Again, a boy has no sense of truth. He will tell lies without any apparent temptation to do so, even against his own obvious interests. All of us have seen persons of this sort in mature life. Some of them are to-day in places of prominence in Christian work and influence. Yet another child is without any sense of reverence, or of modesty, or of natural affection. One lacks all control of his temper, another of his nerves. And so on in great variety.
The physician of that institution is by no means in despair over any of these cases. It is his mission to find out the child’s special lack, and to meet it; to learn what traits are in excess, and to curb them; to know the child’s needs, and to train him accordingly.
Every child is in a sense a partially developed, an imperfectly formed child. There are no absolutely perfect children in this world. All of them need restraining in some things and stimulating in others. And every imperfect child can be helped toward a symmetrical character by wise Christian training. Every home should be an institution for the treatment of imperfectly developed children. Every father and every mother should be a skilled physician in charge of such an institution. There are glorious possibilities in this direction; and there are weighty responsibilities also.
III.
SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS OF CHILD-TRAINING.
Child-training can compass much, but child-training cannot compass everything, in determining the powers and the possibilities of a child under training. Each child can be trained in the way he should go, but not every child can be trained to go in the same way. Each child can be trained to the highest and fullest exercise of his powers, but no child can be trained to the exercise of powers which are not his. Each child can be trained to his utmost possibilities, but not every child can be trained to the utmost possibilities of every other child. Child-training has the fullest scope of the capacity of the particular child under treatment, and child-training is limited in every case by the limitations of that child’s capacity.
A child born blind can be trained to such a use of his other senses that he can do more in the world than many a poorly trained child who has sight; but a blind child can never be trained to discern differences in colors at a distance. A child who has by nature a dull ear for music can be trained to more or less of musical skill; but a child who is born without the sense of hearing can never be trained to quickness in the discerning of sounds. A child can be trained to facility in the use of every sense and faculty and limb and member and muscle and nerve which he possesses; but no training will give to a child a new sense, a new faculty, a new limb, a new member, a new muscle, a new nerve. Child-training can make anything of a child that can be made of that child, but child-training cannot change a child’s nature and identity.
The limitations of child-training are more likely to be realized than its extensive scope. Indeed, the supposed limitations of child-training are very often unreal ones. Many a parent would say, for example, that you cannot change a child’s form and features and expression by training; yet, as a matter of fact, a child’s form and features and expression can be, and often are, materially changed by training. The chest is expanded, the waist is compressed, a curved spine is straightened, or a deformity of limb is corrected, by persistent training with the help of mechanical appliances. Among some primitive peoples, the form of every child’s head is brought to a conventional standard by a process of training; as, among other primitive peoples, the feet or the ears or the eyes or the lips are thus conventionally trained into—or out of—shape. And in all lands the expression of the face steadily changes under the process of persistent training.