The Rutland daily globe. [volume] (Rutland, Vt.) 1873-1877, 1875-06-14
The Mission of Our Schools

Your high vocation is to teach children
how to live with each other in American
society," each attending faithfully to his own
business, and all working together to build
up the worlds republc-the model country
OF mankind. With such foundation stones
laid deep in the souls, the habits, the man
ncrs, and the daily school-lifc of the child
rem, we may hope to rear our temple of art
culture in the common school. No super
fetal drill IN music and drawing and Orna-
mental penmanship will compensate for
radical training of the young in that beauty
whose soul is love. If we come to the con-
clusion that we have nothing to do with the
hearts and morals of our school children in
their school life, and only with the head
and the brains, we may rear generation
polished and intelligent, but faithless, and
useless for all the great ends of American
life. But with such discipline in the
schoolhouse as / have described, the music
master and the drawing master will find
soil made ready for the growth of their d.
vine arts. A class oflovng, gentle minded
children, bound to their teacher by admira-
ton and reverence, living in school room
that is in itself n teacher of elegance and
order governed and led in the sweet ways
of firm and kindly control, will learn To
sing out of the heart, and use the pencil
with spirit and power. And such train
ing in the beautiful things of their common
life will be the most practical of all studies;
even training for the manhood and wo-
manhood for which our dear America SO
longs and prays with uplifted hands Do
you tell me this is all a schoolman's fancy
that it is vain to expect in the scboolnouses
of America, out of the mobs of all sorts and
conditions of children, such results in love-
&c a,,J 81, atn I
tray? Perhaps so but let me show you
transformation in nature. One summer
day, several years ago, wandered through
the snarl of rocky hills and dreary gulches
and dingy shantie-, called Oil City in Penn
sylvana, a great wilderness CT deep pits,
broken machinery, mud, smoke, stencil and
turbid oil, stuck all over with derricks look
ing each like gibbet on which some poor
victim of misplaced confidence had been
hanged.
AS sat on slippery side.hill overlook
ing this abomnation of desolation, and heard
from one of the Oldest engineers of the
place history of the operations there for
the last five years, a sense of sickness came
over me as if / were gazing down into the
valley of the shadow of death. But one
day, soon after, was in the chemical lab
oratory of a college among that same
range of hills and saw row of jars filled
with liquids of the most exquisite eolors;
green, like tender spring grasses; blue,
like heaven caught and imprisoned out of
the heart of July moons; reds, like the
flush of sunsets scarlets, like the flaming
autumn woods; pink and orange and gold,
like the lights that lnger into the evening
hours, lowering above the crystal waters
of northern lakes. The next evening, l
met company of dear friends, and there,
from the garments of every woman, were
flashing back those wondrouS hues, as if
womanhood itself had waited till this hour
for the fit cOlors with which to symbolic
all of love and grace she can become to
man. These colors are the distilled es-
sences of those same abominable oils that
ran all over the hill like a foul slime OF
nature. The great science of natures af-
finities -chemistry-ha been at work, and
out of this, the most horrible place that
can be seen by man, flowed a beauty that
rivals the coors with which the Infinite
Artist flushes the universe. So have /,
in moments of despair, looked over the
life of our American Republic-this crude
aud fearful mingling of all the races and
people on the earth. But there is one
power, omnipresent also in the world of
souls, that out of this very heart of con-
fusion and wrath can summon a sanity
manhood, an angelic womanhood, and
mould society surprising all former
achievements of man. 1t is the old chem
istry of heaven-the life of love TO God
and love to man-Rer. A. ID. Mavo at
Cincinnati.