309.  With regard to girls, one would think that mothers would want no argument to make them shudder at the thought of committing the care of their daughters to other hands than their own.  If fortune have so favoured them as to make them rationally desirous that their daughters should have more of what are called accomplishments than they themselves have, it has also favoured them with the means of having teachers under their own eye.  If it have not favoured them so highly as this (and it seldom has in the middle rank of life), what duty so sacred as that imposed on a mother to be the teacher of her daughters!  And is she, from love of ease or of pleasure or of any thing else, to neglect this duty; is she to commit her daughters to the care of persons, with whose manners and morals it is impossible for her to be thoroughly acquainted; is she to send them into the promiscuous society of girls, who belong to nobody knows whom, and come from nobody knows whither, and some of whom, for aught she can know to the contrary, may have been corrupted before, and sent thither to be hidden from their former circle; is she to send her daughters to be shut up within walls, the bare sight of which awaken the idea of intrigue and invite to seduction and surrender; is she to leave the health of her daughters to chance, to shut them up with a motley bevy of strangers, some of whom, as is frequently the case, are proclaimed bastards, by the undeniable testimony given by the colour of their skin; is she to do all this, and still put forward pretensions to the authority and the affection due to a mother!  And, are you to permit all this, and still call yourself a father!

310.  Well, then, having resolved to teach your own children, or, to have them taught, at home, let us now see how they ought to proceed as to books for learning.  It is evident, speaking of boys, that, at last, they must study the art, or science, that you intend them to pursue; if they be to be surgeons, they must read books on surgery; and the like in other cases.  But, there are certain elementary studies; certain books to be used by all persons, who are destined to acquire any book-learning at all.  Then there are departments, or branches of knowledge, that every man in the middle rank of life, ought, if he can, to acquire, they being, in some sort, necessary to his reputation as a well-informed man, a character to which the farmer and the shopkeeper ought to aspire as well as the lawyer and the surgeon.  Let me now, then, offer my advice as to the course of reading, and the manner of reading, for a boy, arrived at his fourteenth year, that being, in my opinion, early enough for him to begin.