life, the molding of his character into his own hands. It is a comfort to believe that there is even a material register of our educational labours being made in the very substance of the child's brain. And certainly here we have a note of warning as to the danger of letting ill ways alone in the hope that all will come right by and by. Mother love is not sufficient for child training. Some parents may consider all this as heavy hearing, that even to think on these things is enough to take the joy and spontaneousness out of their sweet relationship. And that after all, parents' love and the grace of God should be sufficient for the bringing up of children. No one can feel on this subject more sincere humility than those who have not the honour to be parents. The insight and love with which parents, mothers most so, are blessed, is a divine gift which fills lookers on with reverence, even in many a cottage home. But we have only to observe how many fond parents make foolish children to be assured that something more is wanted. There are appointed ways, not always the old paths, but new ones, opened up step by step as we go. The labour of the mother who sets herself to understand her work is not increased, but infinitely lightened, and as for life being made heavy with the thought of these things. Once make them our own, and we act upon them as naturally as upon such knowledge, scientific also, as loose your hold of a cup and it falls. A little painstaking thought and effort in the first place and all comes easy. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of the Home Education Series, Volume 2 Parents and Children This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Brooke Favorite www.alongsidemom.com The Home Education Series, Volume 2 Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason Chapter 10 Bible Lessons Parents as Instructors in Religion Quote Sunday Schools are Necessary That parents should make over the religious education of their children to a Sunday school is no doubt as indefensible as if they sent them for their meals to a table maintained by the public bounty. We at home plead not guilty to this particular count. Our Sunday Schools are used by those toil-worn and little-earned parents who are willing to accept at the hands of the more leisureed classes this service of the religious teaching of their children. That is, the Sunday School is, at present, a necessary evil, an acknowledgement that there are parents so hard-pressed that they are unable for their first duty. Here we have the theory of the Sunday School. The parents who can teach their children at home on Sunday and substitutes step in to act for those who cannot. But educated parents should instruct their children in religion, an Australian outcome of the parents' union. It is upon this delightful theory of the Sunday School that a clergyman at the antipodes has taken action. Never does it appear to occur to him that the members of the upper and middle classes do not need to be definitely and regularly instructed in religion from a child. His contention is only that such children should not be taught at Sunday School but at home and by their parents. And the main object of his parochial parents' union is to help parents in this work. These are some of the rules. 1. The object of the union shall be to unite, strengthen, and assist fathers and mothers in the discharge of their parental duties. 2. Members shall be pledged by the fact of their joining to supervise the education of their own children and to urge the responsibility of the parental relationship upon other parents. 3. Lesson sketches shall be furnished monthly to each family in connection with the union. 4. Members shall bring their children to the monthly catechizing and sit with them, etc., etc. Probably the lesson sketches are to secure that the children do just such Bible lessons at home with their parents on Sunday as they have hitherto done at the Sunday School with teachers. It seems to be contemplated that parents of every class will undertake their proper duties in this matter, and that the Sunday School may be allowed to drop the clergymen undertaking instead to ascertain by means of catechizing that certain work is done month by month. The scheme seems full of promise. Nothing should do more to strengthen the bonds of family life than that the children should learn religion at the lips of their parents. And to grow up in a church which takes constant heed of you from baptism or infancy, until we will not say confirmation, but through manhood and womanhood, until the end, should give the right tone to corporate life. Parents are fit instructors. No doubt we have parishes and even whole denominations in which the young people are taken hold of from first to last, but then it is by the clergy, teachers, class leaders, and so on, and all parents do not regard it as an unmixed blessing that the most serious part of their children's training should be undertaken by outsiders. The thing that seems most worthy of imitation in this Australian movement is that parents themselves are recognized as the fit instructors of their children in the best things, and that they are led to acknowledge some responsibility to the church with regard to the instruction they give. Report of a committee on the religious education of the upper and middle classes. But do we manage these things so well at home that we have no occasion to look about us for hints? It may be in the memories of some of us that in May 1889 a committee of the House of laymen for the province of Canterbury was appointed to examine into the religious education of