Household Education

Household education is a subject so important in its bearings on every one's happiness, and so inexhaustible in itself, that I do not see how any person whatever can undertake t...

Every home being a school for old and young together, it is necessary, if the training is to be a good one, to be clear as to what the schooling is for.

I speak of those powers only which are the object of education. There are some which work of themselves for the preservation of life, and with which we have nothing to do but to...

Whatever method parents may choose for educating a child, they must have some idea in their minds of what they would have him turn out. Even if they set before them the highest...

It is a large subject that we have to treat;--that of household education; for the main part of every process of education is carried on at home, except in the instance of board...

We may be perverse in our notions, and mistaken in our ways; but there are some great natural blessings which we cannot refuse. I reckon it a great natural blessing that the mai...

Here is a little creature containing within itself the germs of all those powers which have before been described; but with all these powers in so feeble a state that months and...

While the bodily powers of the infant are nourished and preserved by observing Nature, as pointed out in the last chapter, the powers of the mind are growing from day to day. Wh...

What is stronger in an infant than its capacity for Hope and Fear? In its earliest and most unconscious stages of emotion, how its little limbs quiver, and its countenance light...

There is nothing in which children differ more than in their capacity for Fear. But every child has it more or less,--or ought to have it: for nothing can be made of a human bei...

Some may be surprised to find Patience spoken of among the Powers of Man. They have been accustomed to consider it a passive quality, and not as involving action of the mind. Th...

Though the great majority of children born into the world have five senses and four limbs, a full-formed brain, and a well-formed frame, there are many thousands in every civili...

The smaller misfortunes which we now turn to, under the head of Infirmity--the loss of a limb, the partial loss of a sense, deformity and sickness--are scarcely less afflictive...

It appears to me, that much disappointment in the results of education, as in other departments of life, arises from the confusion we fall into about human affections,--mixing u...

I call this a universal power, because there is no human being, (except the idiot) in whom it is not inherent from his birth: and I think I may say, that there is none in whom i...

We come now to consider a moral quality whose importance cannot be overrated, yet about which there is more unsettledness of view and perplexity of heart among parents than abou...

We come now to the greatest and noblest of the Moral Powers of Man; to that power which makes him quite a different order of being from any other that we know of, and which is t...

We are all accustomed to speak of the Intellect and moral powers of man as if they were so distinct from one another that we can deal with each set of powers without touching th...

In beginning a child's intellectual education, the parent must constantly remember to carry on his care of the frame, spoken of in a former chapter. The most irritable and tende...

Up to this point, and for some way beyond it, children are better off at home than at school; and no parent should be induced to think otherwise by what is seen to be achieved a...

The time comes at last,--sooner with one child, later with another,--when the superior faculties begin to show their activity; when the young pupil attempts to reason, and shoul...

The young mind is very well entertained for a time by the exercise of its reasoning powers,--if, instead of being baffled, they are encouraged and trained. But, there is a highe...

The importance of HABIT is an old subject; as old as any in morals. For thousands of years, moralists and philosophers have written and preached about it; and everybody is convi...

It requires some little consideration to feel sufficiently that it is as necessary to be explicit and earnest about the personal habits of children as about their principles, te...

It is difficult to keep a distinction between personal and family habits. In our last chapter, on Personal Habits, we got to the family dinner table; and here, in speaking of Fa...

Is there any other department of Household Education than those on which I have touched? No one can be more aware than I am of the scantiness of what I have said, when compared...