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Let me repeat that we cannot expect any real improvement in education, and improvement that shall be felt throughout an extensive sphere, and that shall continue to spread in the progress of time, increasing in vigour as it proceeds, - we cannot expect any improvement of that character, unless we begin by educating mothers.
It is their duty, in the domestic circle, to do what school instruction has not the means of accomplishing; to give to every individual child that degree of attention which in a school is absorbed in the management of the whole; to let their heart speak in cases where the heart is the best judge; to gain by affection what authority could never have commanded. But it is their duty also to turn all the stock of their knowledge to account, and to let their children have the benefit of it.
I am aware that, under the present circumstances, many mothers would either declare themselves or would be looked upon by others as incompetent to attempt any such thing; as so poor in knowledge and so unpractised in communicating knowledge that such an undertaking on their part would appear as vain and presumptuous.
Now this is a fact which, as far as experience goes, I am abound to deny. I am not now speaking of those classes or individuals whose education has been, if not very diligently, at least in some measure attended to. I have now in view a mother whose education has, from some circumstances or other, been totally neglected. I will suppose one who is even ignorant of reading and writing though in no country in which the schools are in a proper state you would meet with an individual deficient in this respect. I will add, a young and inexperienced mother.
Now, I will venture to say that this poor and wholly ignorant, this young and inexperienced mother, is (not quite destitute) of the means of assisting even in the intellectual development of her child.
However small may be the stock of her experience, however moderate her own faculties, she must be aware that she is acquainted with an infinite number of facts, such, we will say, as they occur in common life, to which her infant is yet a stranger. She must be aware that it will be useful to the infant to become soon acquainted with some of them, such, for instance, as refer to things with which it is likely to come into contact. She must feel herself able to give her child the possession of a variety of names simply by bringing the objects themselves before the child, pronouncing the names and making the child repeat them. She must feel herself able to bring such objects before the child in a sort of natural order - the different parts, for instance, of a fruit. Let no one despise these things because they are little. There was a time when we were ignorant even of the least of them; and there are those to whom we have reason to be thankful for teaching us these little things.