The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.
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.
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.
Every walk should offer some knotty problem for the children to think out-“Why does that leaf float on the water, and this pebble sink?” and so on.
There is no education but self-education.
For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.
The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.
The problem before the educator is to give the child control over his own nature, to enable him to hold himself in hand as much in regard to the traits we call good, as to those we call evil:.