Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1873-01-14
COMPULSORY EDUCATION.

In the January number of the Rhode Is
land Schoolmaster, We find the following
pithy article upon Compulsory Education,
which is worthy of particular attention at
this time. when the subject is being consid-
cred by the Legislature.
what my boy obliged to go to school |.
Isn't this free country BY and by you'll
make a law to send him to meeting q This is
the indignan. protest of a citizen sovereign at
the proposition to compel all children, not
idioic or incapable of education, to attend
school, if not otherwise provided for by their
guardians. The poor man needs his boy to
work for him, to run of errands, to tend the
baby, to fetch the cows, and to get his bottle
| filled, for your sturdiest opponent of compul-
sorry education has frequent calls on his boy
for this particular service, and no COW Yields,
"such milk" to his taste as comes in "that
little brown jug" But the man who boiled
his seed potatoes, and killed the goose of the
golden eggs, was not quite the short sighted
and demented citizen that this indignant pro-
tester shows himself to be. 1t is handy, no
doubt, to have boy to earn a sixpence for
you when yonr credit is low but great
deal wiser to wait while that he may learn
how to earn dollar in less time. Very con-
venient to keep little fellow trotting the ba-
by, but more cunning investment to get him
educated, that he might make his fortune by
inyentng baby jumper that would dispense
with thousand little tired hands.
No sum at compound interest brings in re-
turns like the money spent on education. If
the State compelled our indignant friend to
take fifty per cent bounty on all his pos
sessions, he wond not protest, if the tax.
payer did but the State does better, for his
possessions are small, but his children are ra-
ted at the same inestimable value as those of
the millionaires. The school is democratic
in the noblest sense of the word, and by its
bounty in this regard, the State gives an
equal fortune to every child who is reared
within its limits.
1t is well to remind our protesting friend,
that Compulsory Education is not novelty,
only the school and the surrounding, are
made more to the taste of liberty-loving
souls. If his boy sgrows up a vagabond, as
in nine cases out of ten he will if not schooled
in his childhood, then instead of primary and
normal schools, we have certain secondary
and abnormal schools, where they don't let
the pupils out at recess, and geology is pur-
sued with stone hammer, and the indust
arts are followed at the bench in a uniform
that fits all inmates but pleases none.
Compulsory Education in these barred and
boited schools, is mainly the product of the
want OF it in the airy and free seminaries to
which childhood would flock by their own
attractions,if adult folly offered no impede
ments. 1t is late to teach one after his head and
heart both get hard, and hundred times more
expensive than early training, without thou
sandth part of the good success which attends
1t. Even our indignant friend does not mutter
protest against the compulsory education of
prison and reform scnool and yet it is the men
OF his kith that furnish pupils for these ex.
pensiye institutions Not many lads who show
clean record in the common school, get into
! the books of these ugly reforma;ories. The