Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1868-01-07
Hot House Education.

! A&NoAohSo va viz y OdhS III thAc
country, has been often rebuked by
the press, but was never, we think,
more alarming than now. When Mr..
Parton visited Chicago for the Allan
TIC Monthly, be was struck with the
general excellence of the public
schools, but was painfully impressed
with the conviction that they were
intellectual lighthouses, where the
minds Of young men were repid!y,,de-
veloped at the expense OF physical
vigor and at the risk of ultimate
weakness, and even insanity. The
idea that the intellectual growth of
children should be forced like letuces,
i'll hot houses, is prevalent all over
the country. In New York paper
we read Of little girl whose mother
| beasts that she is so absorbed in her
school lessons that she says them over
nightly in her sleep. The town of
Essex, Mass, boasts of another in
FAINT phenomenon, which, though
only three years old, plays over three
hundred pieces on the piano. AT q
Sunday school on Long Island, whore
prizes were given to those children
who recited from memory the great
| est number of verses from the Bible,
little pale faced prodigy girl of
only four years old--distanced all her
rivals by repeating one hundred and
eleeun uerseS of Marks Gospel Eng
lishmen, it is said, are surprised at
the precocity of American children,
and the variety of their attainments
at an early age; but even John Bull
is beginning to copy our absurdities,
and to be dissatisfied unless the
young travel at two>forty pace
along the railways of Knowledge
An English editor met little girl
going TO school the other day who
had work enough cut out for full
grown Euclid. Besides lessons in
photography, etymology, and syntax,
she had others to learn in astronomy,
bells letters, music. drawing, and po-
litical economy, with side issues, con-
sisting of rd.board, needle-work
and Berlin wool, pictures of lemons
colored sheep kept from indigo lions
by a saffron >colored shepheard-and
the whole to be done up and finished
in three hours
Facts like these are alarming, and
show that in education, as in every
thing else, "the haste that makes
waste" is the great curse of Ameri>
can life. Instead of following the
course which nature dictates, and
leaving the child 10 feel it's own pow
ers, and to revel in infantile wonder
at the objects which solicit it's gaze,
we begin at once to worry it with
school, books, and labor with might
and main to make it "a useful mems
Der of society" Before the age of
four we begin the ork of expressing
its little brain with an incubus Of
technical terms and pedantic phrases,
and compel it to acquire by painful
and irksome attention, things which
would tax severely the intellect of an
adult. At six or seven it is deep in
the histories of Arithmetic, grammar,
Geography and the use of globes !"
at nine, we cram it with Greek and
Latin; at twelve to fourteen, it
vaults into college and coat tails;
and at seventeen to eighteen, has
been dragged through four years
course, having acquired a smattering
of everything, with a thorough
knowledge of nothing, and having
finished its education almost before
it should have fairly begun.
Can any man doubt the fatal eff
fects OF such process ? Is i. not al
most sure to stunt the intellect-to
exhaust prematurely the intellectual
energies, and thus doom the future
man to be an intellectual dwarf P
We hear a great hue and cry about
the educational advantages enjoyed
by children of our day" But in what
do these boosted privileges consist !?
Is it with the fact that we force open
with hasty hand the Young and ten
der buds of mind-that we encourage
precocity OF brain at the cost of LAST
ing vigor-that we exhaust the men
tai soil by crops too heavy for it p
Should we consider him wise who
would attempt to plant an oak in a
flower pot? and is it quite sagacious
to cloud the open brow of childhood
with mannish thoughts, and to shad-
ow with worldly wisdom, faces which
"sbould not have borne this aspect
yet for many a year," Let the in
tellectual stature of succeeding gen.
erations answer. Let the early lives
of all men who have astonished the
world by the greatness of their in
tellectual endowments, answer. Let
the scores and hundreds of men an,
swer, who crawl along through life
premdturely old-men all brain with
no bodies-mere ghosts or phantoms
of humanity, who have neuer enjoyed
a feeling Of youth, and whose over
stimulated education has been the
grave of their healths, pleasures and
affections. Oh that doting fathers
and mothers, who study only to
make their children prodigious of
precoeity, would take lesson from
nature She who hides the germs
and first STRINGS of all life in dark
ness who is always forced, yet con-
tent, to begin with the minutest par
ticles; and who pcver attempts to
produce anything great except by
slow and tedious process of growth
and assimilation. How tardily and
snaiI>li she crawls about her task
Of creating anything that is to be
lasting or valuable. SHE never is in
a hurry, or does anything per saltum
in a day, and at jerk, as it were.
She hss no steam>engine processes, or
science ,made>easy modes of opera
ton. She cannot get to the end of
her journey, as we can. in trice, by
shortcut or royal rosd-with hop,
skip, and jump only. She runs up
no oaks in year or two, nor requires
less than ages to consumate the vir>
tues of her diamonds. 1t takes her
twenty years to grow a common man