EDUCATION OF THE CHILD.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 51, 27 October 1914, Page 7

EDUCATION OF THE CHILD.

A well-known Theosophist writer on the above subject says:—The child does not bring into the world wellgrown and well-developed capacities, as a rule. He brings the germs of faculties that lie is going to develop during life. Now, some of them are mental faculties, others of course emotional. Some of the emotions make for happiness, others for misery. You might call them germs of virtues and vices—which are permanent modes built into the character of tho master emotions of love and hate. Now these have to grow, and have begun growing from the early days of infancy. If the child be surrounded with good influences, if all who come near him are pure in thought, loving in emotion, then those influences playing on tlie germs of good emotions draw them out, without tho child knowing anything about it, ami the virtuous seed is developed under those influences, while the seeds of evil are starved out. Under these influences the seeds of vices have no opportunity of growth. Now, the early education of tho child is very largely, and at flrfili entirely, not by hooks or words, hut by the silent influences of tho thoughts and the emotions of his ciders, that are playing upon him continually, as the sun shines and 1 the rain falls on tho growing seed buried in the earth. Oh! there lies your responsibility. ' The child is naughty. Have you boon irritable, impatient; have you boon anxious or worried? Then you have sent out a. stream of influences that has stimulated in him the germs of anger and of evil, These are things that arc not thought of by the ordinary father or mother; tho child's little naughtinesses arc reflections of the more serious faults of the eiders who punish in him what they have caused. Tho child bodies arc the precious gift from nature, the shrine of a living spirit, placed in your hands to help, to guide, to protect. You have no right to piny upon them anything from your own lower nature,n o right to make the future life of the child more difficult and less noble, because you yield to ignoble passions and desires. You make tho whole future life of that child loss noble than it should ho, because you arc not living your highest and your best. And those elders who realise what the child is, and tho tremendous responsibility of using aright the power which they wield over him, will improve themselves for the sake of tho children; so that tho child becomes a stimulus to parental nobility, and the father and the mother grow hotter and purer, as they try to guard, to help, and to guide the child.