Harriet Martineau observes: “It is a matter of course that no mother will allow any ignorant person to have access to her child who will frighten it with goblin stories or threats of the old black man. She might as well throw up her charge at once, and leave off thinking of household education altogether, as permit her child to be exposed to such maddening inhumanity as this. The instances are not few of idiotcy or death from terror so caused.”
Children should not be hedged-in with any great number of rules and regulations. Such as are necessary to be established, they should be required implicitly to observe. But there should be none that are superfluous. It is only in rich families, where there is a plentiful attendance of governors and nurses, that many rules can be enforced; and it is believed that the constant attention of governors and nurses is one of the greatest moral disadvantages to which the children of the rich are exposed.
Coleridge has well said: “The most graceful objects in nature are little children—before they have learned to dance.”
“Grace,” says Archbishop Whately, “is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation, or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them ‘elegant’ animals would be absurd. Lastly, ‘elegant’ may be applied to mental qualifications, which ‘graceful’ never can. Elegance must always imply something that is made or invented by man. An imitation of nature is not so; therefore we do not speak of an ‘elegant picture,’ though we do of an elegant pattern for a gown, an elegant piece of work. The general rule is, that elegance is the characteristic of art, and grace of nature.”
EDUCATION AT HOME.
Education at Home has been thus aptly illustrated: History and Geography should begin at home. If we want a boy to know some day the families of the Herods and the Cæsars, let him start by learning who was his own grandfather. The Church Catechism rightly commences by making the child tell his own name; it would be in many cases almost puzzling, but in all cases and senses a most proper question, to ask him, further, the names of his godfathers and godmothers; and so carrying him gradually onward, he would know, what seldom happens, the kings of England before he attempts those of Israel and Judah. This principle holds as true of places as of persons. The things that touch us nearest interest us most. Geography should begin from the school-walls: “Which side of this room does the sun rise on?” “Does Church-lane run west or north?” “Whither does the brook flow that rises on Squash-hill?” In this way the young scholar would in time be brought to comprehend the round world and his own position on it, and probably with some clearer perception of the truth and relation of things than if he had begun by rote: “The earth is a terraqueous globe, depressed at the poles, consisting of,” &c. But we are all taught on the contrary plan. We begin at the wrong end; for, in the ladder of learning, Ego, not Adam, is the true No. 1. We start from the equator instead of High-street, and the result is the lamentable fact, that even educated men are strangers in their own country, and thousands die within the sound of Bow-bells who have never seen the inside of St. Paul’s. Topography, then, should precede geography. Yet perhaps there is not a schoolroom in England where a county map is to be found hung up on the wall. Frightened by the remembrance of having been once the deluded subscriber to a Topographical Dictionary, even students have a horror of the word; and the subject is consigned, in expensive folios, to a few professed antiquaries, or to some eccentric member of a county family, who emerges every third or fourth generation to preserve a provincial dignity which he would not willingly let die.[[70]]
[70]. Quarterly Review.