he child is sent with no home-training whatever, to be trained up a
fashionable doll, fit to be played with and dandled upon the arms of a
whining and heartless society, with no preparation for companionship in
life, destitute of substantial character, with undoctrinated feelings of
aversion to religion, fit only for a puppet show in some gay and
thoughtless circle; kneeling before fashion as her God, and giving her hand
in marriage only to a golden and a gilded calf.

According to this abuse of home-education, "a young maiden is kept in the
nursery and the school room, like a ship on the stocks, while she is
furbished with abundance of showy accomplishments, and is launched like the
ship, looking taut and trim, but empty of everything that can make her
useful." Thus one great abuse of home-education is to substitute the
boarding school for home-culture,--to send our children to such school at
an age when they should he trained by and live under the direct influence
of the parent. This generally ends in initiated profligacy, and alienation
from home, while at best but a dunce after his course of training is
ended.

"Would you your son should be a sot and a dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once?
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise."

Too often is it the case that the artifices and refinements of our
fashionable boarding-schools, have a most withering influence upon body,
mind and soul, enfeebling and distorting the body, producing depraved
stomachs, whimsical nerves, peevish tempers, indolent minds, and depraved
morals. They become but wrecks of what they were when they first entered
the school. This has been called "the stiff and starched system of muslin
education," and is the nursery of pale, sickly, listless, peevish children.

But this is not the only abuse of home-education. Even when the training is
begun at home, the very idea of education is often abused, because
inefficient, destitute of true moral elements, and partial both as to the
mode and as to the substance of it. The true resources of life are not
developed; there is no instruction given in the principles and conditions
of temporal and eternal well-being; there is no discipline of the mind, or
body or morals. But the great idea and aim of education with many parents
now, is to teach the child to read and write and cipher as a means of
making money and getting along in this world,--not, o