The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the SouthwestSparks, W. H. (William Henry)
History
The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest
Sparks, W. H. (William Henry)
Georgia -- History -- 1775-1865; Southwest, Old -- History; United States -- Biography
The whole system of education, as practised by the Protestants of the
United States, is wrong; religious prejudice prevents their learning
from the Catholics, and particularly from the Jesuit Catholics, who are
far in advance of their Protestant brethren. They learn from the child
as they teach the child. In the first place, none are permitted to
teach who are not by nature, as well as by education, qualified to
teach; nature must give the gentleness, the kindness, and the patience,
with the capacity to impart instruction. They learn, first, the child's
nature, the peculiarities of temper, and fashion these to obedience and
affection; they first teach the heart to love--not fear; they warn
against the evils of life--teach the good, and the child's duties to
its parents, to its brothers and sisters, to its teachers, to its
playmates, and to its God. When the heart is mellowed and yields
obedience in the faithful discharge of these duties, and the brain
sufficiently matured to comprehend the necessity of them, then
attention is directed to the mind; its capacities are learned and
known, and it is treated as this knowledge teaches is proper: it is, as
the farmer knows, the soil of his cultivation, and is prepared by
careful tillage before the seed is sown. The vision of the child's mind
is by degrees expanded; the horizon of its knowledge is enlarged, and
still the heart's culture goes on in kindness and affection. The pupil
has learned to love the teacher, and receives with alacrity his
teaching; he goes to him, without fear, for information on every point
of duty in morals, as on every difficult point of literary learning. He
knows he will be received kindly, and dealt with gently. Should he err,
he is never rebuked in public, nor harshly in private; the teacher is
aggrieved, and in private he kindly complains to the offender, whose
love for his preceptor makes him to feel, and repent, and to err no
more. All this is only known to the two; his school-fellows never know,
and have no opportunity for triumph or raillery. Thus taught from the
cradle, principles become habits; and on these, at maturity, he is
launched upon the world, with every safeguard for his future life. So
with the girl. With the experience of forty-five years, the writer has
never known a vicious, bad woman, wife, or mother trained in a Jesuit
convent, or reared by an educated Catholic mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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