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Chapter II THE HABITS OF APPLICATION, ETC.   Rapid Mental Effort.—The habits of mental activity and of application are trained by the very means employed to cultivate that of attention. The child may plod diligently through his work who might be trained to rapid mental effort. The teacher herself must be alert, must expect instant answers, quick thought, rapid work. […]

Chapter I THE HABIT OF ATTENTION  Let us pass on, now, to the consideration of a group of mental habits which are affected by direct training rather than by example.          First, we put the habit of Attention, because the highest intellectual gifts  depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner

PART IV SOME HABITS OF MIND—SOME MORAL HABITS ——♦♦—— A Science of Education.—Allow me to say once more, that I venture to write upon subjects bearing on home education with the greatest deference to mothers; believing, that in virtue of their peculiar insight into the dispositions of their own children, they are blest with both

Chapter IX PHYSICAL EXERCISES Importance of Daily.—The subject of the natural training of eye and muscles was taken up pretty fully in treating of ‘Out-of-door Life.’ I will only add, that to give the child pleasure in light and easy motion—the sort of delight in the management of his own body that a good rider

Chapter VIII INFANT ‘HABITS’  The whole group of habitudes, half physical and half moral, on which the propriety and comfort ofp.125everyday life depend, are received passively by the child; that is, he does very little to form these habits himself, but his brain receives impressions from what he sees about him; and these impressions take

Chapter VII THE FORMING OF A HABIT—‘SHUT THE DOOR AFTER YOU’ “Do ye next thinge.”           “Lose this day loitering, and ’twill be the same story          To-morrow; and the next, more dilatory:          The indecision brings its own delays,          And days are lost, lamenting o’er lost days,” says Marlowe, who, like many of us, knew the

Chapter VI THE PHYSIOLOGY OF HABIT   A work of Dr Carpenter’s was perhaps the first which gave me the clue I was in search of. In his Mental Physiology—a most interesting book,p.112by the way—he works out the analogy between mental and physical activity, and shows that the correspondence in effect is due to a correspondence

Chapter V THE LAYING DOWN OF LINES OF HABIT      ‘Begin it, and the thing will be completed!’ is infallibly true of every mental and moral habitude: completed, not on the lines you foresee and intend, but on the lines appropriate and necessary to that particular habitude. In the phrase ‘unconsciousp.108cerebration’ we are brought face to face

Chapter IV HABIT MAY SUPPLANT ‘NATURE’  ‘Habit is ten natures.’ If that be true, strong as nature is, habit is not only as strong, but tenfold as strong. Here, then, have we a stronger than he, able to overcome this strong man armed.           Habit runs on the Lines of Nature.—But habit runs on the lines

Chapter III WHAT IS ‘NATURE’?   ‘Habit is ten natures,’ went on being proclaimed in my ears; and at last it came home to me as a weighty saying, which might contain the educational ‘Open, sesame!’ I was in quest of. In the first place, what is Nature, and what, precisely, is Habit?