the upper and middle classes. The committee considered that they might obtain a good basis for their investigations by examining into the religious knowledge of boys entering school. They sent a paper of inquiries to sixty-two headmasters, most of whom sent replies, and from these replies the committee were led to conclude that, quote, for the most part the standard of religious education attained by boys before going to school is far below what might be hoped or expected, and that even this standard, thus ascertained to be far too low, is deteriorating, and further that the chief cause of deterioration is considered to be the want of home teaching and religion, end quote. Why do parents neglect this duty? Here is a matter of grave consideration for us all. For though the investigation was conducted by churchmen, it naturally covered boys of various denominations attending public and middle class schools. The distinctive character of the religious education was the subject of separate inquiry. No doubt there are many beautiful exceptions, families brought up in quiet homes in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but if it is, as some of us fear, a fact that there is a tendency among parents of the middle and upper classes to let the religious education of their children take care of itself, it is worthwhile to ask what is the reason and what is the remedy. Many reasons are assigned for this alleged failure in parental duty. Social claims, the rest of temper of the young people, and their impatience of religious teaching, and much else. But these reasons are inadequate. Parents are, on the whole, very much alive to their responsibilities. Perhaps there has never been a generation more earnest and conscientious than the young parents of these days. All the same, these thoughtful young parents do not lay themselves out to teach their children religion before all things. Discredit thrown upon the Bible The fact is, our religious life has suffered and, by and by, our national character will suffer through the discredit thrown upon the Bible by adverse critics. We rightly regard the Bible as the entire collection of our sacred books. We have absolutely nothing to teach but what we find written therein. But we no longer go to the Bible with the old confidence. Our religion is fading into a sentiment, not easy to impart. We wait until the young people shall conceive it for themselves. Meantime we give them such aesthetic culture as should tend to develop those needs of the soul that find their satisfaction in worship. The whole superstructure of liberal religious thought is miserably shaky, and no wonder there is some shrinking from exposing it to the ethereals spear of the definite and searching young mind. For we love this flimsy habitation we have builded. It bears a shadowy resemblance to the old home of our souls, and we cling to it with a tender sentiment which the younger generation might not understand. Miracles do not happen. Are we then unhoused? Undoubtedly we are, upon one assumption. That assumption which it takes a brilliant novelist to put forth in its naked asperity. Miracles do not happen. The educated mind is more essentially logical than we are apt to suppose. Remove the keystone of miracle and the arch tumbles about our ears. The ostentatious veneration for the person of Christ, as separated from the mythical miraculous element, is alas no more than a spurious sentiment toward a self-evolved conception. Eliminate the miraculous and the whole fabric of Christianity disappears. And not only so, what have we to do with that older revelation of the Lord, the Lord, a God full of compassion and gracious? Do we say, nay, we keep this, here is no miracle, and of Christ, have we not the inimitable sermon on the mount, sufficient claim on our allegiance? No, we have not. Therein we are taught to pray, to consider the lilies of the field, the fowls of the air, and to remember that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. Here we have the doctrine of the personal dealing, the particular providence of God, which is of the very essence of miracle. If miracles do not happen, it is folly and presumption to expect in providence and invite in prayer the faintest disturbance of that course of events, which is fixed by inevitable law. The educated mind is severely logical, though an effort of the will may keep us from following out arch and creed. There are no conclusions to the bitter end. What have we left? A God who, of necessity, can have no personal dealings with you or me, for such dealings would be of the nature of a miracle. A God, prayer to whom, in the face of such certainty, becomes blasphemous. How dare we approach the highest with requests, which in the nature of things, as we conceive, it is impossible he should grant. Our conception of God depends upon miracles. We cannot pray, and we cannot trust. Maybe yet we are not utterly godless. We can admire, adore, worship in uttermost humility. But how? What shall we adore? The divine being can be known to us only through his attributes. He is a God of love and a God of justice, full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. But these are attributes which can only be conceived of as in action, from person to person. How be gracious and merciful, unless to a being in need of grace and mercy? Grant that grace and mercy may modify the slightest circumstance in a man's existence, spiritual or temporal, and you grant the whole question of miracles. Grant, that is, that it is possible to God to act otherwise than through such inevitable laws as we are able to recognize, refuse to concede