STATE EDUCATION: A NECESSITY, 641 



presented any of the special or general evils so much feared by the 

 honorable gentleman, and which to him seem so threatening in the 

 schools of England. In several of our American cities the system has 

 matured, during a period of some thirty-odd years, from the kinder- 

 garten to the university. These schools have produced whatever 

 results the organism of the graded system is calculated to accomplish. 

 The pupils have passed from the lowest grade, in regular order, in 

 large classes, under similar programmes, in a uniform course, super- 

 vised by boards of trustees, and taught by instructors rising in literary 

 attainments from grade to grade through the entire series. When the 

 higher grades are reached, the pupils take more and more optional 

 studies, and less and less required. And, as the curriculum widens 

 toward the end of the course, the linguistic and scientific studies yield 

 more and more to the inclination of the parent or the pupil, until the 

 post-graduates of the high-school, as well as of the university, sever- 

 ally fall into chosen specialties, as their tastes and preparation may 

 dictate. The result is all that could be desired. So independent and 

 so varied are the subjects of this uniform, organized system of required 

 and optional studies, and so thorough is the knowledge imparted in 

 the selected fields embraced in its curriculum, that from one city its 

 fame has passed from the Western to the Eastern Hemisphere, and in 

 several important lines of skilled industries and art-culture received 

 the award of superiority at the late Paris Exposition over the schools 

 of the civilized world ! 



At the expense of a little brevity, let me here make a short quo- 

 tation from a report of Superintendent Peaslee, of the Cincinnati 

 schools, under date of 1880. He says : "T desire to call the attention 

 of the board to the statement of the National Educational Association 

 at Washington, in February last, by Hon. J. D. Philbrick, U. S. 

 Commissioner to the Paris Exposition, and former Superintendent of 

 the Public Schools of Boston. In speaking of the different school 

 exhibits at Paris, Mr. Philbrick said, * No other exhibits of scholars' 

 work equal to that of Cincinnati was ever made in the known world.' 

 It will be remembered that Mr. Philbrick was also United States 

 Commissioner of Education at Vienna, in 1872, and that he was con- 

 nected with the educational exhibit of the Centennial Exhibition at 

 Philadelphia. *In this connection,' he says, *it gives me great pleas- 

 ure to report that I have received, through the United States Com- 

 missioner, General R. C. McCormick, a gold-medal diploma and a 

 silver-medal diploma, awarded to the public schools of Cincinnati, 

 by the international jury at the Universal Exposition of 1878 held at 

 Paris. I have had the gratification, also, of receiving from the Royal 

 Industrial Museum at Turin a diploma of membership, as a token of 

 their appreciation of the work of our school exhibit at Paris. As 

 stated in a previous report, Cincinnati enjoys the most complete system 

 of public-school education of any city in the world ; for the pupils 



VOL. XIX. i\ 



