Whatever the community accomplished or failed to accomplish, the Brook
Farm School rendered important service in educational progress by
demonstrating the practicability of cultivating the habit of attention.
The teachers in all classes and in all lessons throughout the school
made ceaseless efforts to win and hold attention. This was not
incidental or accidental, but was an integrate part of the educational
plan, intelligently designed and deliberately pursued, with intent to
train the pupils in the practice of concentrating their minds on the
one thing before them until it became a fixed habit.
Years after the Brook Farm School had closed its doors, I was called to
enter another school—the awful school of war. The first word I had to
learn in that school was the command, “Attention!”
Attention means life or death to the soldier; victory or defeat to the
army. In civil life it aids incalculably in promoting prosperity, the
ability to give instant attention to matters coming up for
consideration being one of the first qualifications of the successful
business man. And if he has not such ability originally it may be
imparted to him as a habit, by early training. Miss Morton did not
begin too early; and the teachers who followed her did not persist too
earnestly in the endeavor to impress this habit deeply on the minds of
their pupils.
When my own children were beginning to be interested in juvenile
literature, they found great pleasure in reading again and again “The
William Henry Letters” and other stories by Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz. On
making inquiry I was much gratified to learn that Mrs. Diaz was our
Abby Morton of the Brook Farm Kindergarten. It was no wonder she could
write letters and stories appealing to children. Her understanding and
her sympathies brought her in close touch with them. She knew their
minds and their hearts, their likes and their dislikes and what she
wrote of them and for them they accepted, knowing that every word was
true to nature. It is observable too, that in her writings she still
holds to the purpose of illustrating to her young readers the necessity
of early acquiring the habit of paying attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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