The Education of Man - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... It is certainly a very deep truth, a non-acknowledgment of which avenges itself daily, that it is mostly the man, often the educator, who first makes the child and the boy bad. This takes place when one always attributes an evil, bad, or at least a wrong intention to all which, on the part of the boy or child, takes place either from want of knowledge, inconsiderateness, or is, indeed, the consequence of a very clear and acute perception of .the right and wrong around him, and so from a very virtuous and praiseworthy feeling of the right. There are, alas! still such mischievous men among the educators: they always see in the children and boys little, wicked, spiteful devils, where others would see, at worst, a jest carried too far, or the too free manifestation of their enjoyment of life. Such birds of evil, especially as educators, first make guilty such a child, who, though not fully innocent, is yet guiltless; for they put ideas and actions into him which are as yet foreign to him; they make him bad in act, though not at first in will; they beat him spiritually dead, so that he recog nizes that he has not this life from himself, and cannot give it to himself. But the genuine life is now gone. He cannot give it to himself; and what now avails knowledge without deed? what avails the powerless wish without the power of action? That which these educators have made bad and evil by believing that a child cannot attain to the possession of heaven, cannot cany a heaven in his mind, without previously, to speak mildly, going to it through guilt, -- that will the dear God make good; and that they call making the child pious. This proceeding is like that of the little kind-hearted child who says, with firm conviction, about his fly or his bug,...