Physical education can be given, even from infancy, with the help of music. An infant should be made to move its hands and feet up and down, and as it grows it should be taught to do it rhythmically. When a child grows up, when it can dance and play different games, gymnastics should be taught, in such a way that the child may benefit by them but that they do not become a tedious work but a recreation.

Regularity is desirable in the building up of the personality of a child. It is habit which forms nature, but nature has no habit. It is always beneficial for a child to eat when hungry, to rest when tired. In this way the child makes its own nature instead of becoming subject to habits. Pure and nourishing food is necessary for a child while it grows. It needs all kinds of food to nourish its growth; also a child must have good long hours of sleep according to the needs of each child. At the same time a certain part of the day must be kept for the child to rest, and it must be done in such a manner that the child, whose natural tendency is to be active, may gladly take this rest. This can be done by telling it a story or giving it some work of art to look at, or by letting the child hear some music.

It is a popular belief that the childhood diseases most children go through are more or less inevitable. This is not so; they are caused by the artificiality of life.

A great deal of excitement, crying or laughing naturally upsets the rhythm of a child's body and mind. It is always wise to give the child, for its equilibrium, scope for action and reaction in everything it does. If a child is afraid of something, the best way to help it is to make it acquainted with the thing it is afraid of.

It is not advisable that the child should be taught always in the house, nor always at school. The study should be divided, partly indoors and partly outdoors. The teaching given to a child indoors should be different from the study given out of doors. The outdoor study should concern all that the child sees; one can then include the practice or the experience of what it has learned indoors. In short, a child's health must be considered as part of its education; study and health go together.

Together with physical culture, mental training is very necessary for a child. There are two things which ought to be remembered: one is to develop the mental power of the child, the other to give fineness to a child's mentality. Very often the development in a certain direction hinders the progress in some other direction. In the first place, to make its mentality strong, the child should be taught to concentrate its mind through study and play. It should be given some enterprise which takes most of its attention in one direction, making the child single-minded.

The child must be kept from excitement or passion of any kind, for it is tranquillity of mind which gives a child strength, balance, self-control, self-confidence, and determination. It also strengthens the child's mentality, and it is certainly on the strength of the mentality that success in life chiefly depends. But strong mentality does not suffice for every purpose of life; besides strength, fineness is necessary. In order to develop this fineness in a child, every help must be given to sharpen its wits. Wit needs an opportunity to develop and that opportunity can be given by training a child to grasp things. A certain amount of encouragement can also be given to stimulate its wits. A child must be helped to perceive keenly what time is suitable for a certain action, what it can say or do at one time and what it should not say and do at another time. Great care should be taken in teaching good manners to a child, so that in time it may become natural to show in its manner the beauty hidden in its soul. Fine mentality can be seen in keen perception, in love of subtlety, and in the gracefulness and refinement of manner which complete mental culture.

Moral education depends upon three things: the right direction of love, a keen sense of harmony, and the proper understanding of beauty. The child should be taught to make the right use of its emotional and sentimental faculties; and the right use is to show its charity of heart in generous actions, and first to its immediate surroundings. The child must learn that love means sacrifice; also it must know that love is best expressed in service of any kind; that emotion is best used in kind action, and sentiment in creating harmony. A child must understand that love should be shown by being considerate, and its sentiment must teach it respect and consideration for others.

A child is a growing plant and it needs not only bodily nourishment, but also the nourishment of the heart; and that is best taught by loving the child and by reciprocating its love. And yet it must be taught balance, to keep its emotion within certain bounds and limitations. A child must be taught the use of love through the expression of sweetness in its thought, speech, and action. A wrongly given love spoils the child by making it rude, vain, and indifferent. One must not show all one's love to one's children, especially not in any emotional form. One must have a certain amount of reserve in one's own self, for the child to take example by and to follow. An excessive amount of reserve may imply want of love, which is fruitless at times; a balance of love and reserve in dealing with a child is the right thing.

It is very important to cultivate the spirit of generosity in the child's heart. Generosity does not necessarily mean extravagance or lack of consideration for things one possesses. The real spirit of generosity is best expressed in charity of heart. Obeying, respecting, serving, learning, responding, all this comes from charity of heart, and it grows by developing generosity of nature.

One must protect the child against the inclination to be led astray by others, for a generous child is often subject to misleading influences. Also it must be kept from being generous with other people's things, even with the possessions of its own parents. Generosity on the part of a child is only the opening of the heart. When the heart of a child is closed, the child is deprived of expression; and when once it has started in this way its entire Life develops on the same lines. It is the generosity of the heart which is the mystery of genius, for to give expression to art or science, poetry or music, the heart must be opened first; and this can only be accomplished by the generosity of the heart. Tolerance, forgiveness, endurance, fortitude, are all the outcome of this virtue.

