If there is no science in words, there is no study especially adapted to children. If they have no real ideas, they have no real memory; for I do not call that memory which retains only impressions. Of what use is it to write on their minds a catalogue of signs that represent nothing to them? In learning the things represented, would they not also learn the signs? Why do you give them the useless trouble of learning them twice? Besides, you create dangerous prejudices by making them suppose that science consists of words meaningless to them. The first mere word with which the child satisfies himself, the first thing he learns on the authority of another person, ruins his judgment. Long must he shine in the eyes of unthinking persons before he can repair such an injury to himself.
No; nature makes the child's brain so yielding that it receives all kinds of impressions; not that we may make his childhood a distressing burden to him by engraving on that brain dates, names of kings, technical terms in heraldry, mathematics, geography, and all such words, unmeaning to him and unnecessary to persons at any age in life. But all ideas that he can understand, and that are of use to him, all that conduce to his happiness and that will one day make his duties plain, should early write themselves there indelibly, to guide him through life as his condition and his intellect require.
The memory of which a child is capable is far from inactive, even without the use of books. All he sees and hears impresses him, and he remembers it. He keeps a mental register of people's sayings and doings. Everything around him is the book from which he is continually but unconsciously enriching his memory against the time his judgment can benefit by it. If we intend rightly to cultivate this chief faculty of the mind, we must choose these objects carefully, constantly acquainting him with such as he ought to understand, and keeping back those he ought not to know. In this way we should endeavor to make his mind a storehouse of knowledge, to aid in his education in youth, and to direct him at all times. This method does not, it is true, produce phenomenal children, nor does it make the reputation of their teachers; but it produces judicious, robust men, sound in body and in mind, who, although not admired in youth, will make themselves respected in manhood.
