61 



EDUCATION AND LABOR 



The great majority of our pupils must work for a living. 

 By tlie ordinance of Heaven, the necessity of labor is well- 

 nigb. universal. Kature and history alike confirm the old 

 decree, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.'* 

 Teachers and school officers should carefully inquire whether 

 our schools are accomplishing all they ought to do for the 

 working classes. It is a grand result that all are trained to 

 read and write and cipher, and learn something of the other 

 common rudiments. In no part of the world, except Germany, 

 are there so few native illiterates as in New England. 



The general intelligence of the people is one obvious cause of 

 our exemption from the railway strikes of last summer. The 

 sober second thought prevailed here, while madness ruled the 

 hour elsewhere. But beneficent as has been the influence of 

 the public school in New England, it has by no means done its 

 whole duty to the laboring classes. More should be said and 

 done to dignify labor and prepare our youth to become skilled 

 workmen as well as industrious and upright citizens. It is a 

 mistake to suppose that education need create any aversion to 

 labor, or that those who do the roughest work need the least 

 schooling. 



Under the system of slavery in the South, and until recently 

 with the serfs of Eussia and the equally illiterate farm hands 

 of England, it was held as an axiom that schooling would 

 make laborers discontented, restless and unprofitable ser- 

 vants, and that universal education would render manual 

 labor distasteful and disreputable. Too much of this mis- 

 chievous legacy of slavery lingers among us still. The silly 

 and wicked notion that labor is menial ought to be refuted in 

 our schools, where our youth should be early taught the neces- 

 sity and dignity of labor, as the primal source of all human 

 excellence and progress. Girls as well as boys should be early 

 taught both in the family and school that to learn to be useful 



