“Then he gets dropped from his classes,” objected Bobs.
“The more blame to his classes. Early learning is much too expensive at the cost of eye-strain and consequent nerve-strain. If we force a student in the early years to make too great demands on his eyes, the chances are that he will develop some eye or nervous trouble at sixteen or seventeen and lose far more time than he has gained before, not reckoning the disastrous physical effects.”
“But if other children go ahead, ours must,” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Perhaps the others who go ahead now won’t keep ahead later. There is a sentence in Wood and Woodruff’s textbook on the eye[[1]] which every public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart. It runs like this: ‘That child will be happier and a better citizen as well as a more successful man of affairs, who develops into a fairly healthy, though imperfectly schooled animal at twenty, than if he becomes a learned, neurasthenic asthenope at the same age.’”
[1] Commoner Diseases of the Eye, by Casey A. Wood and Thomas A. Woodruff, pp. 418, 419.
“Antelope?” put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her exclusion from the topic. “I’ve got a picture of that. It’s a little deer.”
“So are you, Toddles,” cried the doctor, seizing upon her with one hand and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each shoulder, “and we’re going to keep those very bright twinklers of yours just as fit’as possible, both to see and be seen.”
“But what of Charley and the twins?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“Everything right, so far. They’re healthy young animals and can meet the ordinary demands of school life. But no more study at night, for some years, for Charley; and no more, ever, of fine-printed maps. Some day, Charley, you may go to the Orinoco. It’s a good deal more desirable that you should be able to see what there is to be seen there, then, than that you should learn, now, the name of every infinitesimally designated town on its banks.”
“In my childhood,” observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality proper to that classic introductory phrase, “we thought more of our brains than our eyes.”