III. 



THE HOME EDUCATION OF THE RURAL DISTRICTS. 



Janviary, 1852. 



WHILE the 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 com- 

 munity 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 most 

 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 success- 



