Luther Burbank (1849–1926)

Taking on subjects that continue to be debated nearly a hundred years later, Burbank boldly asserts, "environment is the architect of heredity . . . acquired characters are transmitted and . . . all characters which are transmitted have been acquired." With enthusiasm, he looks forward to "the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration." Burbank equates education with cloistered classrooms and little noses stuck all day in big books, thus concluding that early education impairs a child's nervous system. "No boy or girl should see the inside of a school-house until at least ten years old," he adamantly declares. And then, impatient with the notion that delinquency builds character, he scolds, "The most dangerous man in the community is the one who would pollute the stream of a child's life. Whoever was responsible for the saying that 'boys will be boys' and a young man 'must sow his wild oats' was perhaps guilty of a crime." In charmingly outdated language, he espouses viewpoints that continue to have their champions in our modern society, so much more hectic today than the ambitious, overbusy Americans whom he criticizes in his early twentieth-century world. He reminds us of universal and timeless truths that are rediscovered with each generation of parents, teachers, and psychologists: "You can never bring up a child to its best estate without love"; "Teach the child self-respect . . . No self-respecting man was ever a grafter"; "Do not be cross with the child; you cannot afford it. . . . We cannot treat a plant tenderly one day and harshly the next; they cannot stand it." (October, 1997)… (mer)