occupy the time of the
children, and scores of teachers have ruined their own constitutions,
and also the constitutions of some of the children, by the perpetual
talking and singing, which, I am sorry to say, too many consider to be
the sum total of the system: and I may state here, that the children
should never be more than one hour at a time, or, at most two hours,
during the day, in the gallery. All beyond this is injurious to the
teacher, and doubly so to the little pupils. The forenoon is always
the best time for gallery lessons; the teacher's mind is more clear,
and the minds of the children are more receptive. After the children
have taken their dinner they should be entertained with the object
lessons, a small portion of spelling and reading, and the rest of the
afternoon should be devoted to moral and physical teaching in the
play-ground, if the weather will at all permit it. The more you
rob your children of their physical education to shew off their
intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and
your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of
nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of
precocity, instead of a rational infants' school for the training
and educating infants. I have been blamed, by writers on the infant
system, for that which I never did, and never recommended; I have been
made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions of others, who have
not troubled themselves to read my writings; and, in their anxiety
to produce something new and original, have strayed from the very
essential parts of the plan, and on this account I am charged by
several writers with being unacquainted with the philosophy of my own
system. I thought three-and-thirty years ago that if I could arrest
public attention to the subject, it was as much as could be expected.
I knew very well at that time that a dry philosophical detail would
neither be received or read. My object was to appeal to the senses of
the public by doing the thing in every town where practicable. By this
method I succeeded, where the other would have failed, but it by no
means followed that I was unacquainted with the philosophy of my
own plans, merely because I preferred the doing of the thing to the
writing about it. Believing, however, that the time has now arrived,
and that the public mind is better prepared than it was then, I have
thought I might venture to go a little more into detail,