and all that is comprised under the head of school-learnings—how few, even out of this small number, find, in the common walks of life, a use for half the acquirements they have so laboriously attained!
I speak not as wishing to reduce the compass of human learning within a narrower circle than it fills at present. Far from it. My idea is, that we never can learn too much, provided that in the acquirement of one thing, we do not neglect another more important; and there will always be, among the many, some minds sufficiently gifted and comprehensive to profit by and repay an extreme amount of culture. But in confining my remarks, as I still wish they should be understood, chiefly to persons of the middle class in Great Britain, one half of whom, supposing society to be divided only into three parts, are connected more or less with business, and subject to all the variety of circumstance which that association entails; I confess I do not see how the mere acquirement of learning, as generally taught in schools, is an indispensable requisite. Indeed, I should have supposed that the use of the faculty of observation in common things, the exercise of ingenuity, and the gradual introduction to the understanding of botany, chemistry, mechanism, and natural history in general, with an habitual readiness in the use of resources, and the application of means to ends, would have been a kind of training, especially if connected with half the amount of school-learning usually bargained for, quite as likely to make clever merchants, and men of business, as well as clever mistresses of families, as that system of education which confines all learning to what may be stored in the memory, and acquired from books.
In the use of a mind, it is very evident that those who teach in schools can have little opportunity for conveying instruction. Their sphere of observation is necessarily limited; each day presents objects little differing from the last; and all those unexpected and novel events which excite interest and inquiry m a private family, it is the aim of school-discipline to prevent, lest the attention of the pupils should be diverted, and lessons consequently hindered by interruption.
The use of a mind, however, is just that important part of education which a mother is so circumstanced as to be
