Year: 1860

Education of the Heart.


We commend the subjoined judicious re-
marks from the London Quarterly Reuiew
to the discriminating attention and regard
as we'll of parents as of teachers. They con-
tain an important principle in refereuce to
the education of the young, and one which
cannot be too carefully needed:


eft is the vice of age to substitute learn.
ing for wisdom-to educate the head and
forget that there is more important edu-
cation necessary for the heart. The reason
is cultivated at an age when nature does not
furnish the elements necessary to success
full cultivation of it ; and the child is solici-
ted to reflection when be is only capable of
sensation and emotion. In infancy the at
tention and the memory are only excited
strongly by things which impress the senses
and move the heart, and father shall in still
more solid and available instruction in an
hour spent in the fields, where wisdom and
goodness are exemplifed, seen and felt, than
in month spent in study, where they are
expounded in stereotype aphorisms.


No physician doubts that precocious chill
dren, in fifty cases for one, are much worse
for the discipline they have undergone. The
mind seems to have been strained, and the
foundations for insanity are laid. When
the studies for maturer years are stuffed into
the child's head, people do not reflect on
the anatomical fact that The brain of an in
fant is not the brain of man, that the one
is confirmed and can bear exertion-the
other is growing and requires repose; that
to force the attention to abstract facts-to
load the memory with chronological and
historical and scientific details-in short to
expect child's brain to bear with impunity
the exertion of mans, is just as rational as
it would he to hazard the same sort of ex
pertinent on its muscles.


The first eight or ten years of life should
be devoted to the education of the heart
to the formation of principles rather than
to the requirement of what is usually termed
knowledge. Nature herself points out such
a course for the emotions are then the
liveliest, and most easily moulded, being as
yet unalloyed by passion. 1t is from this
source that the mass of men are hereafter to
draw their sum of happiness or misery; the
actions of the immense majority are, under
all circumstances, determined much more by
feeling than by reflection in truth, life pre-
sents an infnity of occasions where it is es-
sential to happiness that we should feel
rightly; very few where it is at all necessa-
ry that we should think profoundly.


"Up to the seventh year of life, very
great changes are going on in the structure
of the brain, and demand, therefore, the ut
most attention not to interrupt them by
improper or over excitement. Just that
degree of exercise should be given to the
brain at this period as is necessary to its
health; and the best is oral instruction, ex-
emplifed by objects which strike the senses.


1t is, perhaps, unnecessary to add that
at this period of life, special attention should
be given, both by parents and teachers, to
the physical development of the child. Pure
air and free exercise are indispensable, and
wherever either of these are withheld, the
consequences will be certain to extend them.
selves over the whole future life. The seeds
Of protracted and hopeless suffering have in
innumerable instances been sown into the
constitution of the child simply through
ignorance of the great fundamental physical
law; and the time has come when the united
voices of these innocent victims should as
cend, trumpet tongued,' to the ears of eve
ry parent and every teacher in the land,
give us free air and free exercise leave US
| to develop our expanding energies in accord
| ance with the laws of our being, and full
scope for the elastic and bounding impulses
of our young BLOOD"
The SPEAKERS PAGE.-A Washington
correspondent writes


At present the main stay of Speaker
Pennington is the page who stands upon the