JOURNAL OF RURAL ART AND RURAL TASTE. 



f'ljf Inmt ihmilm of tjit liiral lOistrirts. 



\T5||HILE tlie great question of Agricultural Schools is continually urged upon our 

 ■^ legislatures, and, as yet, continually put off with fair words, let us see if there is 

 not room for great improvement in another way — for the accomplishment of which the 

 farming community need ask no assistance. 



Our thoughts are turned to the subject of home education. It is, perhaps, the 

 peculiar misfortune of the United States, that the idea of education is always affixed 

 to something away from home. The boarding-school, the academy, the college — it 

 is there alone we suppose it possible to educate the young man or the young woman. 

 Home is only a place to eat, drink, and sleep. The parents, for the inost part, gladly 

 shuffle off the whole duties and responsibilities of training the heart, and the social 

 nature of their children — believing that if the intellect is properly developed in the 

 schools, the whole man is educated. Hence the miserably one-sided and incomplete 

 character of so many even of our most able and talented men — their heads have been 

 educated, but their social nature almost utterly neglected. Awkward manners and a 

 rude address, are not the only evidences that many a clever lawyer, professional man, or 

 merchant, offers to us continually, that his education has been wholly picked up away 

 from home, or that home was never raised to a level calculated to give instruction. A 

 want of taste for all the more genial and kindly topics of conversation, and a want of 

 relish for refined and innocent social pleasures, mark such a man as an ill-balanced or 

 one-sided man in his inner growth and culture. Such a man is often successful at the 

 bar or in trade, but he is uneasy and out of his element in the social circle, because 

 he misunderstands it and despises it. His only idea of society is display, and he loses 

 more than three-fourths of the delights of life by never having been educated to use 

 his best social qualities — the qualities which teach a man how to love his neighbor as 

 self, and to throw the sunshine of a cultivated understanding and heart upon 

 trifling events and enjoyments of every day life. 



Jan. 1, 1852. 