the miraculous element, and the shepherd of Israel has departed from our midst. We left our orphaned in a world undone. Such and so great are the issues of that question of miracle with which we are fond of dallying, with a smile here and a shrug there, and a special sneer for that story of the swine that ran violently down a steep place, because we know so much about the dim thoughts of the brute creation living under our eyes indeed, but curiously out of our ken. Grant the possibility of miracles, that is, of the voluntary action of a personal God, and who will venture to assign limits of less or more. Natural law and miracles. How long halt we betwixt two opinions, to the law and to the testimony. Let us boldly accept the alternative which Hume proposes, however superciliously. Let it be that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. Even so, we believe that Christ rose again the third day and ascended into heaven, or we accept the far more incredible hypothesis that there is no God, or anyway the God of Revelation in his adorable personality has ceased to be for us. There is no middle way. Natural law, as we understand it, has nothing to do with these issues. Not that the Supreme abrogates his laws, but that our knowledge of natural law is so agonizingly limited and superficial that we are incompetent to decide whether a break in the narrow circle within which our knowledge is hemmed is or is not an opening into a wider circle, where what appears to us as an extraordinary exception does but exemplify the general rule. We would not undervalue the solid fruits of biblical criticism, even the most adverse. This should be a great gain in the spiritual life, that henceforth a miracle is accredited, not merely by the fact that it is recorded in the sacred history, but by its essential fitness with the divine character. Just as if we may reverently compare human things with divine, we say of a friend, oh he would never do that, or that is just like him. Tried by this test, how unaustentatious, simple, meekly, serviceable are the miracles of Christ, how utterly divine it is to have all power and be as having none. How fit are the miracles of Christ? The mind which is saturated with the Gospel story in all its sweet reasonableness, which has absorbed the more confused and broken rays wherein the light of the world is manifested in Old Testament story, will perhaps be the least tempted to the disloyalty of honest doubt. For disloyalty to the most close and sacred of all relationships it is, though we must freely concede that such doubt is the infirmity of noble minds. Believing that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, that the man is established in the Christian faith according as the child has been instructed, the question of questions for us is how to secure that the children shall be well grounded in the scriptures by their parents and shall pursue the study with intelligence, reverence and delight. Please visit LibriVox.org The Home Education Series Volume 2 Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason Chapter 11 Faith and Duty Reviews Parents as Teachers of Morals Laws of Nature and Ways of Men Education, properly understood, is the science of life, and every attempt to formulate this science is to be hailed with interest and with a measure of gratitude in proportion to its success. Thinking minds everywhere are engaged in furnishing their quota towards this great work in one or another of its aspects, physical, social, religious. We see at once the importance of every attempt to solve scientific and social problems or problems of faith as helping us to understand those laws of nature and ways of men, the love and dutiful attitude of the will towards which Mr. Huxley considers to be the sole practical outcome of education. Let us consider three important works on these lines. One deals with the problems of secular morality from an American point of view. The second with the whole problem of national education from a French and scientific standpoint. The third is not professedly an educational work. It deals with the ways of men, but with the ways of men as they are concerned with the ways and will of God. That is, it deals with the deep-seated springs out of which are the issues of life. As the true educationalist works from within outwards, he will probably find much aid in a work whose outlook on life is from the standpoint of faith. The Moral Instruction of Children Mr. Felix Adler, in The Moral Instruction of Children, undertakes a by no means easy task in setting himself to solve the problem of unsectarian moral instruction. He brings unusual qualifications to the work, a wide outlook, philosophic training, and that Catholic love of literature and knowledge of books which is essential to the teacher of morals. The work before us is one which should find a place on the educated parent's bookshelves, not perhaps to be swallowed whole as a complete guide, but to be studied with careful attention, and some freedom of choice as to which Council of Perfection is worthy to be acted upon, and which other Council may be rejected as not fitting in with that scheme of educational thought which the parent has already made for himself. Mr. Adler is most seriously handicapped at the outset. He writes for American schools in which the first condition of moral instruction is that it must be unsectarian. This, he, rightly or wrongly, interprets to exclude all theistic teaching whatever. That is to say, the child he writes for has no sanctions beyond those he finds in his own breast. For example, it is the business of the moral instructor in