degree, compensate for the unquestionable advantages that attach to schools; but also include the means for improving, to the utmost, those peculiar and inestimable opportunities of moral and mental advancement which are to be found at home, and there only. Not to do this, would be to place ourselves in a position in which private education could not at all sustain comparison with the more usual method. Now, not to mention some incidental and yet important recommendations of the plan which we have at present in view, the chief and the most decisive one, (moral considerations apart,) is the facilities afforded, at home, for bestowing a well-considered culture upon each of the several faculties of the mind; and for doing this in the order of their natural development. This point may then be named, as the leading characteristic of the system which it is the intention of the present volume to explain. But a scheme of intellectual culture, conformed to the principle of a careful adherence to the order of nature, in expanding the several faculties, is not to be comprised within very narrow limits. Indeed it is evident, that an elaborate operation, extended through ten or twelve years, (the five or six years of infancy not included,) if it be so far described in its details as to be made available to others, must occupy a good deal of room. In the present volume, after advancing some observations applicable to the home economy in general, I have gone no further than to open the subject of a systematic culture of the mind by suggesting some methods for eliciting, and for enriching, those faculties that are passive, and recipient chiefly, and which, as they are developed early, demand the teacher's attention before the time when any strenuous labours ought to be exacted from children. I wish to secure the attention of some who may be my readers, to a point, adverted to more than once in the course of the volume, namely, that although the phrase-Home Education-understood in its primary import, means, of course, the education of a family under the paternal roof; yet, the principles and the methods of instruction propounded in this work are, I hope, such as, with more or less modification, may be applied in all cases where the number assembled around a teacher does not greatly exceed the limits of a large family. In advancing, as I am now doing the principles and methods of INTELLECTUAL CULTURE, it would give me much uneasiness to find myself so far mis understood, as for it to be inferred, that I assign Moral and Religious culture to a subordinate place. The reader would do me the greatest wrong in attributing to me any such intention. My most serious convictions, and I hope, too, my own practice, as the father of a family, are decisively opposed to so fatal an error. Having made this profession, which I do with some earnestness of feeling, it will not, perhaps, be required of me to state my reasons for avoiding, at present, those subjects to which, in fact, I attach supreme importance. STANFORD RIVERS. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Points of Comparison between Public and Private Education,... PAGE 9 CHAPTER II. Happiness, the necessary Condition of Home Education,....... Family Love and Order,.. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. The Three Periods of Early Life-Infancy,.. CHAPTER V. The Second Period of Education,.. CHAPTER VI. The Third Period of Early Life, and concluding Term of Home Education,.... 143 CHAPTER VII. Some Diversities of Mental Conformation considered in relation to Methods of ...... 156 CHAPTER VIII. Analysis of the Intellectual Faculties, so far as relates to the Culture of each.. 179 |