To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o’er the mind,
To breathe enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast!"
But home-education, at the present day, is as much abused as it is neglected. The criminality of the former is perhaps greater than that of the latter. This may have more reference to the female than to the male portion of the family. The abuse here consists of the want of a training up to wisdom. We see this in what is called the fashionable, instead of the Christian, education, received at some of our fashionable boarding schools. Here the child is sent with no home-training whatever, to be trained up a fashionable doll, fit to be played with and dandled upon the arms of a whining and heartless society, with no preparation for companionship in life, destitute of substantial character, with undoctrinated feelings of aversion to religion, fit only for a puppet show in some gay and thoughtless circle; kneeling before fashion as her God, and giving her hand in marriage only to a golden and a gilded calf.
According to this abuse of home-education, "a young maiden is kept in the nursery and the school room, like a ship on the stocks, while she is furbished with abundance of showy accomplishments, and is launched like the ship, looking taut and trim, but empty of everything that can make her useful." Thus one great abuse of home-education is to substitute the boarding school for home-culture,—to send our children to such school at an age when they should he trained by and live under the direct influence of the parent. This generally ends in initiated profligacy, and alienation from home, while at best but a dunce after his course of training is ended.
"Would you your son should be a sot and a dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once?
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise."