E. Seguin

“ From this standpoint we consider European children as in four groups: those who receive no education; those who do not receive the education they need; those who receive an education which disqualifies them for work; and those whose education prepares them for work. From another point of view we saw that the European children enter the school younger, are trained longer, and are advanced further, than the Americans. ”

“ Little ones have an instinctive horror of isolation. Whoever studies them knows that when they awake they look not, at first, with staring eyes, but with searching hands; they seek not for sights, but for contacts. This love of contact, whence results the primary education of the most general sense, the touch, is ill-satisfied with the uniformity of the materials at hand, as exemplified at Vienna or Paris. ”

“ For instance, when a mother has lulled her home-sorrows with strains of soothing music, her child, too often an idiot, shows wonderful musical proclivities amid the wreck of all the other faculties of his mind. ”

“ Let us bear in mind that the rich man can never flatter himself that he does a gratuitous charity, since from its poor recipient comes many times its worth in useful experience, directly benefiting the would-be benefactor. ”

“ Priests pretend to teach them to think, yet care only to impose upon them a belief which implies obedience to their craft; Kaisers claim their direction, not to elevate them, but to put them among their droves of subjects; bourgeois and manufacturers give them a minimum of instruction, just sufficient to insure their working dependence, and to qualify their own sons to be fed at the public expense; while the working-men themselves—demoralized by such examples—put their apprentices at menial employment, and cheat them out of their rightful technical training. ”

“ But as soon as the nursling awakes to the world, and wants to be introduced to everything, his couch must be enlarged and enlivened, and must look more and more like a school and play-room. Otherwise it becomes a prison, whence, Tantalus-like, baby looks at his surroundings. ”

“ We do not overlook the fact that many mothers, particularly among those both educated and fruitful, pay the closest attention to these questions, and become expert therein, but, as they lack the means of record and transmission of their observations, their experience dies, so to speak, with each generation. ”

“ Therefore, if it is noble work to educate or to cure the insane, the idiot, the hemiplegic, the epileptic, and the choreic, how much higher is the work of preventing these degeneracies in the incipient being, by averting those commotions which storm him in the holy region intended for a terrestrial paradise during the period of evolution! ”

“ When planning it, a mother must remember that the fixity of the eye upon any object—particularly upon a bright one, and more so if that object is situated upward and sideways from the ordinary range of vision—and through the eye the fixedness of the mind while the body is in a state of repose, constitute a concurrence of conditions eminently favorable to the production of hypnotism, and its terrible sequels, strabismus and convulsions. ”

“ Psychologically viewed, the decoration of the cradle is of equal moment. To surround an infant with highly wrought or colored figures, often grotesque, or at least untrue to Nature, may, by day, attract more attention than his faculties of perception can safely bestow ”

“ TO educate children for themselves is rare in Europe, and is considered rather quixotic. The youth of the people are merchantable commodities, soon to be credited to the party which puts its stamp upon them. ”

“ Hence the nursing of babies continues to be a work of devotion, but does not become the coordinated and progressive art it ought to be in well-organized crèches open to criticism in public exhibitions. ”

“ The head is bent, the extremities are drawn up, and the body shaped like a crescent. This attitude gives to the muscles the greatest relaxation, and to the cartilages, which cap the bones, the position most favorable to nutrition and growth. Generally, the baby rests on the right side, to free the heart from pressure and to facilitate its movements. ”