Basic HTML Version
Right Education
69
The only schoolroom for children until eight or ten years of age
should be in the open air, amid the opening flowers and nature’s
beautiful scenery, and their most familiar textbook the treasures of
nature. These lessons, imprinted upon the minds of young chil-
dren amid the pleasant, attractive scenes of nature, will not be soon
forgotten....
In the early education of children, many parents and teachers
fail to understand that the greatest attention needs to be given to
the physical constitution, that a healthy condition of body and mind
may be secured. It has been the custom to encourage children
to attend school when they were mere babes needing a mother’s
care. When of a delicate age, they are frequently crowded into
ill-ventilated schoolrooms, where they sit in wrong positions upon
poorly constructed benches, and as a result the young and tender
frames of some have become deformed.
The disposition and habits of youth will be very likely to be
manifested in mature manhood. You may bend a young tree into
almost any shape that you choose, and if it remains and grows as
you have bent it, it will be a deformed tree, and will ever tell of the
injury and abuse received at your hands. You may, after it has had
years of growth, try to straighten the tree, but all efforts will prove
[81]
unavailing. It will ever be a crooked tree.
This is the case with the minds of youth. They should be carefully
and tenderly trained in childhood. They may be trained in the right
direction or in the wrong, and in their future lives they will pursue the
course in which they were directed in youth. The habits formed in
youth will grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength....
Physical Degeneracy
Man came from the hand of his Creator perfect and beautiful
in form, and so filled with vital force that it was more than a thou-
sand years before his corrupt appetites and passions and general
violations of physical law were sensibly felt upon the race. More
recent generations have felt the pressure of infirmity and disease
more rapidly and heavily with every generation. The vital forces
have been greatly weakened by the indulgence of appetite and lustful
passion.... The violation of physical law, and the consequence,—