Authority is just and faithful in all matters of promise-keeping; it is also considerate, and that is why a good mother is the best home-ruler.
In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin, and that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food.
Let children feed on the good, the excellent, the great! Don’t get in their way with little lectures, facts, and guided tours!
Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.
Wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education.
A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present – present now at this very moment – not to be educed after many years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator.
Let the parent ask “Why?” and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him – and he will remember it – the reason why.
The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.
So much for the right books; the right use of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea.
Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.
Profound thought is conveyed in language of very great simplicity and purity.
Every person exceeds our power of measurement.
Composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books.
Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.
A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.
The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and furnish the imagination with pictures.
We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.
We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.