the school to deliver to his pupils the subject matter of morality, but not to deal with the sanctions of it. He says to the pupil, Thou shalt not lie. He takes it for granted that the pupil feels the force of this commandment and acknowledges that he ought to yield obedience to it. For my part I should suspect of quibbling and dishonest intention any boy or girl who would ask me, Why ought I not to lie? Why ought I not to lie? I should hold up before such a child the ought in all its awful majesty. The right to reason about these matters cannot be conceded until after the mind has attained a certain maturity. No infallible sense of ought. Where does the ought get its awful majesty? That there is in the human breast an infallible sense of ought is an error prolific of much evil. It is a common idea today that it is right to do that which the doer holds to be right, or, as it is popularly expressed, a man does all that can be expected of him when he acts according to his lights. Now a very slight acquaintance with history demonstrates that every persecution and most outrages, from the inquisition to thuggy, are the outcome of that same majesty of ought, as it makes its voice heard in the breast of an individual or of a community. To attempt to treat of morals without dealing with the sanctions of morality is to work from the circumference instead of from the center. Moses, Moses, und immer Moses says a German pedagogue of the modern school who writes an hot disdain of the old school system in which ten or twelve, and in some of the German states, fifteen or sixteen hours a week were devoted to Bible teaching. We in England and they in America also rebel against the Bible as a class book. Educationalists say there is so much else to be learned that this prolonged study of sacred literature is a grievous waste of time and many religious persons, on the other hand, object on the ground that it is not good to make the Bible common as a class book. The Bible, a classic literature. But it is singular that so few educationalists recognize that the Bible is not a single book, but a classic literature of wonderful beauty and interest, that apart from its divine sanctions and religious teaching, from all that we understand by revelation, the Bible as a mere instrument of education is, at the very least, as valuable as the classics of Greece or Rome. Here is poetry, the rhythm of which soothes even the jaded brain past taking pleasure in any other. Here is history, based on such broad, clear lines, such dealing of slow and sure and even handed justice to the nations, such stories of national sins and national repentances, that the student realizes, as from no other history, the solidarity of the race, the brotherhood, and if we may call it so, the individuality of the nations. Here is philosophy, which, of all the philosophies which have been propounded, is alone adequate to the interpretation of human life. We say not a word here of that which is the raison d'etat of the Bible, its teaching of religion, its revelation of God to man, but to urge only one point more, all the literatures of the world put together utterly fail to give us a system of ethics, in precept and example, motive and sanction, complete as that to which we have been born as our common inheritance in the Bible. The Bible Tabooed in Education For 1700 years, roughly speaking, the Bible has been the schoolbook of modern Europe. Its teaching conveyed directly or indirectly, more or less pure, has been the basis upon which the whole superstructure of not only religious but ethical and to some extent literary training rested. Now the Bible as a lesson book is tabooed and educationalists are called upon to produce what shall take its place in the origination of ideas and the formation of character. This is the task to which Mr. Adler sets himself and that he is at all successful is obviously due to the fact that his own mind is impregnated with the Bible lore and the sacred law which he does not feel himself at liberty to propound to his students. But this prepossession of the authors makes his work very helpful and suggestive to parents who desire to take the Bible as the groundwork and the sanction of that moral teaching which they are glad to supplement from other sources. May we recommend the following suggestion to parents? A Mother's Diary Parents and teachers should endeavor to answer such questions as these. When do the first stirrings of the moral sense appear in the child? How do they manifest themselves? What are the emotional and the intellectual equipments of the child at different periods? And how do these correspond with its moral outfit? At what time does conscience enter on the scene? To what acts or omissions does the child apply the terms right or wrong? If observations of this kind were made with care and duly recorded, the science of education would have at its disposal a considerable quantity of material from which no doubt valuable generalizations might be deduced. Every mother especially should keep a diary in which to note the successive phases of her child's physical, mental and moral growth with particular attention to the moral so that parents may be enabled to make a timely forecast of their children's character to foster in them every germ of good and by prompt precautions to suppress or at least restrain what is bad. Fairy Tales and How to Use Them We are glad to find that Mr. Adler reinstates fairy tales He says justly that much of the selfishness of the world is due not to actual hard-heartedness but to a lack of imaginative power and adds, I hold that something, nay much, has been