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Page 23
No mother can read these statements unmoved--statements, remember, not
my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which,
therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider. I
know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, "What can I do?"
I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, "Everything,"--with God's
help.
I
And now let us enter into practical details. We will begin with the
outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.
First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy's
father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a
boarding-school.
As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course,
considerable difficulty. I have always found the best way is through
mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know
through them what really goes on. In this way, as mothers wake up to the
danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them,
we shall be able to help one another more and more. But make a point of
yourself, as well as the boy's father, personally seeing the master to
whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with
him. In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will
strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is
to your heart. What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men
who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced
by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money
down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their
inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own
children.
Here let me give you two most earnest cautions. Do not attach too much
importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards. One of
our most successful head-masters says:
"I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of
a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of
arrangements. Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in
the highest perfection. They cannot afford to have them otherwise.
Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted
sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flourishing,
schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are
hopelessly inefficient in every particular. Of course, many a
parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these
mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he
can form his judgment. Let me assure him that they are entirely
untrustworthy."
Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called
"religious" school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own
religious opinions. The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school
where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting! We must boldly
face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the
religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious
forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to
prove a hot-bed of impurity. Choose a school with a high moral tone,
with religion as an underlying principle--a practical religion, that
inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise
proverb of Solomon, "In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the
lips tendeth to penury."
Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your
boy sent away at too early an age. Do you really think that the
exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their
foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions
of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not
always clean in the researches they inspire, and _always_ false in their
results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler's words,
"the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness
of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and
loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly--scarcely to be
distinguished in its effects from these influences--the sweetness,
the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy,
frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock,
or stable?"
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