Upbringing

“ Returning from voluntary exile, to my father's house, not as a prodigal son, to make confession of sins, or of wasted patrimony or of wasted life, but to gain impressions from early places, where any boy gets the most important part of his education, seeing that it is in our youth that we lay the foundation of whatever character, position, or usefulness we later attain, I was most deeply stirred at those places that directly touch my interior life. ”

“ Therefore it is not wonderful that you, endowed as you were with all the qualities of a good child, with obedience, innocence, love of learning, modesty, and with harmless merriment, should have been the joy and delight of your parents and teachers, a spectacle to God, to angels, and to men! Yes, fair and golden were the days of your first youth, which you spent under the parental roof, beneath an unclouded sky. ”

“ Do ye greater than we have done! The young just coming into your homes seem to say: Instruct us to be nobler than yourselves! Your life is the answer to your children and your sires. The next generation will be as you make it. ”

“ Beginning by reviewing his ancestry and environment, he also tries to recapture some of those earliest, evanescent sense experiences and memories of childhood. He peers into that mysterious borderland between childhood and youth; surveys the formative influences, the outstanding events, the proclivities, longings, aspirations, achievements, struggles, temptations, successes, defeats—reviews them all, tries to estimate their influence, and to recognize their possible reappearance, in other guises perhaps, in his present self. ”

“ And we, embracing within our little selves (as did the tusk whence that ball was cut) countless conflicting forces, the inextricably intermingled traits, that is, of numberless ancestors,—fashioned, too, by the loving hands of father, mother, brother, sister, teacher; we spin forth on the journey of life. ”

“ Every child is born with a natural temperament or disposition, which is the product of two elementary factors. (1) Inheritance—those qualities which are transmitted by nature from one’s ancestors and (2) maternal impression—the impression made upon the plastic brain of the foetus. The first comes from generations of ancestry, whereas the last is entirely dependent upon the mother; the influence of what she sees, what she hears and what she thinks. These qualities combine for good or for bad, to influence the life of the child. ”

“ Construction of Ideals.—The construction of such ideals through example, through precept, through appeal and through actual practise in self-denial and self-control on the part of the child, should be the foremost duty of the parent or teacher. Above all it should be remembered that imitation of teacher, of parents, of companions, is more of a factor than intellect in the moral action of children. ”

“ The love, joy, and peace which give glory to maturity and old age grow alone out of thought upon true and pure and lovely things and those of good report.
(3) Development specialized, not general. Out of the many calls and lines of interest, each life has made choice of one or more, according to taste and circumstances. Along these lines growth and development proceed. It is not that life could not continue [Pg 176] the many-sided expansion of adolescence, but growth demands nourishment, development demands activity. ”

“ When once it is admitted that education, a long, watchful, laborious training, is indispensable in order to call forth and perfect in the child the development of aptitudes and of mental qualities, we must conclude that heredity acts only a secondary part in the wonderful genesis of the moral individual. ”

“ 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 parents' 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 ”

“ In a generation bred on these principles—a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born—there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen. ”

“ It had been all my study to take care of our little ones, and try to teach them those principles which would prepare them for usefulness in this life, and to meet their father in eternity, so that we might be an unbroken family in the future state of existence. ”

“ The formation of the will and heart and character, the formation of a man, is education, and not the reading, and the writing, and the spelling, and the summing. Physiology, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, and all other sciences with sounding names, and of Greek etymology, will not teach our children the respect, love, and obedience due to parents. ”

“ In a little while there are eyes full of interest and clutching hands full of purpose, smiles and frowns, the babbling beginning of expression and affections and aversions. Before the first year is out there is obedience and rebellion, choice and self-control, speech has commenced, and the struggle of the newcomer to stand on his feet in this world of men. ”

“ For those of us who are of mature years the gap is bridged by the tender associations of our childhood and the memory of parents, for whom no such gap existed, and whose faith and character have left indelible impressions on our lives. ”

“ What a sense of delicious responsibility fills the parents' hearts as they realize that in their hands and under their influence is to be molded a character, that they are the ones to carefully watch the unfolding of a human life, the development of a human soul. ”

“ I thought you conceived of education as growing-up.”
Growing up, yes—out of the helplessness, the fear, the misery of childhood, which come only from weakness and ignorance: growing up into knowledge and power. ”

“ Let that portion of the brain whose functions pertain to the family relation, and to domestic life, fail in proper development and healthy action, and supreme attention be given to the culture of the intellect and moral sentiment, and, in process of time, its effects on character will become very manifest. ”