A friendly spirit is the natural spirit of the soul. Nothing in the child should be encouraged which forms an obstacle to its friendly tendency; but it is the responsibility of the parents to watch with whom the child wants to be friends, and to keep the child always in the company of desirable children. The guardian must not make the child feel that it is deprived of the choice of its friends, but it should be guided in order to keep it among desirable friends.

The freedom of the child must always be considered; it should never be forced but only guided gently. One should produce in a child the desire to choose as its friends those whom it feels to be congenial. As soon as the liberty of a child is interfered with, the child begins to feel itself captive and the lantern of its conscience becomes dim. Therefore the duty of the parents is to guide the child constantly, yet freeing it gradually to make a choice in everything in life. Parents who do not understand this and do not attach sufficient importance to it, very often cause the child to go astray while trying to guide it.

A child should learn to recognize its relation and duty to all those around it. One should let it know what is expected of it by its father, mother, brothers, and sisters; for the recognition of relationship is the sign of human character which is not seen among animals. A son who has not been a good son to his mother will not be a good husband to his wife, for he has missed his first chance of developing thoughtfulness and the love quality. But as the child grows it must be led to have some idea of the further relationship between human beings. For the world is a family, and the right attitude of a young soul must be to see in every man his brother and in every woman his sister; he must look on aged people as he would on his father or mother.

The betterment of the world mostly depends upon the development of the coming generation. The ideal of human brotherhood should be taught at home; this does not mean that the child must recognize human brotherhood before recognizing the relationship with his own brothers and sisters; but the relationship at home must be the first lesson in human brotherhood which the child may reach by realizing the brotherhood of the nation, of the race, and then of the world. It is a fault when a person does not progress in the path of brotherhood. The child should be taught to picture first its own town as a family, then its nation as a family, and then the entire continent as a family, in order to arrive at the idea that the whole world is a family.

A child should know the moral of give and take; it must know that it should give to others what it wishes to receive from them. The great fault of humanity today is that everyone seeks to get the better of others, by which one is often caught in one's own net. Fair dealing in business and in a profession and the honoring of one's word are most necessary today. It is the spirit of brotherhood which will solve the problems of business and professions, as of education and politics, which are so difficult to solve at present owing to the absence of brotherly feeling.

The education of the younger generation needs the spiritual ideal more than anything else. Since the world has become so materialistic man has almost lost sight of the main object of life, which is the spiritual ideal. Spiritual ideal does not mean that children should necessarily be attached to any particular faith, or that any particular Church should be forced upon them. What is needed is simply to give some ideal to the child to look forward to, some high ideal, yet one which the chad's mind can conceive. The divine ideal has been given to mankind for spiritual attainment in all periods of the world's history, and humanity will never outgrow that ideal.

Whatever be the stage of human progress, the divine ideal will be the only ideal which will help both old and young to steer their way through the sea of life. It is the loss of divine ideal which causes the breakdown in the life of individuals and of humanity in general; the cause of paralysis in modern progress is no other than the loss of divine ideal. Man, revolting against existing religion or religious authority, has naturally forgotten the divine ideal, which is really the one yearning of his soul. A time has come when man has neither his ancestors" religion nor a religion of his own.

A child must learn that there is some ideal; that towards that ideal the whole of humanity is unconsciously or consciously progressing. The child must know that it is responsible for all it does, not only to its fellow-men, but to someone who watches it constantly and from whom nothing can be hidden; that however much justice may seem to be suffering in the world, there is somewhere the balance of justice which in time must balance things; and that death is only a bridge by which the soul passes from one sphere to another. The child which respects age, which is considerate for the elderly in its surroundings, and which imagines them to be an ideal that is to be followed, shows it has religion in itself.

Spiritual ideal is the natural inclination of every soul. It needs no great effort to guide a child towards spirituality; it is more difficult to keep a child from it, which many parents do today who are anxious about their child being drawn towards spiritual ideals. No doubt, too much religion is not good for a child; it makes the child fixed in its ideas, and takes away the liquidity that every soul naturally possesses. Giving the child ideas of spirits or ghosts or of heaven and hell is not desirable. The child's imagination should be kept within the range of its reasoning, and yet reason must not be made an obstacle in the way of the child's imagination. For very often the child's imagination goes further than that of its parents, and it would be cruel to hinder it by limiting the child to one's own religious and material ideas. The principal thing in spirituality is gentleness of life; in other words: sincerity. The child must be taught to say what it means. If it is by nature artistic in its expression, which is often seen in exceptionally intelligent children, then the child must be kept close to reality, in order that it may not be led astray by the art of its intelligent expression.

Before the child goes to bed, it should be taught, in some form or other, to think gratefully of the One from whom all goodness comes and to whom all is known. The child may also be taught to wish good to all in the name of the One who has created all. What a child should wish for its parents or for others is good health, long life, right guidance from above, prosperity, success, happiness, and love.