free exercise of voice and limbs: but do not keep him dumb and
motionless as a statue--his blood and his intellect both in a state
of stagnation, and his spirit below zero. Do not send him in quest of
knowledge alone, but let him have cheerful companionship on his way;
for, depend upon it, that the man who expects too much either in
discipline or morals from a boy, is not in my opinion, acquainted
with human nature. If an urchin titter at his own joke, or that of
another--if he give him a jab of a pin under the desk, imagine not that
it will do him an injury, whatever phrenologists may say concerning the
organ of destructiveness. It is an exercise to the mind, and he will
return to his business with greater vigor and effect. Children are not
men, nor influenced by the same motives--they do not reflect, because
their capacity for reflection is imperfect; so is their reason: whereas
on the contrary, their faculties for education (excepting judgment,
which strengthens my argument) are in greater vigor in youth than in
manhood. The general neglect of this distinction is, I am convinced,
a stumbling-block in the way of youthful instruction, though it
characterizes all our modern systems. We should never forget that they
are children; nor should we bind them by a system, whose standard is
taken from the maturity of human intellect. We may bend our reason to
theirs, but we cannot elevate their capacity to our own. We may produce
an external appearance, sufficiently satisfactory to ourselves; but, in
the meantime, it is probable that the child may be growing in hypocrisy,
and settling down into the habitual practice of a fictitious character.

But another and more serious objection may be urged against the present
strictness of scholastic discipline--which is, that it deprives the
boy of a sense of free and independent agency. I speak this with
limitations, for a master should be a monarch in his school, but by no
means a tyrant; and decidedly the very worst species of tyranny is
that which stretches the young mind upon the rod of too rigorous a
discipline--like the despot who exacted from his subjects so many
barrels of perspiration, whenever there came a long and severe frost. Do
not familiarize the mind when young to the toleration of slavery, lest
it prove afterwards incapable of recognizing and relishing the principle
of an honest and manly independence. I have known many children, on
whom a rigor of discipline, affecting t