Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness. A child spends hours in preparing some surprise for you—decorates your room with flowers, not in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe before your impatiently awaited arrival—or ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters to represent flags at your home-coming.
"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly, hardly looking—and the child sees that you hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's a dear!"
The child clears it all away, and with the dying flowers something else is cleared away, something that will no more live again than will the faded flowers.
Be generous of praise—it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the child the true Elixir of Life.
CHAPTER IX
Praise and Punishment
While admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up may often be better for him—or much more often her—than it is for the child for whom that sacrifice is made. There is a certain danger that the enthusiastic educator, passionately desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may incidentally, and quite without meaning it, sacrifice something very vital in the child. For the child whose every want is anticipated, whose every thought is considered, who is surrounded by the softness of love and the sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint and dismay the fond parent or guardian, pastor or master, by growing up selfish, cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with no capacity for obedience, no power of endurance, no hardihood, no resource—whining in adversity and intolerable in success. The object of education is to fit the child for the life of the man. Once it was held that a rigorous discipline, enforced by violence, was the best preparation for the life which is never too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all that, and there is some danger that the pendulum may swing too far, and that the aim of education may come to mean only the ensuring of a happy childhood, without arming the child for the battle of life. It is right that to the educator the child should be the prime object, the centre of the universe, the prime consideration to which every other consideration must give way. But there is the danger that the child may become his own prime object, not only the centre of his own universe, but its circumference, and cherish, deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the conviction that all other considerations should and will give way to his desires.