American Pocket Library of Useful Knowledge/Education
EDUCATION.
Promote as objects as primary importance inhibitions for the general diffusion of knowledge.–Washington’s Farewell Address.
A sheriff of London, after adequate experience, declares that the most prominent causes of crime are to be traced to the want of education–the want of parental care, correction, and control, &c.
HABIT! HABIT!
I trust every thing to habit; habit, upon which, in all ages, the law-giver, as well as the school-master, has mainly placed his reliance; habit which makes every thine easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course. Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful and hard; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be contrary to the nature of the child grown an adult. Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth–of carefully respecting the properly of others–of scrupulously abstaining from all nets of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as lying, or cheating, or stealing.–Lord Brougham.
FAMILY GOVERNMENT.
We can, therefore, hardly overrate the importance of sound and wholesome family discipline and instruction. Important as are laws and civil government, family influence is paramount. It is not for legislation to affect materially the family, the most ancient and venerable and permanent of all the forms of society, commencing with man’s history and ending only when man shall cease to be a dweller upon earth. The moral influence of families depends upon themselves. Each family to answer the ends of its existence, and contribute to the common weal and glory, must care for itself, and attend to its own government, purity and happiness. Each must firmly inculcate within its own sacred enclosure the virtuous and conservative principles of truth, reverence, submission, peace, goodness, and love of order, which alone can give stability to the time, and safety and grandeur to the state.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
To physical education belong the proper training and strengthening of all the powers of the body, and the avoidance of every thing calculated to injure its structure.
The first and most striking error in physical education, is the unnecessary confinement to which the child is subjected. No one that has observed a child, between the ages of three and six, can doubt that nature requires that he should be almost constantly in motion during his waking hours. How painful then, how unnatural, must be his situation in school! Pent up, for six hours a day confined to one seat, and that a very uneasy one, where he is forced to sit perfectly still and silent, how irksome must be his condition, how prejudicial to his health! And what aggravates the evil is, that it is wholly unnecessary. For the extended confinement defeats the very purpose for which it is imposed. “The body and mind,” says Sterne, “are like a jerkin and its lining. If you rumple the one, you rumple the other.” Besides the injury to his health, his mind becomes heavy and dull, and his progress, consequently, is not half what it would be under a more rational course.
The school-room is too small either for convenience, comfort, or health. Most children go first to school while many of their bones are still in a forming stale. They go almost as early as when the Chinese turn their children’s feet into the shape of horses’ hoofs. And, at this period of life, the question is, whether the seals shall be conformed to the children, or the children deformed to the seals. Let any man try the experiment, and see how long he can sit in an upright posture, on a narrow bench or seat, without being able to reach the floor with his feet. Yet, to this position, hundreds of children are regularly confined, month after month; Nature inflicts uneasiness and distress if they do sit still, and the teacher inflicts his punishments, if they do not. The closet for hats and coats is small, or altogether wanting, so that the children acquire disorderly and wasteful habits with their clothes. The room is badly ventilated, so that in cool weather when the doors and windows are kept shut, the children are forced to breathe the same air over and over, until it has become unfit for respiration, thus laying a foundation for debility and disease.–Palmer’s Prize Essay.
Extracts from the Preface to Taylor’s
DISTRICT SCHOOL OR NATIONAL EDUCATION.
All who are competent to judge, and will give their due attention to the facts which this book discloses, must unite in the conclusion, that our present system of popular education is radically defective.
It is on this point chiefly that the public mind requires to be disabused; it is in relation to this that there exists–I speak especially of this State[1]–a very general delusion. We are told that under the fostering patronage of the government, more than half a million of children are taught in our common schools,–our pride, as citizens of the Empire State, is gratified, and we content ourselves with the general statement, omitting to inquire into the character and value of the instruction which is thus imparted.
We know not, for we care not to know, that it is in truth so imperfect and scanty as hardly to deserve the name even of elementary,–that it is unconnected with any thing resembling moral discipline or the formation of character,–that the teachers, inexperienced, transitory, snatched up for the occasion, are paid by salaries which hardly exceed the wages of the menial servant or the common labourer,–and that, as a necessary consequence, ignorant and disqualified, they are perhaps even overpaid by the pittance which they receive.
Yet it is in such schools and by such in structures that thirty-eight out of forty of the children of the nation are, as we phrase it, educated. We have lived in a pleasing delusion; but it is time we should awake.
