"Would you your son should be a sot and a dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once?
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise."
Too often is it the case that the artifices and refinements of our
fashionable boarding-schools, have a most withering influence upon body,
mind and soul, enfeebling and distorting the body, producing depraved
stomachs, whimsical nerves, peevish tempers, indolent minds, and depraved
morals. They become but wrecks of what they were when they first entered
the school. This has been called "the stiff and starched system of muslin
education," and is the nursery of pale, sickly, listless, peevish children.
But this is not the only abuse of home-education. Even when the training is
begun at home, the very idea of education is often abused, because
inefficient, destitute of true moral elements, and partial both as to the
mode and as to the substance of it. The true resources of life are not
developed; there is no instruction given in the principles and conditions
of temporal and eternal well-being; there is no discipline of the mind, or
body or morals. But the great idea and aim of education with many parents
now, is to teach the child to read and write and cipher as a means of
making money and getting along in this world,--not, of course, to prevent
them from cheating others, but others from cheating them.
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