Читать книгу The Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster онлайн

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The best way to secure good progress, so that the intelligence may conceive clearly, memory may hold fast, and judgment may choose and discern the best, is so to ply them that all may proceed voluntarily, and not with violence, so that the will may be ready to do well, and loth to do ill, and all fear of correction may be entirely absent. Surely to beat for not learning a child that is willing enough to learn, but whose intelligence is defective, is worse than madness.

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The duty of leading children to cleave to the good and forsake the bad, in matters of ordinary conduct, is shared by all who come in contact with them; it belongs to the parents by nature, to schoolmasters by the charge committed to them, to neighbours as a matter of courtesy, and to people in general on the ground of a common humanity. Teachers, it is true, have special opportunities of influencing the morals and manners of children, by means of the authority they naturally exercise, in teaching them what is best, and inducing them to practise it, even by force at first, till they come to appreciate it for themselves. But this control of good manners is not for teachers alone, for as I have said, they must co-operate with the parents, to whom that duty naturally appertains most nearly, as they have the fullest authority over the children. Wherefore, reserving for the teacher only so much as strictly belongs to him, in instructing the child what is best in good manners, and in framing good regulations and seeing that they are properly carried out, I refer the rest to those who are the appointed guardians of morals, to secure either by private discipline at home, or by public control outside, that young people are well brought up to distinguish the good from the bad, the seemly from the unseemly, that they may know God, serve their country, be a comfort to their friends, and help one another, as good fellow-citizens are bound to do. But the task of training their intelligence and memory belongs wholly to the teacher, and I will now proceed to deal with it.