Education and the Good Life by Bertrand Russell

In the following chapters, I propose to deal with various aspects of moral education, especially in the years from the second to the sixth. By the time the child is six years old, moral education ought to be nearly complete; that is to say, the further virtues which will be required in later years ought to be developed by the boy or girl spontaneously, as a result of good habits already existing and ambitions already stimulated. It is only where early moral training has been neglected or badly given that much will be needed at later ages.

I suppose that the child has reached the age of twelve months healthy and happy, with the foundations of a disciplined character already well laid by the methods considered in the preceding chapter. There will, of course, be some children whose health is bad, even if parents take all the precautions known to science at present. But we may hope that their number will be enormously diminished as time goes on. They ought, even now, to be so few as to be statistically unimportant, if existing knowledge were adequately applied. I do not propose to consider what ought to be done with children whose early training has been bad. This is a problem for the schoolmaster, not for the parent; and it is especially to the parent that this book is addressed.