562 Education a National Concern. 



sumed by the first who look on the education of the masses as a spe- 

 cies of necessary evil, it does not seem to us that in carrying out 

 their plans they proceeded on right principles. If the distinctive 

 character of man be the possession of a faculty or faculties, whereby 

 he forms ideas, compares them with each other, and accumulates 

 them, as it were, for future use, if man according to the schoolmen 

 be animal sentiens, he should be treated as such ; and every method 

 of training man must be radically defective, that does not educate 

 his mind. Education, in short, must be intellectual, or it is unwor- 

 thy of the name : it is a shadow without a substance, a dead, un- 

 meaning form. Intellectual education, till within a very few years, 

 was unknown except to the Edgeworths, the Aikins, and the Pesta- 

 lozzis, who conscious of the correctness of their own views were 

 willing to endure the scoffs and sneers of those who called them 

 dreamy and unpractical speculators. The clergy patronised, as 

 indeed they still patronise, a system, whereby children were treated 

 as the mere lifeless components of a machine lifeless itself: the 

 chartered schools were confined to the teaching of the dead forms 

 of grammar and a few words of ancient vocabularies : and in the 

 private schools, high or low, for poor or rich, left to the care of men 

 responsible only to parents quite incompetent to give an opinion for 

 or against men, whose interest was to pay the smallest possible 

 salaries to their ushers and to send in the largest possible bills to the 

 parents men who were as ignorant as idiots of the first principles 

 of teaching and no less so of the first principles of knowledge, little 

 or nothing was done to prepare children for the business of mature 

 years. Education, indeed, began where it should have ended, 

 when the children left school and not when they entered it. Let 

 any sensible person of any class whether from national school, pub- 

 lic school, or private school answer this question whether he was 

 ever asked or led to think of his lessons, to exercise his judgment on 

 their meaning, in short, actively to employ his mind. Ninety-nine 

 out of every hundred will answer in the negative ; and if any one 

 should affirm, that under the formal, mechanical system, whose de- 

 fects are now in course of developement, he did progress, did receive 

 instruction mainly instrumental in making him an useful and distin- 

 guished member of his class, we answer that he became such, not 

 through the means, but in spite of the hindrances of the system. How- 

 ever unfavourably such defects in the plans and conduct of education 

 may have acted on society at large, it is on the poor, chiefly, that its 

 most baneful influence is discernible and especially on those who live 

 in the rural districts. The boy belonging to the higher or middle 

 classes, when he returns from school, beholds around him those, whose 

 experience or reading enables them to give him in a familiar way 

 the instruction which his school furnishes not ; and thus he is stimulated 

 to think for himself and to begin the work of self-education. The 

 child of the tradesman or the intelligent artisan, though not so favour- 

 ably situated as the former, still has many opportunities placed in his 

 \v&y, which his young and active mind seizes, of getting instruction : 

 his book-lessons are formal and dull, his lessons of life are vital 

 and interesting, and they often decide his future pursuits. But when 



