Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt:...the influence of contrary circumstances, your child will feel the good effects of them, for the later and the less will he go into what is wrong. Let us also be assured that the business of education, properly so called, is not transferable. You may engage masters to instruct your child in this or the other accomplishment, but you must educate him yourself. You not only ought to do it, but you must do it, whether you intend it or no. As education is a thing necessary for all,--for the poor and for the rich, for the illiterate as well as for the learned,--Providence has not made it dependent upon systems uncertain, operose, and difficult of investigation. It is not necessary, with Rousseau or Madame Genlis, to devote to the education of one child the talents and the time of a number of grown men; to surround him with an artificial world; and to counteract, by maxims, the natural tendencies of the situation he is placed in, in society. Every one has time to educate his child: the poor man educates him while working in his cottage; the man of business while employed in his counting-house. Do we see a father who is diligent in his profession, domestic in his habits, whose house is the resort of well-informed, intelligent people,----a mother whose time is usefully filled, whose attention to her duties secures esteem, and whose amiable manners attract affection? Do not be solicitous, respectable couple, about the moral education of your offspring; do not be uneasy because you cannot surround them with the apparatus of books and systems, or fancy you must retire from the world to devote yourselves to their improvement. In your world they are brought up mi1ch better than they could be under any plan of factitious education which you could provide...