gained if a child has learned to take the wishes out of its heart as it were and to project them on the screen of fancy. The German Mirhen holds the first place in his regard he says they represent the childhood of mankind and it is for this reason that they never cease to appeal to children. But how shall we handle these Mirhen and what method shall we employ in putting them to account for our special purpose? My first counsel is tell the story do not give it to the child to read the child, as it listens to the Mirhen looks up with wide-opened eyes to the face of the person who tells the story and thrills responsive to the touch of the earlier life of the race which thus falls upon its own that is, our author feels and rightly so that traditions should be orally delivered this is well worth noting his second counsel is equally important do not, he says, take the moral plum out of the fairytale pudding but let the child enjoy it as a whole treat the moral element as an incident emphasize it indeed but incidentally pluck it as a wayside flower Mr. Felix Adler's third counsel is to eliminate from the stories whatever is merely superstitious merely a relic of ancient animism and again whatever is objectionable on moral grounds in this connection he discusses the vexed question of how far we should acquaint children with the existence of evil in the world my own view, he says, is that we should speak in the child's hearing only of those lesser forms of evil, physical or moral with which it is already acquainted on this ground he would rule out all the cruel stepmother stories the unnatural father stories and so on though probably most of us would make an exception in favor of Cinderella and it's charming German rendering Ashen Brodel I'm inclined to think too that fairytales suffer in vigor and charm when they are prepared for the children and that Wordsworth is right in considering that the very knowledge of evil conveyed in fairytales under a certain glamour is of use in saving children from painful and injurious shocks in real life Fables Fables, according to our author, should form the basis of moral instruction at the second stage probably when children emerge from the nursery we have all grown up on Esop's fables and the dog in the manger, king log, the frog and the stork have passed into the current coinage of our thought but it is interesting to be reminded that the so-called Esop's fables are infinitely older than the famous Greek storyteller and are, for the most part, of Asiatic origin we are reminded that it is important to keep this origin of the fable before us and exercise discrimination in our choice of those which we use to convey moral ideas to our children such fables as the oak and the reed, the brazen and the earthen pot, the kite and the wolf Mr. Adler would reject as breathing of eastern subserviency and fear but possibly for the very reason that the British backbone is little disposed to bow before man or circumstances the lessons of life culled by people of other habits and other thoughts may be quite specially useful to the English child anyway, we should lose some of the most charming fables if we cut out all that savours of the wisdom of the east the fables Mr. Felix Adler specially commends are those which hold up virtue for our praise or evil for our censure such as cowardice, the fable of the stag and the fawn vanity, the peacock and the crane greediness, the dog and the shadow in the third part of our primary course he says we shall use selected stories from the classical literature of the Hebrews and later on from that of Greece particularly the Odyssey and the Iliad Bible stories here we begin to be at issue with our author we should not present Bible stories as carrying only the same moral sanction as the myths of ancient Greece neither should we defer their introduction until the child has gone through a moral course of fairy tales and a moral course of fables he should not be able to recall a time before the sweet stories of old filled his imagination he should have heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the evening should have been an odd spectator where the angels ascended and descended upon Jacob's stony pillow should have followed Christ through the cornfield on the Sabbath day and sat in the rows of the hungry multitudes so long ago that such sacred scenes form the unconscious background of his thoughts all things are possible to the little child and the touch of the spiritual upon our material world the difficult problems, the hard sayings which are in offence in the Bible sense of the word to his elders present no difficulties to the child's all embracing faith we should not say, far otherwise, that every Bible story is fit for children because it is a Bible story neither should we analyze too carefully nor draw hard and fast lines to distinguish what we should call history from that of which it may be said without a parable, spake he not unto them the child is not an exegetical student the moral teaching, the spiritual revelations the lovely imagery of the Bible are the things with which he is concerned and of these he cannot have too much as Mr. Adler says, the narrative of the Bible is saturated with the moral spirit the moral issues are everywhere to the forefront duty, guilt and its punishment the conflict of conscience with inclination are the leading themes the Hebrew people seem to have been endowed with what may be called a moral genius and especially did they emphasize the filial and fraternal duties now it is precisely these duties that must be impressed on young children let us see how our author would use the Bible narratives we have only space for a fragmentary sentence here and there once upon a time there were two children, Adam and Eve Adam was a fine and noble looking lad it was so warm that the children never needed to go indoors and the snake kept on whispering, just take one bite of it nobody sees you you Adam must learn to labor and you Eve to be patient and self denying for others etc we leave it to our readers to decide whether treatment improves the Bible narrative or whether this is the sort of thing to lay hold of a child's imagination the cadence of biblical phraseology charming to a child Mr. Ruskin tells us that his incomparable style is due entirely to his early familiarity with the Bible classics it is a mistake to translate Bible stories into slip-shod English even when the narrator keeps close to the facts of the narrative the rhythm and cadence of biblical phraseology is as charming to a child as to his elders if not more so read your Bible story to the child bit by bit get him to tell you in his own words keeping as close as he can to the Bible words what you have read and then if you like talk about it but not much above all do not let us attempt a practical commentary on every verse in Genesis to quote the title of a work lately published two points it seems worthwhile to dwell upon here shall the stories of miracles be used in moral instruction? is it advisable to tell children the stories of the Bible miracles in an age when the possibility of miracles is so hotly discussed in the first place all that the most advanced scientists have to urge against miracles is that precisely such phenomena have not come under their personal notice but they before all people are open to admit that nothing is impossible and that no experience is final in the second place as for the moral and spiritual instruction which the story of the miracle affords it is immaterial whether in the particular case in question a historical fact is recorded or whether in this case also it is true that without a parable spake he not unto them it is the essential not the historical truth of the story which matters to the child as for the latter he is a bold critic and well in advance of the scientific knowledge of the day who ventures to say this is possible that other is impossible should the whole Bible be put into the hands of a child the second point worthy of our attention in regard to Bible teaching is is the Bible to be taken whole and undivided or to be delved out to children as they are able to bear it there are recitals in the Bible which we certainly should not put into the hands of children in any other book we should do well to ask ourselves gravely if we have any warrant for supposing that our children will be shielded from the suggestions of evil which we deliberately lay before them if there is any divine law requiring that the whole Bible which is not only the word of God but is also a collection of the legal, literary, historical, poetical, philosophical, ethical and polemical writings of a nation should be placed all together and all at once in the hands of a curious child as soon as he is able to read when will our superstitious reverence for the mere letter of the scriptures allow us to break the Bible up to be read as all other literature is in separate books and for the children anyway those passages expunged which are not fit for their reading and even those which are perfectly uninteresting as for example long genealogies how delightful it would be that each birthday should bring with it a gift of a new book of the Bible progressing in difficulty from year to year beautifully bound and illustrated and printed in clear inviting type and on good paper one can imagine the Christian child collecting his library of sacred books with great joy and interest and making a diligent and delighted study of the volume for the year and its appointed time the next best thing perhaps is to read bit by bit of the Old Testament anyway to the children as beautifully as may be requiring them to tell the story after listening as nearly in the Bible words as they can Moral Rules from the Pentateuch but to return to Mr. Adler here is a valuable suggestion children should be taught to observe moral pictures before any attempt is made to deduce moral principles but certain simple rules should be given to the very young must indeed be given them for their guidance now in the legislation ascribed to Moses we find a number of rules fit for children and a collection of these rules might be made for the use of schools such as he shall not lie he shall not deceive one another he shall take no bribe thou shalt not go about as a tale bearer among thy fellows and so on a very useful collection of 16 rules by way of specimen further on we read the story of David's life is replete with dramatic interest it may be arranged in a series of pictures first picture David and Goliath i.e. skill pitted against brute strength or the deserved punishment of a bully conceive the barren common self complete and self complacent product of moral teaching on this level the Odyssey and the Iliad in his treatment of the Odyssey and the Iliad Mr. Adler makes some good points my father anxious that I should become a good man made me learn all the poems of Homer Xenophon makes one of his characters say and here we have suggestive lines as to how the great epics may be used for example of life and instruction and manners what's so inspiring is the story of Ulysses to the boy in search of adventures and what greater stimulus to courage prudence presence of mind than in the escapes of the hero Ulysses is the type of