Education as a Factor in Civilization. 251 



training of those who were to train the youth has been re- 

 garded as of no particular consequence. Although the 

 legislators of the French Revolution may appear to us like 

 so many reeds shaken by the wind, they were, notwithstand- 

 ing, the first ones to see that for education were needed 

 educators. To them is due the credit of the foundation 

 of normal schools, though few are yet in existence and 

 those few mainly the growth of the last twenty years. Edu- 

 cation is a science, as is surgery, and why is it not reason- 

 able to demand fitness for the work of the school-room 

 as for that of the hospital ? more, indeed, if we are to 

 fear less those who kill the body than those who have power 

 to kill the soul. Public money spent for the training 

 of teachers is capital invested at compound interest, and 

 teaching should be made as profitable, at least, as hoeing 

 corn. Not much longer will the teacher be allowed to tell 

 to-day the source of a river if she must wait till to- 

 morrow to find out where it empties ; and the time is soon 

 coming when the trustees of a district will hesitate to offer 

 her three dollars a week for services, and charge her 

 four dollars a week for board, for " the English-speaking 

 race leads the world, and the teachers of that race are the 

 ones who will decide what its future is to be." 



It is true, as Carlyle says, that ''our school-hours are 

 all the days and nights of our existence, whose lessons 

 stream in iipon us Avith every breath w^e draw." Telegraph, 

 locomotive, and steamship ; social, church, and commercial 

 relations ; literary and art clubs, scientific societies, our 

 great libraries and museums, Arctic expeditions, African 

 explorations, geographical surveys, international exposi- 

 tions, none of these forces can be overlooked in an 

 estimate of the educational factors of civilization. Think, 

 too, of the avalanche of matter daily falling from the press, 

 in such an amount and Avith such rapidity that even 

 the person of entire leisure despairs of acquaintance with 

 it, and so cheap that for ten cents apiece can be purchased 

 the masterpieces of our own and other languages, evolu- 

 tion indeed from the time when the eyes of the people 

 rested only upon one book and merely the outside of that, 

 the bible, fastened to the altar by its heavy chain, fit symbol 

 of the intellectual bondage of the race. 



If education, both as cause and effect, can do so much 

 for the world, it logically follows that its direction and 



