You’ll make me a lovelier child.
I’ll bud as a gay little lassie,
Or bloom as a cheery young lad;
So, smile up your heart, mother darling,
You’ll always be grateful and glad.
The Nursery a University
By C. Josephine Barton
If your child is rightly born, with no prenatal drapery to untangle from, you need concern yourself about his proper guidance, only past the infant age. He will educate, without your insistence. He will be showing you new points wherein your old rhetoric is at fault, or your mental philosophy behind the times. If you are wise, you will get vast lessons from him.
Froebel said: “The nursery was my university.” The child receives there indelible lessons, nor does he judge as to whether a thing is literal or figurative. It is all fact to him. Plato says it is most important that tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thought. The highest and grandest that could be said of that strange phase of human experience, the Flesh-birth phase, was said by Friedrich Froebel, substantially as follows: “With the beginning of every new family there is issued to mankind and to each individual human being, the call to represent humanity in pure development; to represent man in his ideal perfection.” Froebel was broad in saying also, “The destiny of nations lies far more in the hands of women, the mothers, than in the possessors of power, or of those innovators who, for the most part, do not understand themselves! We must cultivate women, who are the educators of the race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.”