Counsels to Parents, Teachers, and Students

The Ideal Plan

Parents should be the only teachers of their children until they have reached eight or ten years of age. As fast as their minds can comprehend it, the parents should open before them God's great book of nature. The mother should have less love for the artificial in her house and in the preparation of her dress for display, and should take time to cultivate, in herself and in her children, a love for the beautiful buds and opening flowers. By calling the attention of her children to the different colors and variety of forms, she can make them acquainted with God, who made all the beautiful things which attract and delight them. She can lead their minds up to their Creator, and awaken in their young hearts a love for their heavenly Father, who has manifested so great love for them. Parents can associate God with all His created works. CT 79.2

The only schoolroom for children until eight or ten years of age should be in the open air, amid the opening flowers and nature's beautiful scenery, and their most familiar textbook the treasures of nature. These lessons, imprinted upon the minds of young children amid the pleasant, attractive scenes of nature, will not be soon forgotten.... CT 80.1

In the early education of children, many parents and teachers fail to understand that the greatest attention needs to be given to the physical constitution, that a healthy condition of body and mind may be secured. It has been the custom to encourage children to attend school when they were mere babes needing a mother's care. When of a delicate age, they are frequently crowded into ill-ventilated schoolrooms, where they sit in wrong positions upon poorly constructed benches, and as a result the young and tender frames of some have become deformed. CT 80.2

The disposition and habits of youth will be very likely to be manifested in mature manhood. You may bend a young tree into almost any shape that you choose, and if it remains and grows as you have bent it, it will be a deformed tree, and will ever tell of the injury and abuse received at your hands. You may, after it has had years of growth, try to straighten the tree, but all efforts will prove unavailing. It will ever be a crooked tree. CT 80.3

This is the case with the minds of youth. They should be carefully and tenderly trained in childhood. They may be trained in the right direction or in the wrong, and in their future lives they will pursue the course in which they were directed in youth. The habits formed in youth will grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength.... CT 81.1