3. No absence from school, no coming back late, no excuses for unprepared lessons should ever be permitted, except for some very sufficient reason—never because pleasure was preferred to duty.
4. If parents and teachers differ, that difference should be discussed by neither in the presence of the child.
5. Parents should take interest in the school work; ask to see the written work; get to know the teachers and friends of their children; attend lectures, if possible, and supplement school lessons by home reading; perhaps join some common society, e.g., Teachers’ Guild, Parents’ Educational Union, or Child Study Society.
6. Teachers should invite and welcome any communications from parents, should try to know something of the home life.
7. Submission should be required in things lawful from the beginning, and the reins loosened as children grow up: the reverse method is fatal.
8. Parents should not allow the children to read indiscriminately. Distaste for intellectual work is created by exciting novels; irreparable injury is done to the moral nature by letting children enter into sympathy in imagination with the base and impure.
9. The only safeguard is to provide in the home good literature, and to read with the children. Especially should holidays be utilised as a means of learning how to spend time rightly in after-life, and some regular and independent study undertaken during long holidays.
10. Health should never be sacrificed to fashion. High heels, tight-lacing, etc., etc., should be absolutely impossible. Woollen clothing, a carefully studied dietary, regular hours, sufficient sleep, well-ventilated bedrooms, daily baths, proper artificial light, suitable seats and tables, all these things which are studied in boarding-schools should be considered also in the home. Care should be taken in avoiding infection.
11. In planning the studies and life-work of children, parents and teachers should be guided, not by the consideration of what they want the children to be, but of what they are; the special gifts of God are to be specially cultivated, and both should ask, “Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to do?” Pascal’s father forbade mathematics. Some parents insist on music unwisely.
12. Especially should parents use Sunday rightly; the religious instruction of their children maybe given at school, but the home reading has much to do with this, and the example.