To women of great attainments and culture the training of infancy properly belongs, and that training in the homes of the classes will be of the highest value to the State. The problem of how to create in childhood a ready obedience to authority without jarring the nerves, or checking freedom unnecessarily, is a very difficult one. It requires a cultured intelligence to grasp the problem and carry out the true method of its solution. The aim in the training of infancy is to develop superior types of men and women by evoking the higher qualities of human nature in a sphere of comparative liberty. A babe in the nursery, let us say, has had his attention caught by the flames leaping up in the well-guarded grate. He creeps towards them and pushes his fingers through the wires of the guard. The educated nurse gently lifts him to a safe distance, but he starts creeping again to the fire. Now there are in the nursery some baskets of different size and depth, all softly lined and weighted. Baby is put into one of these to amuse himself with a toy until the fascinating flames are forgotten.
An older child flings her ball in another child’s face. Nurse tells her the ball might hurt, but on persistence in the selfish amusement she, too, is firmly placed in a larger basket or nursery prison, and must stay there till the impulse to be disobedient has passed off; for the principle which guides nurse in the training of these infants is this: liberty abused must be abridged.
After a few such experiences the little ones feel that a network is around them—a network of authority never physically painful and that has no connection with anger.
As the reasoning powers develop they feel that liberty is theirs in the straight course of obedience to authority, and later they find that this authority represents a knowledge of the laws of nature, for when in garden and field they join in the nature-study lessons, they discover that if plants creep into unfavourable conditions, they languish; if animals run counter to laws of health, they suffer and die.
From nursery to home-training the infants pass forward. Their nerves have never been irritated by harshness, nor their affections repressed, and their impulses to unhurtful activities are of normal strength. In the more advanced training now given, the aim is no longer to impress automatically, but rationally to guide the growing intelligence. Blind obedience is not required, but every command is explained and related to the facts of happy and healthful life. At this point a discriminating judgment is profoundly necessary, and the child should be studied individually, for to each there comes the right moment when self-rule is possible, and unless outward restraints are wisely withdrawn that power of self-rule may be injured.
The human types to be desired are not slavish, but independent beings, capable of noble service to God and man; and choosing to do right because they know true happiness lies that way.
At sixteen or upwards the young thus trained may safely leave home for high school or university, in pursuit of the special instruction required for their future career. An education that has laid the foundation of noble character, comes to no abrupt conclusion. The love of truth when firmly implanted prompts to the acquisition of new knowledge, and knowledge is boundless as the universe. Fields of science become the happy hunting-ground of minds that are markedly intellectual, and although self-culture supersedes formal instruction, and original research supersedes the following of authority, education moves continuously and steadily forward.
“The environment,” says Clifford Harrison, “that lies open to men rationally developed is as vast as the ideal that lies before them. This environment is not a spiritual matter merely; not of the soul alone, but of body, mind, soul and spirit; not of heaven only, but of earth as well; not of eternity and a beyond, but of time and here.”