“ Upon the growing boy.”
6 The little child, in his father’s house and under his father’s care, feels the stir of newborn gregarious instincts, and takes his first steps into the larger life of the world. Boyhood proper begins with the rise of impulses which make us citizens and lead us to take care of ourselves; and it ends with the rise of impulses which make us heads of families and lead us to take care of other people. Each step is an enlargement of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our children must go through all the labor of learning to read, write, spell, add, multiply, subtract, and divide, which we went through. Moral traits, manners and customs, and other habits and ideals of social importance must be acquired by each successive generation. ”

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ He had a large family, and as he took considerable pains with the education of his children, and set before them an example worthy of their imitation, he had the pleasure of seeing them growing up, esteemed and respected, bidding fair to be the ornaments of a future generation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rising generation is in your hands, you can fashion them in your image, you will, you must do this. Great duties will devolve on these children when grown up to be men; you are to fit them for these duties. ”

“ Youth, Manhood, and Age. In Youth, as Entered Apprentices, we ought industriously to occupy our minds in the attainment of useful knowledge; in Manhood, as Fellow Crafts, we should apply our knowledge to the discharge of our respective duties to God, our neighbor, and ourselves; so that in Age, as Master Masons, we may enjoy the happy reflections consequent on a well-spent life, and die in the hope of a glorious immortality. ”

“ What do you suppose, in the course of three or four generations, produces men of different mental and physical calibre? I will tell you. The circumstances of their bringing-up, the life they have to lead, their education, their environment. ”

“ Education, discipline, culture, the habits and surroundings of life through generations, to some extent, at least, determine the inherited intellectual and moral qualities of individuals, families and races. The colored youth begins life without the inherited qualities which can come only through generations of civilization. ”

“ We must follow him in his progress through the different stages of society, as he gradually advances from the infant state of civil life towards its maturity and decline. We must observe at each period, how the faculties of his understanding unfold; we must attend to the efforts of his active powers, watch the various movements of desire and affection as they rise in his breast, and mark whither they tend, and with what ardour they are exerted. ”

“ What the next generation will be depends upon the physical, mental, and moral training of the children of to-day. These children are the to-morrow of society. Are they to be puny and dyspeptic, fretting and worrying through life as through a task? ”

“ Whether as bearing on the happiness of parents themselves, or whether as affecting the characters and lives of their children and remote descendants, we must admit that a knowledge of the right methods of juvenile culture, physical, intellectual, and moral, is a knowledge of extreme importance. ”

“ Mankind may be considered in a four-fold degree, his childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. His childhood and his youth may be considered from his birth till forty years of age. Within this compass of time, after he is weaned from his mother, his parents shall teach him a civil and humble 215 behaviour towards all men. ”

“ And as, in our first years, playing and learning, growth and education, had been quite common to both of us, so that we might well have been taken for twins, so did this community, this confidence, remain during the development of our physical and moral powers. ”

“ Perhaps the absence of great physical strength prompted reliance on wits; the prolongation of infancy would help to educate the parents in gentleness; the strengthening of the feeling of kinship would favour the evolution of family and social life--of which there are many anticipations at lower levels. ”

“ In the transition forms of his offspring, which link infancy with manhood, the parent will recognise the progress of his mortal career, and in the successive phases which mark the sunset of life, the stripling in his turn will read the lesson that his pilgrimage too has a term which must close. ”

“ We have seen the accumulating intelligence lengthen the period of infancy, and thus prolong the relations of loving sympathy between mother and child; we have seen the human family and human society thus brought into existence ”

“ It must be the general conviction that the new instincts, the new feelings, the new thoughts, the new ideas, which mothers and fathers pass on into the flesh and blood of their children, will transform existence. ”

“ But that which transpires during the period between conception and birth, as the foundation of character in the future man or woman, as an index to their thoughts, feelings, plans, motives, actions, to their virtues and vices, to successes and failures in life’s conflict, has been entirely overlooked by biographers and historians, by poets and novelists, in their efforts to delineate human life as manifested in individuals, or in civil and ecclesiastical combinations. ”

“ In this fact we find the truth of our Lord's words verified: "The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." The word generation in this place means state or condition from which proceeds a given manner of life, and daily attention to business. ”

“ Here again it is essential to commence to instil the principles which form a disciplined mind as early as possible in the boy’s early youth. Self-denial, obedience to the orders of their superiors, and respect and affection for their elders, are perhaps the most important of these principles. ”

“ The birth of this all-powerful being, his manifestation as an infant, his nurture and education through all the succeeding periods of childhood and of boyhood, constituted the grand mystery of the entire system. ”

“ Now imagine that the youth has become a father, and has a son who is exposed to the same temptations, and has companions who lead him into every sort of iniquity, and parents and friends who try to keep him right. ”

“ 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. ”