Children

“ How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. ”

“ Children are our hope and our inspiration. For every finger painting that graces our kitchen walls, for every ball game that fills our streets and playgrounds with laughter, we join today in celebrating the many blessings our children bring. ”

“ Parents, teachers, but preferably the school physician, should begin with children of six a clean initiation into these mysteries—absorbing even to youngsters of that tender age—to replace the hitherto regnant nasty one wrought by child lore handed down, from mouth to mouth, through the centuries, and characterized by unprintable words, in uttering, seeing, and hearing which numerous children seem to take delight. ”

“ Children, abstracted from the homely details of their management, and the anxiety which they always occasion, are a delightful study—a study, I maintain, fitted alike to engage the speculations of the philosophic, and the affections of the benevolent, mind. I cannot, I must say, form the idea of a man of extended views and sympathies, who does not like children. ”

“ I leave to children, inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely, according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. ”

“ I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful text-books and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the paths of learning. ”

“ Thou seest old and young children, nothing else. And in whom Thou hast more joy, Thy Son announced ages ago. But people believe in Him and do not hear Him—that, too, is an old trouble, and they model their children after themselves. ”

“ All about we see and feel the utter indifference of parents to what their children are reading, or whether they are reading at all, and the results of this indifference appear on every hand, in the character of the books which content the child, or in his determination to bury himself in a book to the exclusion of every other interest. ”

“ Children all the world over laugh and weep, quarrel and make up, play hard, and eat heartily, love and try their mammas, pet and tease their little brothers and sisters,—are a sweet care and a dear perplexity, and are God's little folk, all of them. ”

“ I must not forget the juvenile readers, school-boys and school- girls, and the children from the stores and offices about town. These latter are smart, bright, active little bodies, often more in earnest than their more fortunate fellows of the same age. They are an object of special solicitude and care. The school children come for points in reading for their compositions and for parallel reading with their lessons in school; and such books are suggested as may be found useful. The two most available faculties in children to work upon are the heart and the imagination. ”

“ I had long been troubled about the little children in school—the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and physical—the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child. ”

“ So of education, we begin to ask, Is its work so purely formative as we thought? Is it directly formative at all? How much is there in this pleasing and easy doctrine, that the drawing forth and strengthening and directing of the several “faculties” is education? Parents are very jealous over the individuality of their children; they mistrust the tendency to develop all on the same plan ”

“ I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a child. ”

“ We endeavour that all our teaching and treatment of children shall be on the lines of nature, their nature and ours, for we do not recognise what is called 'Child-nature.' We believe that children are human beings at their best and sweetest, but also at their weakest and least wise. ”

“ Children who are taught too plainly, by every anxious look and word of their parents, by every family arrangement, by the impressment of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. ”

“ "Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?" ”

“ If an inborn love of children and of school-keeping are qualifications for judging of the best means of educating them, I may claim to have known something of the theory and practice best adapted to that end. ”

“ Now, the ‘New Education’ deals entirely with individuals; not with children, but with the child; the faulty habit is supplanted, observe the word, the desirable habit produced, within a definite period, say a month or so, and then the parents’ easy work is to keep the child upon the lines of habit thus produced. ”

“ It strikes the keynote for the training of children. In proportion as our training tends to develop the subjective principle, it tends to place our children on a lower level of purpose, character, and usefulness throughout their lives: while so far as we develop the objective principle, with which the children are born, we make them capable of love, service, heroism, worship. ”

“ Children live, in a great measure, from the earliest age in an ideal world—their pains and their pleasures, their joys and their fears being, to a vast extent, the concomitants of phantasms and illusions having often the slightest bond of connection with the realities around them. ”

“ We must likewise attend to the early education of our children. It is during infancy and childhood that our heads are filled with "nursery tales" and marvellous stories. They are told us by those to whose care we are early intrusted, either to frighten us into obedience, to gratify our thirst for the new and wonderful, or to while away a tedious evening. ”

“ Don’t I know that every mother of a first child is infallible, and knows more about children than all the old doctors in creation? But, supposing you had asked me, I should have said—Get him each day to occupy himself a little longer with one plaything than he did the day before. ”

“ And if we can once seriously resolve to employ this Term so critical to Children, solely to their Advantage, Authority will thenceforward become useless: it’s Terrors will vanish, and be wholly absorbed in the united Considerations of the Parent, the Friend, and the Companion: in a Word, our Children well conducted to this Age will afterwards take as much Pains to make us happy, as we have done to make them wise. ”

“ The Cry of the Children
[On the subject of infant education it has been suggested that more advantageous results might be obtained if, instead of filling children’s minds with such nonsense as fairy-tales, stories were read to them about Julius Cæsar.]
O my Brothers, do you hear the children weeping?
Do you note the teardrops tumbling from their eyes?
To the school-house they reluctantly are creeping, [Pg 64]
Discontented with the teaching it supplies. ”

