Thirty-five years ago, when I was a college student, people wrote letters. The businessman who read, the lawyer who traveled; the ...dressmaker in evening school, my unhappy mother, our expectant neighbor: all conducted an often large and varied correspondence. It was the accustomed way of ordinarily educated people to occupy the world beyond their own small and immediate lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird Theory, which flies before it. Try your design on the best sc...hool. The scholars are of all ages and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult to class them, some are too young, some are slow, some perverse. Each requires so much consideration, that the morning hope of the teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often closed at evening by despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their lunch...eon.... I read these things at a vast advantage there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the most useful, natural, and respectable. Almost all the opinions and sentiments expressed were so little considered, so shallow and flimsy, that I thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear the more easily. The advertisements and the prices current were more closely allied to nature, and were respectable in some measure as tide and meteorological tables are; but the reading-matter ... unless it was some humble record of science, or an extract from some old classic, struck me as strangely whimsical, and crude, and one-idea'd, like a school-boy's theme, such as youths write and after burn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... much less time should be given to school, and much more to domestic employments, especially in the wealthier classes. A little... girl may begin, at five or six years of age, to assist her mother: and, if properly trained, by the time she is ten, she can render essential aid. From this time, until she is fourteen or fifteen, it should be the principal object of her education to secure a strong and healthy constitution, and a thorough practical knowledge of all kinds of domestic employments. During this period, though some attention ought to be paid to intellectual culture, it ought to be made altogether secondary in importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school w...as taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thou Fair-haired Angel of the Evening, Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light... Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
School days, school days; dear old golden rule days. Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic; taught to the tune of a hick'ry stic...k.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nevertheless, no school can work well for children if parents and teachers do not act in partnership on behalf of the children's b...est interests. Parents have every right to understand what is happening to their children at school, and teachers have the responsibility to share that information without prejudicial judgment.... Such communication, which can only be in a child's interest, is not possible without mutual trust between parent and teacher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The young love and cherish people and places from which they receive the skills and the emotional support which enable them to mak...e it in the world or to meet their basic human needs. The same people and places are often the first recipients of the frustration and anger--violence, vandalism, disrespect--of young people who are not making it well in the world. I suspect that this is the reason that personal and school property violence is increasing more rapidly than school burglary and dropout rates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children in home-school conflict situations often receive a double message from their parents: "The school is the hope for your fu...ture, listen, be good and learn" and "the school is your enemy. . . ." Children who receive the "school is the enemy" message often go after the enemy--act up, undermine the teacher, undermine the school program, or otherwise exercise their veto power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »