IMPORTANCE OF PH13ICAL EDUCATION. 99 



women. In some of our female institutions of learning as high 

 as thirty-seven per cent, of those who had been attendants have 

 died within two years after leaving school. Students as a general 

 rule are inclined to become listless and indolent; therefore they 

 should be required, as a matter of duty, to spend several hours dur- 

 ing the middle of the day in regular, active, systematic exercise 

 and physical training, with active amusements. A double advan- 

 tage is thus derived; for being occupied a portion of the time dur- 

 ing the day they will be compelled to spend their evenings at study, 

 instead of in dissipation and folly. No doubt our present system 

 of education is very imperfect, though the day of its radical amend- 

 ment may be distant. The force of example and training seems 

 all-powerful. Teachers are educated to teach, and cannot well help 

 teaching as they are taught. The orthodoxy of education is of the 

 most prescriptive sort. To differ, to innovate, to adapt instruction, 

 either in kind or degree, to the capacity and mental bent of the 

 pupil would be certainly a perilous experiment, even could a teacher 

 be found sufficiently bold and original to design and attempt such 

 a thing. No doubt he would be ostracised, both by the profession 

 and the patron. We want our children educated in the good old 

 way ; their minds stretched upon the rack which cracked the mental 

 sinews of their fathers and mothers; their intellectual stature 

 adapted to the proportions of the old Procrustean bed ; their educa- 

 tion to result in mental uniformity. Of course we all see that this 

 is silly; that it would be quite as reasonable to design and seek to 

 compass for our children an equal measure of physical strength and 

 weight ; that the higher mathematics, the dead languages and many 

 of the arts now attempted to be taught in the public schools are 

 totally impracticable not to say useless to the large majority of 

 the pupils; but we goon in the same old fashion. Every child must 

 be classed and graded and put through the same mechanical drill. 

 It is quite certain that many are stultified and some ruined by the 

 process. But that makes no difference, it is the fashion; it is the 

 accepted theory of our age and country that all children should be 

 educated, and educated in the same way. Of course both these 

 propositions are outrages upon common sense. The vast majority 

 must be "hewers of wood and drawers of water," laborers and 

 common servants; and their partial or complete education, even 

 were the latter practicable, which it is not, must defeat the ends of 

 civilization, and more or less disorganize society. Such has been 

 the effect hitherto; it is patent to the observation of all men; serv- 

 ants and laborers are growing scarcer, and idlers, vagabonds, tramps, 

 thieves and robbers being multiplied year by year. This is the 

 natural and necessary effect of the system of popular education; 

 the servant is made to feet himself as good as his master, and the 

 laborer quite the social equal of his employer. What wonder that 

 these scorn service and labor and prefer to live by their wits? 

 Society is simply reaping in the present carnival of outrage and 



