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*–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