Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1872-06-18

~ MI a D. hlOohS. L. d. L.
1t is an old complaint that money and effort
are wasted in this country in maintaining a
dozen feeble and inefficient colleges with a few
half educated instructors, no library worthy of
the name, and none of the other appliances so
useful in giving completeness and finish to a
liberal education, when the same expense and
labor concentrated upon one institution would
provide immensely improved educational oppor
tunities for a greater number of students, to
their great advantage and that of society in
general. In New England this evil is not SC
much felt, though even here perhaps, there are
too many colleges and academies, rather than
too few; but they are generally well, il
not amply endowed, and are situated in
community whose intelligent standard of
education is too exactingt to allow them to make
uuwarranted pretensions or to offer a course of
training which is not reasonably thorough and
complete But in the south and some parts of
the west these institutions are under no such re-
through the states, styling themselves colleges,
and having authority by their charters to give
the usual degrees, but often having not man
connected with them who is fairly educated or
has an adequate conception of the elements of a
liberal education. They do some good, of course.
A superficial and fragmentary education is bet
ter than none, using education in the narrow
sense of learning from books; but they are so
much less efficient than they might be
in the matter of systematic and thorough
instruction, and so often seem to do little els c
than substitute for conscious ignorance an odious
RIGHTEOUSNESS and self conceit, that one is
almost inclined to believe that their influence is
not only relatively but absolutely mlschieyous,
and that the young people who attend them
would have had better prospect of becoming
useful and agreeable members of society, if their
mental training had been left to the ordinary
social influences around them, supple nented by
little common school instruction aud the read
ing of such books as might come in their
way. We suspect that more men ofconspicuous
usefulness have been trained in this way than
have ever been turned out by all the zone horse
colleges in the southwest
These remarks are suggested by certain adj
vertisements in a newspaper published at Jack
son, Tennessee, from which we learn that in that
little town, which, according to the last census,
had less than five thousand inhabitants, there
are no less than four female Seminares, inSii-
tutes, &C., all of which claim to give collegiate
education, and have the power to confer dc
grees, and one college, with a faculty consistiug
of a president and two professors. The
seminaries are all ostentatiously Sectarian,
claiming and probably receiving support
respectively from the Presbyterans, Baptists,
Methodists aud Roman Catholics. 1t may be
that Jackson is a centre of educational nfu-
ences of the highest order, and that the gradu-
ates of any one of these institutions would com
pare favorably with those ladies who have re-
ceiyed their training at Mount Hoyoke or Vas
Sar; but we are not yet prepared to believe
this. One school there might be respectfully
maintained and afford advantages of a really
excellent character, and it might be so man
aged that Baptists Presbyterans and Metho-
dists could all attend it without injury to their
distinctive religious principles or feelings That
Tennessee village affords an exaggerated speci-
men Of a fault not confined to Tennessee nor to
the southwest. Instances may be found even in
New England where important interests are sac
rificed and the strength TO be derived from com
bined action is frittered away th rough sectarian
prejudice.