The First Ten Years

Otago Witness, Issue 2734, 8 August 1906, Page 65

The First Ten Years

— Vital Importance of Sunshine and Nourishing Food in Childhood. — By Lui-bcer BfcKBAXK, in Century.

To develop indoors, under glass, a race of men and women of the type that I believe is coming out of all this marvelloas t mingling of races in the United States is i immeasurably absurd. There must be sunlight, but even more is needed — fresh, pure air. The injury wrought to-day to J the race by keeping too young children indoors at school is beyond the power of any one to estimate, fhte *air they breathe, even under the best sanitary regulations, j is far too impure for their lungs. Even it : is positively poisonous — a slow poison which never makes itself fully manifest until the child is a wreck. Keep the child/, outdoors and a-way from books and- study. Much you can teach him, much he will teach himself all gently, without knowing it. of Nature and Nature's God, just as the child is taught to walk or run or play ; but, education in the acedemic sense shun as you would the plague. And the atmosphere mult be pure around it in the othel sense. It must be free froto every kind of indelicacy or coarseness. The most dangerous man in the community is the one wlio would pollute the stream of a, child's life. Whoever was responsible for the saying that "boys will be boys" and a young man "must sow his wild oats' was perhaps guilty of a crime. It is impossible to apply successfully the principles of cultivation and selection of plants to human life, if the human life does not, like the plant life, have proper nourishment. First 'of all. the child's digestion must be made sound by sufficient, simple, and well-balanced food. But, say, anyone should know this. True, and most people do realise it in a certain sense ; but how many realise that upon the food the child is fed in these first 10 years largely depends its moral future? I once lived near a class of people who, from religious belief, excluded all meat, eggs, and milk from th£ dietary of their children. They fed them vegetables and the products of cereals. What result followed? The children were anaemic, unable to withstand diseases", qujekly succumbed to illness. There were no signs of vigour ; they were always low in vitality. But that was not all. They were frightfully depraved. They were n/>t properly fed ; their ration was unbalanced. Nature rebelled, for she had not sufßcieri material to perfect her higher development. I

What we want in developing a new plant, making it better in all ways than any of its kind that haye preceded it, is a splendid norm, not anything abnormal. So we feed it -from the soil, and it feeds from the air, and thus w© make it a. powerful aid to man. It is dependent upon good food. Upon good food for the child, well-balanced food, depends good digestion ; upon good digestion, with pure air to keep the blood pure, depends the nervous system. If you have the first 10 years of a boy's or a girl's life in which to make them strong and sturdy "with normal nerves, splendid digestion, and unimpaired lungs you have a healthy animal, ready for the heavier burdens of study. Preserve beyocd- all else as the priceless portion of. -a child the integrity of the nervous system. Upon this depends hie success in life. With the nervous system shattered, what is life worth? Suppose yoa begin the education, so-called, of your child at. say, three or four, if he be unusually bright in the kindergarten. Keep addling slowly and systematically, with what I think the devil must enjoy as a refined means of torment, to the burden day by day. Keep on "educating" him until he. enters the primary school at five, and push him to the uttermost until he is 10. You have now laid broad and deep the foundation : outraged Nature may be left to take case of the rest.

The integrity of your child's nervous system, no matter what any so-called educators may say, is thus impaired ; he can never again be what he could have been had you taken him as the plant-cultivator takes" a plant, and' for these first 10 precious Jjears of hie life Had fitt-eJ tira for the future. Nothing else is doing go much to break down the nervous systems of Americans, not even the insane rushing of mature years, as this overcrowding and cramming of child-life before the age

of 10. And the mad haste of maturer years is the legitimate result of the earlier strain.