sagacity as well as of bravery his mind teams with inventions the ethical elements of the Odyssey are said to be conjugal affection filial conduct telemicus presence of mind and veneration shown to grandparents laertes friendly relations with dependence might have been added as illustrated by the lovely story of the nurse Euraclia recognizing Ulysses when his wife sat by with stony face friendship again and the story of Achilles grief for patroclus the initial weakness of secular morality Mr. Adler treats the Homeric stories with more grace and sympathy and with less ruthless violation than he meets out to those of the Bible but here again we trace the initial weakness of secular morality the Odyssey and the Iliad are religious poems or they are nothing the whole motive is religious every incident is supernaturally directed the heroic inspiration is entirely wanting if we fail to bear in mind that the characters do and suffer with superlative courage and fortitude only because they willed to do and suffer in all things the will of the gods the acquiescence of the will with that which they guessed however darkly of the divine will is the truly inspiring quality of the Homeric heroes and here as much as in the teaching of Bible morality secular ethics are at fault the third section of Mr. Adler's work consists of lessons on duty here again we have excellent councils and delightful illustrations the teacher should always take the moral habit for granted he should never give his pupils to understand that he and they are about to examine whether for instance it is wrong or not to lie the commandment against lying is assumed and its obligation acknowledged at the outset this we heartily agree with and especially we like the apparently inadvertent use of the word commandment which concedes the whole question at issue that is that the idea of duty is a relative one depending on an authority supreme and intimate which embraces the thoughts of the heart and the issues of the life a child's inducements to learn the story of Hillel as illustrating the duty of acquiring knowledge is very charming and is deeply interesting to the psychologist as illustrating that a naturally implanted desire for knowledge is one of the springs of action in the human breast the motives proposed for seeking knowledge are poor and inadequate to succeed in life to gain a steam to satisfy yourself and even to be able possibly to benefit others are by no means soul compelling motives the child who is encouraged to learn because to learn is his particular duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call him has the strongest of conceivable motives in the sense that he is rendering that which is required of him by the supreme authority this one note of feebleness runs through the whole treatment of the subject the drowning man is supposed to counsel himself to be brave be brave because as a human being you are superior to the forces of nature because there is something in you your moral self over which the forces of nature have no power because what happens to you in your private character is not important but it is important that you assert the dignity of humanity to the last breath this reads rather well but how much finer is the attitude of the man who struggles manfully to save the life that God has given him moral value of manual training the chapter on the influence of manual training is well worthy of consideration the concluding sentence runs it is a cheering and encouraging thought that technical labour which is the source of our material aggrandisement may also become when employed in the education of the young the means of enlarging their manhood quickening their intellect and strengthening their character I have taken up Mr. Adler's work so fully because it is one of the most serious and successful attempts with which I am acquainted to present a graduated course of ethics suitable for children of all ages though I am at issue with the author on the all important point of moral sanctions I commend the work to the perusal of parents the Christian parent will assuredly present the thought of law in connection with a law giver and will supplement the thousand valuable suggestions he will find here with his own strong conviction that ought is of the Lord God slip-shod moral teaching but even the Christian child suffers from what may be called slip-shod moral teaching the failings of the good are a source of sorrow and surprise to the moralist as well as to the much endeavouring and often failing Christian soul that temptation and sin are inseparable from our present condition may be allowed but that an earnest and sincere Christian should be habitually guilty of failing in candour frankness, justice to the characters and opinions of others should be intemperate and censure and, dare we say it, spiteful in criticism is possibly to be traced not to fallible human nature but to defective education importance of ethical instruction the ethical idea has never been fairly and fully presented to the mind on these vulnerable points the man is unable to give due weight to the opinions of another because the child has not been instructed in the duty of candour there is little doubt that careful, methodical, ethical instruction with abundant illustration and we need not add inspired by the thought God wills it should, if such instruction could be made general have an appreciable effect in elevating the national character therefore we hail with gratitude such a contribution to the practical ethics of the nursery in the schoolroom as Mr. Adler's work on the moral instruction of children End of Chapter 11