“ At the present moment not less than ten thousand children of thinking, educated parents, are being brought up, more or less consciously and definitely, upon the line of the Union. Parents who read the Parents’ Review, or other literature of the Society, parents who belong to our various branches, or our other agencies, parents who are influenced by these parents, are becoming multitudinous; and all have one note in common,—the ardour of persons working out inspiring ideas. ”

“ To which we merely rejoin, "Does she?" We know that the household industries are carried on in some fashion; and that children grow up amid them (such of them as do not die) , and are—when grown—the kind of people we see about us. ”

“ This may be often observed in little boys and girls of kindergarten age, when telling their experiences to older persons, or when playing among themselves. The freedom, activity, and vivacity of children is, indeed, in strong contrast to the apathetic, expressionless, monotonous style of many grown people, including teachers. ”

“ Now the tendency of children is to be altogether objective, not at all subjective, and perhaps that is why they are said to be first in the kingdom of heaven. This philosophic distinction is not one which we can put aside as having no bearing on everyday life. ”

“ Look carefully after the education of your children. Remember that the picture-book, the nursery-song, the evening prayer, the family music, the walk, the ride, the hasty word, the thoughtful counsel, are all helping to educate your child. ”

“ We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us? ”

“ It cannot be too strongly urged that our education of children will depend, nolens volens, upon the conception we form of them. If we regard them as instruments fit and capable for the carrying out of the Divine purpose in the progress of the world, we shall endeavour to discern the signs of the times, perceive in what directions we are being led, and prepare the children to carry forward the work of the world, by giving them vitalising ideas concerning, at any rate, some departments of that work. ”

“ We begin by believing in the children as spiritual beings of unmeasured powers—intellectual, moral, spiritual—capable of receiving and constantly enjoying intuitions from, the intimate converse of, the divine Spirit. With this thought of a child to begin with, we shall perceive that whatever is stale and flat and dull to us must needs be stale and flat and dull to him, and also that there is no subject which has not a fresh and living way of approach. Are we teaching geography? ”

“ In the case of children, perhaps the principal constituents of the concept are supplied by their outward appearance and environment. When a child speaks of itself, it thinks primarily of its body, especially its face, then of the clothes it usually wears, the house it lives in, the streets through which it habitually walks, its parents, brothers, sisters, school-masters, etc. ”

“ Besides, “little children are as arrows in the hands of the giant, and blessed is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” That is to say, children, if they bring their cares, bring also their pleasures and solid advantages. ”

“ Dr Arnold’s Knowledge as a Child.—​On the whole, the children who grow up amongst their elders and are not provided with what are called children’s books at all, fare the better on what they are able to glean for themselves from the literature of grown-up people. ”

“ My leading impression is that the children in this country are better educated than the adults. The position of a child is, on the whole, one of great distinction. There is a popular ballad of which the refrain, if I am not mistaken, is "Make me a child again, just for to-night!" ”

“ If one is addressing a large number of children, the homes from which they come must be considered. Children of refined, cultivated parents, who have listened to family conversation, who have been talked to and encouraged to express themselves,—these are able to understand much more lofty themes than the poor little mites who are only familiar with plain, practical ideas, and rough speech confined to the most ordinary wants of life. ”

“ Many parents neglect the training of their children until the boys and girls have grown to be almost men and women, and then they expect all at once to develop them into well-rounded characters, as if by magic. ”

“ There are, for example, two arts which children have to learn, in the process of their mental and physical development, in which their faults, errors, and deficiencies are never pointed out, but in the dealings of their parents with them all is commendation and encouragement. ”

“ Some of you, I daresay, are unconscious of this latent power. We don't expect much of a child, do we? A child eats and plays and sleeps. But children of the tenderest years have performed amazing, incredible deeds. ”

“ But children heed no minor distinctions; to them, the inhabited world is composed of the two main divisions: children and upgrown people; the latter being in no way superior to the former—only hopelessly different. ”

“ For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. ”

“ Above these dusky star-eyed children,—
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living—
And I crooned:
"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair ”

“ Education begins its work with the first breath of life. —Jean Paul.
61. Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character.—Ballou.
62. Eet maar Brod, dann wardst du grôt. [Eat bread and you'll grow.] —Frisian.
63. Ein Kind, kein Kind, zwei Kind, Spielkind, drei Kind, viel Kind, vier Kind, ein ganzes Hausvoll Kinder. [One child, no child; two children, playing children; three children, many children; four children, a whole house full of children.] —German (with numerous variants) . ”