The daily press. (Cincinnati [Ohio) 1859-1859, 1859-06-06

spring; or its penitence is, still worse,
the token of nature becoming abject,
the penitence of fear which is lower than
spirited rebellion But besides this,
that the very good supposed to be secured
is entirely on the surface, the grim evils
which have risen up are such as may
never be set aside l. The child who has
been beaten is disgraced; disgraced in
its own eyes, and those of its companions
The laws of Nature hold in beasts and
personal disgrace is the parent of reck-
lessness. A child which has once been
beaten in school, has less to lose after
ward; be so good as it can, and it can
never wipe off the disgrace Of its Aogging
the humiliation of the cries that torture
forced from it, and the memory of the
taunts which were only too freely given
by its companions during recess. A boy
who has been whipped before girls, or
where they know it, can never forget;
girl who has been chastised before boys, is
embittered perhaps for life. .. By this
means low and hard association is given
to that which should be always beautiful
and attractive For q child brimming
with life and frolic, freedom, study, is at
best task and hardship A wise
teacher will associate with it every pos
sible delight. The most successfulteacher
of On infant school, who ever lived in
Boston, declared that her success was
chiefly due to a closet adjoining her
school-room, where the children were
frequently allowed to 60 and find baby
house, and tray with clay for mud-pies,
all ready for their amusement! But to
associate good order with q scene of
blows and sobs to define education as
something that grows on birch tree to
make the nursery of the intellect long
memory of wrath and ill-feeling What
wonder if the mind so nursed, learned to
hate the sight of . book? How many
tender gums have been lacerated on the
stony udders Of false systemP
1t is time that our teachers were taught.
Let them learn that reverence for the
childs nature, would instruct them in
every emergency For the rudeness, the
wildness, even the seeming falsehood of a
child, are the untutored manifestations of
nature which could not be crushed out
without making the child nonentity.-
Is it not strange that so many years of
slow learning should be allowed child
to learn the alphabet, then to spell, then
to read, and yet that it should be held
from the first in full debt to the whole
moral law, and punished for deviation
from it Yet why should q child be
supposed to know the sacred obligation
of truth, before it knows how to write ?
Why should it be held to know the laws
of property, the difference of MEUM AND
TUUM in less time than it can learn
arithmetic People will not whip a child
for not knowing how to read at four, OF
write at six; but will do so if it says
what is not so, and takes what does not
belong to it. Yet, properly speaking, a
child CANNOT lie before it is some fourteen
or fifteen years old, nor steal The
standard which adults have in their
minds against theft and falsehood has
been lifted by long experiences, observa-
tions, and until that standard is lifted in
the child's mind, (Which cannot be done
by WORDS from any lps,) until it has ex-
perience and culture of its own, its mis-
statement can never be called lie, nor
its appropriation of what it desires, theft.
These are the first, unregulated manifes
tations of imagination, of appetite, of life
all of which 60 to make the child: sec,
o teacher, that in tanning them you dc
not make them TAME enough,-that in
dealing with nature you do not build her
sepulchre We do not wish the spirits
whispered out of the children We dc
not wish an annual crop Of tombstones
from our Public Schools. Moral-suasiou
is indeed harder and slower than rattan
suasion: but the one gives us elevated
men and women the other MAY give us
cats and spaniels instead. Will not our
educational authorities see that a rule is
made on this subject and enforced?