Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/103

 space and time, or the principle of the lever; and it is a chance if the most expert teacher will succeed in rendering any such abstruse principle really intelligible to a child of the age we are now supposing. This at least is certain, that the comprehension of it will have demanded an effort too great for the unripe brain; it will have occupied time that might have been better employed; and will, in less than an hour, have flown, leaving nothing in the mind but a jumble of crabbed phrases and puzzling diagrams. If a child strives to understand a complicated statement, but fails in his endeavours, his faculties have been perturbed; if he does understand it, by extraordinary intelligence, a rare power, in the bud, has been forced, which, without a doubt, would have expanded, have blossomed, and fructi-fied in due season: what motive can justify the violence we have been doing to nature?

Happily, and by the beneficent constitution of the human system, animal and mental, the mischief done, at any one time, by a too ambitious teacher, may entirely be remedied by half an hour's high sport.Play disperses the dose of logic, and all is right again. This corrective effect of the active gaiety of children, will, in most instances, render the over zeal of a teacher harmless; but it is certain that a brain of fine and rare organization, eager for knowledge, may be permanently injured by such treatment. A mind, thus early curdled by injudicious zeal, might be compared to a marbled paperin the old fashion, the bright colours of which, streaked into fantastic forms, might, if re-served for the pencil of the master, have pictured the beauty of the real world. But to this subject I must return, presently.

In adherence to the general principle which, as I think, should distinguish the slow but comprehensive culture to be pursued at home, from the hurried development, necessarily aimed at where education is to be imparted at a