CHAPTER V.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
1. A certain author advises that we ought “to pray for a sound mind in a sound body.”[1] But we ought to labor as well as to pray, since God promises the blessings to the industrious, and not to the indolent. Inasmuch, however, as babies cannot labor, nor know how to pour out prayers to God, it becomes the parents to discharge this duty, so as to zealously train up what they have procreated to the glory of God.
2. Above all things it should be the parents’ first care to preserve the health of their offspring, since they cannot train them up successfully unless they be lively and vigorous; for what proficiency can be made with the sickly and the morbid? Inasmuch as this matter depends mainly upon mothers,[2] it seems requisite to counsel them for their sake.
- ↑ Montaigne in L’institution des Enfants (Paris, 1888) says: “I would have the youth’s outward behavior and mien and the disposition of his limbs formed at the same time with his mind. It is not a soul, it is not a body, that we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him.”
- ↑ Pestalozzi also maintains that the mother is the natural educator of the child. In Comment Gertrude Instruit ses Enfants (Paris, 1887), he says: It is the main design of my method to make home instruction again possible to our neglected people, and to induce eyery mother whose heart beats for her child to make use of my elementary exercises.” Again in Christoph und Else (Berlin, 1869); “A pious mother who teaches her own children seems to me the finest sight on earth.”
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