How the Educational Formula should run––This is, perhaps, how the educational formula should run: Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin; and,
’God has made us so’
that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; therefore, in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall prosper, whether this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.
The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore, hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil ideas.
The initial idea begets subsequent ideas; therefore, take care that children get right primary ideas on the great relations and duties of life.
Every study, every line of thought, has its ‘guiding idea’; therefore, the study of a child makes for living education in proportion as it is quickened by the guiding idea ‘which stands at the head.’