150 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



If the writer of the article lacks information upon the suhject in any par- 

 ticulars, he more than makes up for this lack hy the vigor of his assertions and 

 the strength of his denunciations. 



He commences by affirming that " there is probably not one of those 

 various social contrivances, political engines, or modes of common action 

 called institutions, which are regarded as characteristic of the United States, 

 if not peculiar to them, in which the people of this country have placed more 

 confidence, or felt greater pride, than its puhlic school system. There is not 

 one of them so unworthy of either confidence or pride ; not one which has 

 failed so completely to accomplish the end for which it was established. And 

 the case is worse than that of mere failure ; for the result has been deplorable, 

 and threatens to be disastrous." 



After declaring the whole system a disastrous failure and worse, he says: 

 "According to independent and competent evidence from all quarters, the 

 mass of the pupils of these public schools are unable to read intelligently, to 

 spell correctly, to write legibly, to describe understandingly the geography of 

 their own country, or to do anything that reasonably well-educated children 

 should do with ease. They cannot write a simple letter; they cannot do 

 readily and with quick comprehension a simple ' sum ' in practical arithmetic; 

 and they cannot tell the meaning of any but the commonest of the words 

 that they read and spell so ill." 



"This is the intellectual result of the operation of our own much-vauuted 

 'American' public-school system during the last thirty or forty years." 



"As a mere imparter of useful knowledge the public-school system has failed 

 utterly." 



Having proved, to his own satisfaction, that the schools have entirely failed 

 so far as intellectual education is concerned, he proceeds to establish the ad- 

 ditional, and more fatal proposition, if it be true, that they are positively of 

 no value as producers of virtue, morality or patriotism. 



" Ignorance," according to this profound moralist, is not at all " the mother 

 of vice," indeed "has no relation with vice." 



On the other hand, he declares "crime and vice have increased year after 

 year almost pari passu with the development of the public school system." 

 Statistics are brought forward to show that uneducated and ignorant people 

 are actually more moral, upright and law-abiding than educated and intel- 

 ligent people. 



His conclusions are that sixty-four million dollars are annually wasted, and 

 worse than wasted, in supporting public schools, and that "a remedy must be 

 found " — a change must be had. 



Briefly the remedy proposed is this: "Those children only should be edu- 

 cated at public cost whose parents are too poor to give them even an elementary 

 education," and these children should be instructed, at the public expense, 

 only in the elements of reading, spelling, writing, and the common rules of 

 practical arithmetic." \\\ other words, public schools should be provided only 

 for the pauper portion of our population. 



Another writer, in the Popular Science Monthly, a magazine which claims 

 to lead the van of the grand army of "progress," attacks the schools, in 

 quite another direction, and attempts to prove that the education which merely 

 teaches children to read, spell, write and cipher, is much worse than no educa- 

 tion, so far as the good of the State is concerned. 



Having thoroughly berated the "demagogues," who are usually supposed 

 to exercise their arts most successfully upon the ignorant, he goes on to declare: 



