Lessons for the home school
“The mother should find time to cultivate in herself and in her children a love for the beautiful buds and opening flowers.... The only schoolroom for children from eight to ten years of age should be in the open air, amid the opening flowers and nature’s beautiful scenery. And their only text-book should be the treasures of nature.”
The church school
With such a training, the first ten years the child should develop a strong body and a strong mind. He should then be able to spend the next five or six years under the instruction of a consecrated Christian teacher in an elementary school, where teacher and parents may co-operate. The threefold nature must be developed so that when the age of manhood or womanhood is reached, strength of character has also been gained.
The industrial school
The youth should then continue his mental culture in some industrial school, located in the country, where there is freedom from the evils of city life, and where the rapidly developing physical nature can be correctly guided into lines of practical duties which will fit him for real life. In the meantime, mental culture and spiritual training are continued, for character is being formed for eternity.
Training school for Christian workers
The young man or woman of twenty or twenty-two should be prepared to select a life-work, and the special training needed can be received in a training school, which in Christian education will be for Christian workers. Such a school will be necessary; for the education thus outlined, extending from infancy over twenty years, can not fail to develop a character which chooses Christian work as the life occupation. A short training in a higher institution, which in character is a school of the prophets, should so round out the nature already forming that the young person goes out an ambassador for Christ, willing to be used in any capacity by the Commander of the heavenly host, whether it be on the farm, at the carpenter’s bench, or in the pulpit; for his soul is knit to the King of heaven, as was David’s to Jonathan’s. Such a student is prepared for active service, either on earth or in the kingdom of our God; for he is one with the Father and his Son.
“Comenius divided the first twenty-four years of life into four periods, to each of which he would assign a special school, thus:—