The time for education is in early youth.[27] God has, accordingly, made the years of childhood unsuitable for anything but education; and this matter was interposed by the deliberate intent of a wise Providence. Youth is a period of great plasticity. It is in the nature of everything that comes into being to bend and form easily while tender; but when the plastic period has passed to alter only with great difficulty. If one wishes to become a good tailor, writer, or musician, he must apply himself to his art from his earliest youth, during the period when his imagination is most active and when his fingers are most flexible. Only during the years of childhood is it possible to train the muscles to do skilled work. If, then, parents have the welfare of their children at heart, and if the good of the human race be dear to the civil and ecclesiastical guardians of society, let them hasten to make provision for the timely planting, pruning, and watering of the plants of heaven that these may be prudently formed in letters, virtue, and piety. Private education is not desirable. Children should be trained in common, since better results and more pleasures are to be obtained when they are taught together in classes. Not only is class teaching a saving of labor over private instruction, but it introduces a rivalry that is both needful and helpful. Moreover, young children learn much that is useful by imitation through association with school-fellows. Comenius, it may be remarked, was one of the first of the educational reformers to see clearly the value of class teaching and graded instruction. His reforms in this direction have already been noted. School training is necessary for the children of all grades of society, not of the rich and powerful only, but the poor and lowly as well. Let none be neglected, unless God has denied him sense and intelligence. When it is urged that the laboring classes need no school education, let it be also recalled that they are expected to think, obey, and do good. Girls should be educated as well as boys. No satisfactory reason can be given why women should be excluded from the pursuits of knowledge, whether in the Latin or in the mother-tongue. They are formed in the image of God as well as men; and they are endowed with equal sharpness of mind and capacity for learning, often, indeed, with more than the opposite sex. Why, then, should we admit them to the alphabet, and afterwards drive them away from books? Comenius takes issue with most writers on education that study will make women blue-stockings and chatterboxes. On the contrary, he maintains, the more their minds are occupied with the fruits of learning, the less room and temptation there will be for gossip and folly.