Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

Then the educator should “time” himself in forming habits? How long may it take to cure a bad habit, and form the contrary good one?

Perhaps a month or six weeks of careful incessant treatment may be enough.

But such treatment requires an impossible amount of care and watchfulness on the part of the educator?

Yes; but not more than is given to the cure of any bodily disease—measles, or scarlet fever, for example.

Then the thoughts and actions of a human being may be regulated mechanically, so to speak, by setting up the right nerve currents in the brain?

This is true only so far as it is true to say that the keys of a piano produce music.

But the thoughts, which may be represented by the fingers of the player, do they not also run their course without the consciousness of the thinker?

They do; not merely vague, inconsequent musings, but thoughts which follow each other with more or less logical sequence, according to the previous training of the thinker.

Would you illustrate this?

Mathematicians have been known to think out abstruse problems in their sleep; the bard improvises, authors “reel off” without premeditation, without any deliberate intention to write such and such things. The thoughts follow each other according to the habit of thinking previously set up in the brain of the thinker.