To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting one's feet on a narrow path, it means never placing ourselves in danger of meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without words that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. It means the humble realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are infinite, while the ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does the educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age, is making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvelous shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each impression. The slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least act of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for life in the finely strung soul of the child."
The Century of the Child, by Ellen Key (1900)
"I have seen a child, natively most tender and susceptible, a boy with a heart all affection, and feelings like harp strings, ready to vibrate at very breath, grow up a cold-hearted, undemonstrative man; just because he had lived under an unfortunate and mistaken family influence, in which no effort had been made to give play to movements of his deeper and gentler nature, and where all was calculated to suppress and stifle them."
Life at Home, William Aikman, 1870, New York.
"Before they can go (are mobile), they instill in them violence, revenge, and cruelty. Give me a whip, that I may beat him, is a lesson which most children every day hear; and it is thought nothing, because their hands have not strength to do any mischief. But I ask, does not this corrupt their mind? Is not this the way of force and violence, that they are set in? And if they have been taught when little, to strike and hurt others by proxy, and encouraged to rejoice in the harm they have brought upon them, and see them suffer, are they not prepared to do it when they are strong enough to be felt themselves, and can strike to some purpose."
Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke, 1693
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