I do not hesitate to avow the belief, that without regulations far more extensive than have yet been introduced,–a control far more enlightened and constant than has yet been exercised,–and fiscal aid far more ample than has yet been afforded, it is vain to expect that the character of our common schools can be truly and permanently improved. It is conceded by all that nothing can be done without competent teachers, and such teachers, in the number and of the qualifications required, we can never have, unless they are properly trained, and properly examined, and watched, and controlled, and, above all, properly rewarded.
The dissemination of this book, and of the truths which it contains, will tend thus to prepare the public mind, to produce the right slate of feeling and of thought; for assuredly it will not be read in vain by parents who are such in heart and in conscience, not in name merely.
There are some truths which it may be painful to confess, yet are most necessary to be known. To the reflecting and the candid it will not seem extravagant to say that the chief source of the evils, the disorders, the crimes which afflict society, is to be found in the heartless indifference of the higher classes, the rich, the educated, the refined, towards the comfort and well-being of those they term or deem their inferiors, and their consequent neglect of tho intellectual and moral improvement of those who always have been, and would seem by the order of Providence, always must be, the most numerous class–those who depend on their daily labour for their daily support.
It is this neglect, the alienation it produces, the ignorance it perpetuates, the vices it fosters, which leave marked the broad line of separation, on the one side of which are the few, indolent, disdainful, proud, on the other the many, restless, envious, discontented. It is this which keeps the minds of a multitude in a constant state of irritation, and which, when the base demagogue seeks to array the poor against the rich, collects the crowd of his willing auditors, and arms him with his dreaded power.
It is this which caused the atrocities of the French Revolution, and which deepens and darkens the cloud that now hangs over England.[2] It is this neglect–the grand crime of civilized and Christian society, which, in every country, sooner or later, and in none more certainly than in our own, if continued, is destined to meet a fearful retribution. Here most emphatically is it true, that the people must be raised to the level of their rights and duties, must be made the safe depositaries of the power which they possess, or in the history of other republics we may read our own fate;–first, lawless anarchy–next, the calm which fear and the bayonet produce–the calm of military despotism.
How then are these evils to be prevented?–this fate to be averted? I answer, all that is odious, all that is dangerous in the distinctions which the free acquisition and the lawful enjoyment of property must always create, will soon vanish, and all classes be united in the enduring bonds of sympathy and gratitude, when the rich (I include all who have the leisure or means to bestow) shall understand and feel that it is their paramount duly to improve the physical and elevate the moral condition of their fellow-beings, or, to express nearly the whole in one word–to educate the poor.
Let those on whom the burden ought to fall willingly assume–cheerfully sustain it, and there will be no further obstacle to the action of the legislature, no further difficulty in organizing a system effectual, permanent, universal.
- ↑ New York.
- ↑ The Working Classes of England.–Mr. C. Butler, in a speech in Parliament on a late occasion, said:–“Whenever I contemplate the condition of the working classes–the deep and dark gulf that separates them from the knowledge and sympathies of their superiors in fortune, the utter ignorance in which we are of their feelings and wants, the little influence which we have over their conduct, and the little hold which we appear to have on their affections–I shrink with terror from the wild passions and dense ignorance that appear to be fermenting in that mass of physical force.
THE BIBLE.
A nation must be truly blessed, if it were governed by no other laws, than those of this blessed book; it is so complete a system, that nothing can be added to or taken from it; it contains every thing needful to be known or done; it affords a copy for a king, and a rule for a subject; it gives instruction and counsel to a senate, authority and direction to a magistrate; it cautions a witness, requires an impartial verdict of a jury, and furnishes a judge with his sentence; it sets the husband as lord of the household, and the wife as mistress of the table; tells him how to rule and her how to manage. It entails honour to parents, and enjoins obedience upon children; it points out a faithful and eternal guardian, to the departing husband and father, tells him with whom to leave his fatherless children, and in whom his widow is to trust, and promises a father to the former, and husband to the latter. It defends the right of all, and reveals vengeance to the defrauder, over-reacher, and oppressor. It is the first book and the oldest book in the world. It contains the choicest matter, gives the best instruction, and affords the greatest pleasure and satisfaction that ever were revealed. It contains the best laws and profoundest mysteries that ever were penned. It brings the best tidings, and affords the best of comforts to the inquiring and disconsolate. It exhibits life and immorally, and shows the way to everlasting glory.
THE PAST TO THE FUTURE.
The following sentiment from an address delivered at the second centennial celebration of the settlement of Boston, is significant and impressive:–"The great comprehensive truths, written in letters of living light on every page of our history,–the language addressed by every past age of New England to all future ages, is this–Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom none but virtue; virtue none but knowledge; and neither freedom, virtue, nor knowledge, has any vigour, or immortal hope, except in the principles of the Christian faith, and in the sanctions of the Christian religion."