The discussions which have of late occupied the public mind regarding the polemics of education, have, we fear, had an injurious influence on the real progress of education amongst us. Some tell us that it is the bounden duty of the State to educate the democracy; and others inform us that the Church of the country is the proper instructress of the people. Without attempting to expose by facts, or assail in abstractions, the reasoning of these different classes, we would remark, that in the world children have to toil, to struggle, to resist, to endure—to labour long, and to wait patiently for a distant and even, to a certain extent, precarious result; and the school for the kind of lore which fits for that is around the domestic hearth.
A powerful influence is exerted by the family circle, in the formation of character. While all real formation must be self-formation, we cannot deny the moulding agencies of home life. Indeed the plastic power of home is so great as to be almost appalling. Home society works on the very foundations of character, and at no stage of life is social influence so strong as in youth; and no influence is so powerful as that of a mother over a daughter. Whence issues that moral influence which, to the tender mind, is paramount over all formal teaching? Primarily and supremely from the mother. The histories of all who have risen above the level of their compeers, shows that the largest and most potent share of influence lies with the mother. God’s plan of reforming communities is to train families. When an architect was asked how he built one of the lofty chimneys which stud some parts of Lancashire, he replied, “I built it up from within.” Nations are built up in the same manner. The future mothers of a people are the best protectresses of a state from moral deteriorations. When every cottage in our land shall be blest with a well educated female, bearing the noble distinctions of wife, mother, and Christian! we may hope that the vilest wanderer will be reclaimed to the sweet bonds of household allegiance.
“How pleasing,” says Dr. Winter Hamilton, “are the touches of domestic tenderness and order, which some incidental passage, in a classical author unfolds, as marking the Roman common life. We are accustomed to think of it only in its severer forms. We call up before our minds unrelenting sternness and stoicism. But the parental character was not despoiled of its nature. It was beheld in the most ardent desire to train offspring for all social duties. While it assiduously prepared them for the state, it resigned not that business to it. Thus in the Adelphi of Terence, the wit of Syrus does not hide from us the paternal influence in education. ‘_Ut quisque suum vult esse, ita est._’ Nor does the weakness of Demea conceal the indefatigable earnestness of that influence:—