imate actions by their
moral relations, try to make your pupils understand these relations,
and you will discover whether history is adapted to their years.

If there is no science in words, there is no study especially adapted
to children. If they have no real ideas, they have no real memory; for
I do not call that memory which retains only impressions. Of what use
is it to write on their minds a catalogue of signs that represent
nothing to them? In learning the things represented, would they not
also learn the signs? Why do you give them the useless trouble of
learning them twice? Besides, you create dangerous prejudices by
making them suppose that science consists of words meaningless to them.
The first mere word with which the child satisfies himself, the first
thing he learns on the authority of another person, ruins his judgment.
Long must he shine in the eyes of unthinking persons before he can
repair such an injury to himself.

No; nature makes the child's brain so yielding that it receives all
kinds of impressions; not that we may make his childhood a distressing
burden to him by engraving on that brain dates, names of kings,
technical terms in heraldry, mathematics, geography, and all such
words, unmeaning to him and unnecessary to persons at any age in life.
But all ideas that he can understand, and that are of use to him, all
that conduce to his happiness and that will one day make his duties
plain, should early write themselves there indelibly, to guide him
through life as his condition and his intellect require.

The memory of which a child is capable is far from inactive, even
without the use of books. All he sees and hears impresses him, and he
remembers it. He keeps a mental register of people's sayings and
doings. Everything around him is the book from which he is continually
but unconsciously enriching his memory against the time his judgment
can benefit by it. If we intend rightly to cultivate this chief
faculty of the mind, we must choose these objects carefully, constantly
acquainting him with such as he ought to understand, and keeping back
those he ought not to know. In this way we should endeavor to make his
mind a storehouse of knowledge, to aid in his education in youth, and
to direct him at all times. This method does not, it is true, produce
phenomenal children, nor does it make the reputation of their teachers;
but it produces judicious, robust men, sound in body and in mind, w