Imatges de pàgina
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UNPOPULARITY OF THE SUBJECT.

as an additional reason for me to persist in advocating those principles, however abstract, the application of which to the education of the rising generation I conceive to be the only remedy for those evils under which we are labouring. Not that I expect that those principles will rapidly gain ground with the public at large, or be carried generally into effect; I freely own, that I do not hope myself, to see them applied to the education of the mass of the people, or even partially, to any considerable extent, in my life time. But this does not form an objection to those principles in themselves; for the slightest glance over the history of mankind will convince us, that none of those ideas by which our species has been essentially and lastingly benefitted, were ever reduced to practice, or even acknowledged as practicable, at the time when they were proclaimed. Nor do I perceive in this any inducement to desist from advocating such principles, or urging them upon the public. The task may be an ungrateful one, but it is no less binding, no less sacred. No generation of men ever knew, or were able to understand, their own wants; they pined under the evils which their own folly, or that, perhaps, of their forefathers, had entailed upon them; but to the cure they were always blind; so much so, that the greater the evil, the greater has invariably their blindness been. If these remarks hold good concerning the history of past ages, certainly they are still more applicable to the state of things in our own time. Never, perhaps, at any former period of the history of mankind was the want of improvement, and the wish for it, more generally felt and expressed; and never perhaps was the darkness so great respecting the principles, from the active operation of which that improvement was to be expected. And never was it more necessary that those principles should be loudly and boldly proclaimed; for, in addition to all the other evils, under which we are suffering, a spirit of compromise has gone abroad, which bids fair to mar the

ON WHAT GROUNDS IT MAY BE VIEWED.

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exertions, even of those whose hearts and minds are not shut to the claims which the state of the mass at large, makes upon the energies of the more enlightened. The evils, of which we complain, are such as require a radical cure,-I do not use the word radical here in its obnoxious sense-and a radical cure is of all things that which human nature most dreads and resists. Hence it is that, in our days, many of those whose attention and endeavours are directed towards the means of ameliorating the condition of their fellow creatures, allow themselves to be betrayed, by a well meant but mistaken anxiety to gain the concurrence of the public in the measures proposed by them, into a compromise of the very principles which they advocate, and upon which they pretend to act. They clog their own power by an alliance, both unlawful and impolitic, with the very prejudices against which they are making war, and thus of necessity defeat their own end. Deeply impressed as I am with the baneful consequences of that mistake, I feel it my duty, more than ever, to state, without any disguise, and without any attempt at conformity with the leading opinions of the day, those principles, however unpopular, by which the education of our youth ought to be guided and regulated This I shall do on the present occasion; and I thought it right openly to avow this my intention, in order that you may not feel disappointed you find me, as you certainly will do, now and then, travelling far away-not I trust from the nature of things, but from the state of things as it is at present.

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After this short introduction, I shall at once proceed to the first of the questions proposed, vix. "What are the rights and duties of the family, and of society at large, respecting the education of children belonging to "them." This question can be answered on two grounds: first, as a matter of mere policy, according to the dictates, as it is called, of human reason; and, secondly, in a religious point of view. For the present, I shall confine

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THE SOCIAL GROUND EXAMINED.

myself to the former inquiry, reserving the latter for another opportunity.

The premises which we have to go upon, when endeavouring to determine, on social grounds, the respective rights and duties of the community, and of the family, concerning the education of their children, are simply the two facts, that society exists, and that children are born and must necessarily grow up in it. From these premises, which men have endeavoured to modify, but which they could never entirely do away with, all the inquiries made into this subject have begun, and a variety of theoretical schemes and practical systems have successively been built upon them. In two opposite directions the very extremes have been reached, the one at the earliest, the other at the latest period of philosophy; and I do not think that there is any intermediate shade between those extremes which has not been propounded in theory, or attempted in practice, at some time and in some nation. The maxim, that the child belonged to society, and was to be educated for it, was carried to such an extent by Plato, that, in entire disregard of the strongest and the most sacred feelings of the human bosom, he proposed the separation of the infant from the mother at the very instant of birth; and although he claimed the services of the mother in nursing, yet his arrangements were such as to prevent, as far as possible, her discerning her own offspring, in the number of children, amongst which it was placed : so that if perchance she should happen to nurse her own infant, she should do so without knowing it to be hers. Whilst in this manner Plato claimed the child entirely and exclusively for society, Rousseau fell into the other extreme, to educate man entirely and exclusively for himself. The endless variety of systems, holding the middle between those two extremes, that have either been practically tried, or at least set forth in theory, I shall not undertake to enumerate; but I think it will not be incongruous with our present purpose, to take a short review

HISTORY OF EDUCATION.

of the state of education, as it was at different periods among the principal nations of the civilized world; in order to see, what share society has in every instance taken in the accomplishment of so important a task.

If we go to the cradle of pagan civilization, and to the first establishment of social institutions, to the oriental states of Hindostan, China, Persia, and their less conspicuous neighbours, including all the nations celebrated in antiquity, which had their abode to the East of the Tigris, as well as Egypt, which, previously to the Greek influence upon it, belonged to the same class, we find that education, like every thing else, bore there not a progressive, but a stationary character. Their religious systems were a sort of petrifaction of those spiritual truths, of which mankind have been put in possession by a primitive revelation, but the nature of which was greatly perverted in the course of tradition. Incapable of seeing them in spirit and in truth, the inhabitants of the South of Asia incorporated them, as it were, in their view of visible nature, by whose grandeur and beauty, as displayed in those countries, not their senses only, but their minds also had been led captive. Having thus fallen under the bondage of the earth, the genius of those nations became essentially earthy; their social institutions accordingly were entirely modelled upon the distinctions produced between different classes of men in consequence of the peculiar manner in which every one of them was brought in contact with that outward world, which, to them, was the comprehension of the universe. The character of man and his social existence depended not upon the intellectual and moral elements of his being, but upon the sort of intercourse, as it were, which existed between him and nature, of whom all were equally the slaves.

Hence the division in castes, according to the different employments and trades which the imperious call of necessity created at the first origin of society; and hence an education, which had no other object than to make

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THE ORIENTAL NATIONS.

man, whatever the constitution of his inward nature might be, outwardly a fit member of that caste in which he was born, - an education, which employed for the attainment of that object, no other means but those which that same caste afforded. To this national and individual thraldom, we must attribute the moral barrenness of the long aged records of those superannuated states of the eastern world, and the never ceasing circle of sameness, in which their national life has been revolving, wherever it was not interrupted by foreign invasions, from the earliest dawn of civilization, down to the present day, without any other change than the inevitable one of slow decrepitude.

Of the genius of those mercantile tribes, which extended themselves from the shores of the Persian Gulf over the plains of the Euphrates, and from thence to the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, and the north-west border of Africa, but little is known. The philosopher can no more trace the effects of their civilization in the moral history of mankind, than the traveller can discover the remains of their splendid structures in the sands which have covered their dwelling-places; and from this fact, as well as from the mean and short-sighted spirit of their nobility, so often exhibited in the records of their political history, the inference is, I think, neither rash nor presumptuous, that their education, calculated only for the temporary purposes of gain, though it may have rendered 'subservient to those purposes some of the mental powers of man, yet had never a direct bearing upon the development and cultivation of his immortal nature; nor, on the other hand, any public tendency, but inasmuch as ambition, and the love of admiration may have given an additional stimulus to the spirit of trade, in communities in which wealth was the chief qualification for the possession of power.

A brighter prospect, however, opens before us, when we come farther west and north, to the shores of Greece,

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