140 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



anything else — and yet, we are bound in the end, to be a wholly and 

 purely Christian nation, or perish from off the face of the earth. AH our 

 fundumental, civil, and social principles hold us fast to that, if to nothing 

 else. In education we have achieved vast mechanisms, and are applying 

 vast resources. We have a most magnilicent mill, and steam power 

 enough to keep every stone and wheel a whizzing from one year's end to 

 another. But what are we in fact grinding out.'' We are trying, through 

 our schools, to teach some forty millions of people to live by their wits, 

 without work; and surely they must, in the end, have avast deal of wit 

 or a very poor living. We are fitting them all by our incessant drill in 

 the school-room, to be pi'esidents, governors, preachers, senators, over- 

 seers, salesmen, agents, and place or ofhcc-seekers of some sort, while we 

 propose to teach none of them simply to think and to work. 



This results Inevitably from taking all our children out of the natural 

 sphere of the family, the shop, and tlie field, and confining them in 

 crowds, through all their young and growing years, to the incessant, bare, 

 and bald intellectual drill of the school-room. It is no more possible to 

 inure a boy or a girl to a life of industry and its indispensible habits in 

 the school-room alone, than it is to inure them to a life of scholarship at 

 the plow-tail. The solitude of the ordinary labor of the field and the 

 shop, to the pupil who has lived all his days in the crowd of the school- 

 room, becomes, in itself, intolerably irksome, while the habits, both of 

 the body and of the mind, ground under our present drill, become totally 

 unsuited to its tasks. What would be said of the absurdity of keeping a 

 boy driven night and day, year in and year out, at the anvil, or the plow, 

 through all his growing years, allowing him only some two hours per 

 day to I'ead, in order to fit him for a literary career.? Is there a man on 

 the continent who would not at once see the absurdit}' of such a course.'* 

 What shall we then say of the converse and parallel absurdity of keeping 

 all boys under the drill of the school-room, year in and year out, in order 

 to fit them for any industi ial career, even though we allow them some 

 two hours or more per day for work or play.^ 



The results of this process are already coming before our eyes, if we 

 will but see them. The vast majority of pupils, so schooled, drill them 

 as you will, and on what you will, as soon as they can, will inevitably 

 seek some more congenial mode of life, than that of the shop or the field. 

 The whole force of this so-called education, drives them to this result — by 

 whatever name we please to call it, whether literary or industrial. If 

 other and more public and social spheres of life are open to them, they 

 will seek them; or if not, they will create them, however needless, woe- 

 begone, or disastrous they may be; till no man can save his own soul, or 

 insure his own shins, or sell his own potatoes, without some agent, clerk, 

 or middleman, or place-seeker, or administrator to help him ; and take soul, 

 shins, potatoes, and all, in part payment for services rendered. But when 

 this process is fully completed, when an entire generation of forty or fifty 

 millions of people have been so educated, that none of them can endure 

 the solitude and toil of the field and the shop, but all are in an agony to 

 become presidents, or preachers, or insurance-agents, or office-seekers, or 



