The New York herald., 1874-09-02


of our educational institutions calls. for special
notice by the press, and furnishes an occasion
for urging upon educators generally some con-
siderations that have been greatly overlooked.
There is, perhaps, no branch of human in
dustry in which the requirement Of skill and
sagacity is so essential, and yet so rarely
found, as that of training the mind and drill
ing it for the rough battle of life which lies
before American youth. The eminent jurist
William Writ. in distinguishing the causes
which underlie the varying careers of young
men emerging from college life, has forcibly
reasoned that the difference in their destiny is
due not to intellectual disparity but to the
disparity of their labor and application. We
cannot, indeed, accept the theory that all the
young start in life with equal endowments,
and need only the same education and same
labor to keep abreast of each other. But
without question our educational machinery,
private and public, is moulding national
life, because it is moulding by its ponderous
and powerful strokes the individuals who in
little while will control the nation. And it
is to be not q little dreaded that education
may become in this country, as in Germany,
not the tender and minstering nurse of the
young but the tyrannic master, shaping the
plastic mind on the unyielding anvil of its
own thought and will.
Such result would be the natural conse-
quence of the hasty and undue exaltation of
education beyond the legitimate sphere to
which it should be confined. There is no
lesson we need to impress on our educators
more deeply than that they are not called to
fashion and mould but to lead along and
develop the individual intellect in the line of
nature and according to the individual bent
TO do this in large schools, where large
masses of youth arc put through the same
course Of study very much as large masses of
clay are run through brick press, is impos-
sible. The individuality of the scholar is ig-
nored, and the most precious germs of genius,
which would under wise culture have been
prolific Of good, are crushed out between the
upper and neither stones of the ponderous
mill.
In an age like this, when public morality is
at low ebb because home culture and home
education have been supplanted by the tree
school, the boarding school, the academy and
college, we should pause and inquire what
limitation must be put on this unnatural
process. True, we need the free school and
the other public institutions as much as ever.
But the time has arrived for complete re-
vision of all our educational systems. Small
and select schools, in which the numbers are
sufficient to furnish honorable emulation and
provoke earnest work, are unquestonably bet
ter than the grand academies and public
schools, where all individual development Is
necessarily ignored. The academy, ceteris
paribas, is or ought to be better gymnasium
than the college, and it is noticeable fact
that many youth who has done well in the
private school has been spoiled for life in the
university.
The education of females is problem yet
more difficult, and calls for far more patient
and philosophic concern than it has ever yet
received. An English Psychologist, Mr..
Lindsay, who has given much attention to
the study of the mental faculties, has found
that at or up to certain age girls are as
sharp as, or sharper, than boys at lesson learn
ing and recitation. The press reports of the
competitive examinations in the public
schools frequently record cases of female pro-
fciency rivalling that OF boys. And yet this
same scientist has found that the female su-
periority, when it exists, is confined to school
life, and is afterwards perfectly eclipsed by
the average attainment Of the man. The ex-
planation is obvious. The modern systems
of female education aim to stimulate the
feminine mind beyond its normal and natural
tension, to push it onward TO attain an
artificial standard of energy and CON-
pass which it was never designed
for. The result is that diplomas ore won
and little ephemeral reputation, at the cost
at least of physical health, and after the enor-
nous mental strain comes the reaction, which
produces years of intellectual prostration,
while meantime the sharp and delicate edge
of femininity, with its indispensable charms
has been blunted and worn away. If we
would, therefore, secure the highest welfare of
the female sex, upon which so much depends,
we must throw around it the power of fam
lily influence and protect it from the withering
blaze of publicity. The failure to do this and
the Wholesale education of our women in
public institutions, where the intellectual cul-
ture has the prominence, are threatening the
physical as well as the moral health of tho
nation, and we cannot too soon or too sharply
look to the rectiication of this evil.
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The WAR OF RACES. state of society
which exists in Kentucky and Tennessee,
as nicturad hx mr corragnQndanta In