The importance of exercise in the open air, and abstemiousness in diet, is
proven from the health of those nations that train their children in all
the exercise of riding, leaping, running and fencing, and subject them from
infancy to the most frugal diet. Thus the perfect forms and vigorous health
of the Greeks, the Romans and Persians were the fruit of national attention
paid to physical education. Every home should have its suitable gymnasium.
How many parents, by their violation of the laws of health, prostitute the
strength of their children to profligacy and indolence.
Home-education must be intellectual. Much of human character and happiness
depends upon the education of the mind, both as respects the development of
its faculties and the application of legitimate truth. The mind is the man.
It is not, as Locke declares, like a blank sheet of paper or a chest of
drawers; but has an intuitional as well as a logical consciousness, innate
ideas as well as capacities of receiving truth; while all its faculties
involve a unity, and exist in the child in a state of involution; the abuse
and neglect of one of which will have their bearing upon all the rest; and
the mind without proper culture in its undeveloped state in the child, will
show the symptoms of its abuse in the man. The character of the mind in the
man will indicate the character of its education in the child.
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