under our control.  We must open our garden to such influences as shall bring forward all the plants, each in a way corresponding to its own nature.  It is impossible if it were wise, and it would be foolish if it were possible, to stimulate, by artificial means, the rose, in hope of its reaching the size and magnitude of the apple-tree, or to try to cultivate the fig and the orange where wheat only will grow.  No; it should be the teacher’s main design to shelter his pupils from every deleterious influence, and to bring every thing to bear upon the community of minds before him which will encourage in each one the development of its own native powers.  For the rest, he must remember that his province is to cultivate, not to create.

Error on this point is very common.  Many teachers, even among those who have taken high rank through the success with which they have labored in the field, have wasted much time in attempting to do what never can be done, to form the character of those brought under their influence after a certain uniform model, which they have conceived as the standard of excellence.  Their pupils must write just such a hand, they must compose in just such a style, they must be similar in sentiment and feeling, and their manners must be formed according to a fixed and uniform model; and when, in such a case, a pupil comes under their charge whom Providence has designed to be entirely different from the beau ideal adopted as the standard, more time, and pains, and anxious solicitude is wasted in vain attempts to produce the desired conformity than half the school require beside.

(5.) Do not allow the faults or obliquities of character, or the intellectual or moral wants of any individual of your pupils to engross a disproportionate share of your time.  I have already said that those who are peculiarly in need of sympathy or help should receive the special attention they seem to require; what I mean to say now is, do not carry this to an extreme.  When a parent sends you a pupil who, in consequence of neglect or mismanagement at home, has become wild and ungovernable, and full of all sorts of wickedness, he has no right to expect that you shall turn your attention away from the wide field which, in your whole school-room, lies before you, to spend your time, and exhaust your spirits and strength in endeavoring to repair the injuries which his own neglect has occasioned.  When you open a school, you do not engage, either openly or tacitly, to make every pupil who may be sent to you a learned or a virtuous man.  You do engage to give them all faithful instruction, and to bestow upon each such a degree of attention as is consistent with the claims of the rest.  But it is both unwise and unjust to neglect the many trees in your nursery which, by ordinary attention, may be made to grow straight and tall, and to bear good fruit, that you may waste your labor upon a crooked stick, from which all your toil can secure very little beauty or fruitfulness.