When I had set in order round my sitting-room and school-room my valuables (they were manuscripts) and my effects (the inventory of which was not over thirty lines deep), and my paternal and maternal property (that was I myself); when I had already previously taken three long strides to see the prospect from my window, which consisted of a windmill, the evening sun and a little starling's house on a birch tree, then I could forthwith be a ready-made tutor and needed only to begin. I could now look serious the whole week, and oblige my pupil to also--all my words could be weekly sermons, all my faces tables of the law. I had even two ways before me of being a fool: I could make an immortal soul decline, conjugate, memorize and analyze itself half dead in Latin--I could also dip and drown his young pineal gland so deeply in the higher sciences, that it should be quite bloated and puffed up with great draughts of logic, politics and statistics. I could accordingly (who should prevent it?) plane out the bony walls of his cranium to a dry bookcase, or press apart the living head into a profile-board, on which learned heads should be adumbrated; his heart, meanwhile, might be wrought over from being a high altar of nature to a wire-table of the Old Testament, from a celestial globe to a paternoster-globule of sanctimony--or, in fact, to a swimming-bladder of worldly policy; verily, I could be a ninny and make him a still greater one....
Thou precious one! thou confiding, friendly soul, that didst throw thyself with thy whole fate, with thy whole future, into my arms! Oh, I am already distressed that so much depends upon me!
Seeing, however, that just as much depends on the tutor of my future children, I will have printed for him here the following sheets of an Educational Programme, which he cannot take ill of me, because I really do not yet know the good man and do not mean him.
"My dear Mr. Tutor!
"Were I yours, you would certainly sit down and write out for me the following very good rules:
"Let Natural History be the sugar-cake which the schoolmaster shall put into the child's pocket in the first study hour, as a bait to lure him on; so, too, stories from history. Only let not history itself come as yet! What might not this lofty goddess, whose temple stands on nothing but graves, make of us, if she should then for the first time address us, when our head and heart were now open, and both understood her language of eternity--Fatherland, People, Constitution, Laws, Rome, Athens? As regards Mr. Schröckh, who appends thereto respectable literary history and pure orphan-house morality, I only beg that you will not, Mr. Tutor, cut out from his book the copper-plate engravings, and the English binding I also insist upon.
"Geography is a wholesome first course for the child's soul; arithmetic and geometry are also suitable for an early scientific breakfast; not because they teach to think, but because they do not teach it (the greatest arithmeticians and differentiators and mechanicians are often the shallowest philosophers), and because the exertion attending them does not weaken the nerves, as is proved by the case of revenue auditors and algebraists.
"But philosophy, or the effort of deep thinking, is deadly to children, or snaps off forever the too thin point of deep thought. To resolve virtue and religion into their first principles with children is equivalent to cutting away a man's breast and dissecting the heart, to show him how it beats. Philosophy is no bread-earning science, but mental broad itself, and a necessary: and one cannot teach either it or love; both, if taught too early, unman body and soul.
"It pleases me that you yourself explained you would send out French before Latin, speaking before rules of grammar (i. e., the go-cart before theories of muscular motion), and undertake the languages later, because they are apprehended more through the understanding than the memory. One reason why Latin is so difficult is that it comes on so early; in the fifteenth year one can do therein, with a finger, what at an earlier period required a whole hand.
"It is abominable that even now our children have to read and sit and make the fundament the underpinning and base of their education. The book of instruction does not make good to them the place of the instructor, nor the amusing one that of more wholesome play. Poetry is for a beardless age too unintelligible and unwholesome; the teacher who reads a lecture must be a miserable one, if he does not far more emphatically speak. In short, no children's books!