The Price of Vigilance: Lessons on Parenting and Education

The proper exhibition of parental love, deep and lasting as life, unmarred by any unwholesome environment, is the most exalted trait of human character. Guided by reason and restrained by judgment, it enables its possessor to so train the plastic mind of youth that the gray hairs of age will never be brought down to the grave with sorrow. But, says a not overly fond mother, 'they are a great responsibility—an incessant care—and a terrible trial to practice too, sometimes.' That may be true. All of us have been that to somebody.

We often misapply the term education. We limit it to the time when the child is placed in the schoolroom. That period is so short, stultified, and broken, so rinsed with labor, care, and toil as to affect the child's life but little. Home influences are always more potent than those of the schoolroom. Let no parent, if they find their children inclined to imitate the snowball and start down life’s incline towards the canyon of moral death instead of up the sunlight summits, expect the teacher’s hand alone can save. It requires the united efforts of both, constantly applied.

At what age should children enter school? The old rule, of packing them off to a rickety schoolhouse as soon as they can talk plainly, where they will be cooped, crowded, and packed on wooden benches for six hours like sardines in a box, just to get them out from underfoot at home, is an abominable disgrace. If the child is slow, dull, or brain-inactive, the sooner he goes to the schoolroom to reap the benefit of older children, the better. But the truth is, nearly all children are dull; the animal predominates at birth and develops more rapidly than the intellectual. Teach them to think. Let them understand that truth is the power that is to develop them into men and women. Then, watch, study, and know children, so that we may become the proper tutors of our children.