“Screw not the chord too sharply, lest it snap.”[[216]]
You should treat a child as you would a young colt. Think only at first of strengthening his body. Let him have a perfectly free, happy life, plenty of food to eat, abundance of air to breathe, and no work to do; there is plenty of time to think of his learning—of giving him brain work. It will come sadly too soon; but do not make him old before his time.
180. At what age do you advise my child to begin his course of education—to have his regular lessons?
In the name of the prophet,—Figs! Fiddlesticks! about courses of education and regular lessons for a child! You may as well ask me when he, a child, is to begin Hebrew, the Sanscrit, and Mathematics! Let him have a course of education in play; let him go through regular lessons in football, bandy, playing at tic, hares and hounds, and such like excellent and really useful and health-giving lessons. Begin his lessons! Begin brainwork, and make an idiot of him! Oh! for shame, ye mothers! You who pretend to love your children so much, and to tax, otherwise to injure, irreparably to injure their brains, and thus their intellects and their health, and to shorten their very days. And all for what? To make prodigies of them! Forsooth! to make fools of them in the end.
181. Well, then, as you have such a great objection to a child commencing his education early in life, at what age may he, with safety, commence his lessons? and which do you prefer—home or school education?
Home is far preferable to a school education for a child. If at home, he is under your own immediate observation, and is not liable to be contaminated by naughty children; for, in every school, there is necessarily a great mixture of the good and of the bad; and a child, unfortunately, is more likely to be led by a bad than by a good child.
Moreover, if the child be educated at home, the mother can see that his brain be not overworked. At school the brain is apt to be overworked, and the stomach and the muscles to be underworked.
Remember, as above stated, the brain must have but very little work until the child be seven years old: impress this advice upon your memory, and let no foolish ambition to make your child a clever child allow you, for one moment, to swerve from this advice.
Build up a strong, healthy body, and in due time the brain will bear a moderate amount of intellectual labor.
As I have given you so much advice, permit me, for one moment, to address a word to the father of your child: