Raising someone

One idea from each of the 5 books on this topic.

• Learning works like building a mound one basket of earth at a time. If you stop one basket short, the stopping is your own doing. If you tip in a single basket on flat ground, that step forward is yours as well.

  From The Analects by Confucius

• Character grows the way a crop does. A farmer in Sung, worried his corn was too short, pulled the stalks up to make them taller. He came home tired and said, “I have been helping the corn to grow long.” His son ran out and found it all withered.

  From Mencius by Mencius

• A rule about who gets served first, who speaks first, who bows to whom, looks like pure decoration from the outside. It’s closer to traffic control. Remove the traffic lights and the wanting underneath doesn’t go away, it just collides at the intersection.

  From Xunzi by Xunzi

• One gentleman got through all the Latin poets in the bathroom. He tore a couple of pages at a time from a cheap Horace, read them there, and threw them away. Spare minutes of that kind add up quickly.

  From Letters to His Son by Lord Chesterfield

• Girls are said to love dolls and dresses from birth. Sit a girl for hours beside her mother’s mirror and she’ll copy what she sees. Let her run outdoors with her brother and she’ll play as hard as he does.

  From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft