The Ideal Plan Parents should be the only teachers of their children until they have reached eight or ten years of age. As fast as their minds can comprehend it, the parents should open before them God’s great book of nature. The mother should have less love for the artificial in her house and in the preparation of her dress for display, and should take time to cultivate, in herself and in her children, a love for the beautiful buds and opening flowers. By calling the attention of her children to the different colors and variety of forms, she can make them acquainted with God, who made all the beautiful things which attract and delight them. She can lead their minds up to their Creator, and awaken in their young hearts a love for their heavenly Father, who has manifested so great love for them. Parents can associate God with all His created works. {CT 79.2} The only schoolroom for children until eight or ten years of age should be in the open air, amid the opening flowers and nature’s beautiful scenery, and their most familiar textbook the treasures of nature. These lessons, imprinted upon the minds of young children amid the pleasant, attractive scenes of nature, will not be soon forgotten.... {CT 80.1} In the early education of children, many parents and teachers fail to understand that the greatest attention needs to be given to the physical constitution, that a healthy condition of body and mind may be secured. It has been the custom to encourage children to attend school when they were mere babes needing a mother’s care. When of a delicate age, they are frequently crowded into ill-ventilated schoolrooms, where they sit in wrong positions upon poorly constructed benches, and as a result the young and tender frames of some have become deformed. {CT 80.2} The disposition and habits of youth will be very likely to be manifested in mature manhood. You may bend a young tree into almost any shape that you choose, and if it remains and grows as you have bent it, it will be a deformed tree, and will ever tell of the injury and abuse received at your hands. You may, after it has had years of growth, try to straighten the tree, but all efforts will prove unavailing. It will ever be a crooked tree. {CT 80.3} This is the case with the minds of youth. They should be carefully and tenderly trained in childhood. They may be trained in the right direction or in the wrong, and in their future lives they will pursue the course in which they were directed in youth. The habits formed in youth will grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength.... {CT 81.1} Physical Degeneracy Man came from the hand of his Creator perfect and beautiful in form, and so filled with vital force that it was more than a thousand years before his corrupt appetites and passions and general violations of physical law were sensibly felt upon the race. More recent generations have felt the pressure of infirmity and disease more rapidly and heavily with every generation. The vital forces have been greatly weakened by the indulgence of appetite and lustful passion.... The violation of physical law, and the consequence,—human suffering,—have so long prevailed that men and women look upon the present state of sickness, suffering, debility, and premature death as the appointed lot of humanity.... {CT 81.2} The strange absence of principle which characterizes this generation, and which is shown in their disregard of the laws of life and health, is astonishing.... With the majority the principal anxiety is, What shall I eat? what shall I drink? and wherewithal shall I be clothed? ... The moral powers are weakened because men and women will not live in obedience to the laws of health and make this great subject a personal duty.... The majority ... remain in ignorance of the laws of their being, and indulge appetite and passion at the expense of intellect and morals; and they seem willing to remain in ignorance of the result of their violation of nature’s laws. They indulge the depraved appetite in the use of slow poisons, which corrupt the blood and undermine the nervous force, and in consequence bring upon themselves sickness and death.... {CT 81.3} Importance of Home Training One great cause of the existing deplorable state of things is that parents do not feel under obligation to bring up their children to conform to physical law. Mothers love their children with an idolatrous love and indulge their appetite when they know that it will injure their health and thereby bring upon them disease and unhappiness. This cruel kindness is manifested to a great extent in the present generation. The desires of children are gratified at the expense of health and happy tempers, because it is easier for the mother, for the time being, to gratify them than to withhold that for which they clamor. Thus mothers are sowing the seed that will spring up and bear fruit. {CT 82.1}
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:17:41 +0000
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