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J. S. Conference Herald.
March.
To make exemplary Jains of your children, train their parents, and specially their mothers in the best possible way. Sound female education taken up in right earnest will help us three-fourths in our work of rightly educating our children. Our best thanks are due to Seth Lalbhai Dalpatbhai, the Supervising Secretary for Education, who has shewn keen tact and insight into matters educational, by giving prominence to female
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education. All the great worthies, such as Napoleon, Washington, Macaulay &c., are the best and undefatiguable proofs of the good results of educated mothers. The soft and pliant mind and body of a child are susceptible to impressions from without and education begins not only when a child is born but from the very time when the child is in the embryo. It is therefore of vital importance that the mother ought to be well trained and the Jains of the present day would do well, instead of feasting so many hundreds, thousands, nay, tens of thousands of persons, to educate their females.
If a child receives sound religious education at home and imbibes the truths of those principles, there is no fear for him to spoil at school: rather the more he makes progress in his studies, the more convinced he becomes of the truths learnt in his infant days. But if he is let loose like an unbroken colt to graze wherever he can, you can easily conjecture the result. Better to remain satisfled with true and faithful Jains destitute of modern learning than to be encumbered with some of the long tailed but sceptic alumni of the present day. But the fault is not theirs. The blame lies immediately at the doors of their parents who, being themselves ignorant of their own religion, neglected the timely religious training of their children. The home education thus badly begun ruins future religious aspects and school education given as it is at present seals the fate of the man for ever. He is irrevocably lost to self and to society of which it has been his fate to be a member.
we sow.
The results will not be good if such revolutionary turn of things is allowed to pass current. Sooner or later we must reap according to what To keep pace with the advancing time, and to remain true to the points of heaven and home, it is the incumbent duty of the leaders of society in addition to educating the female sex to found such a national institution which would afford means for the true and right cultivation of the brain in religious and secular education. The late Babu Panna Lal of Bombay had got this idea uppermost in his mind when he endowed the princely sum of faur lacs of rupees towards the establishment of a Jain College. But the trustees, for reasons best known to themselves,
