Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what education is aiming at.  There is evidence that the ancients of New England used to birch their boys, but after independence had been fought for and won, higher aims prevailed.  The Puritan then believed that his children were born to a destiny far grander than that of any other children on the face of the earth; the treatment accorded to them was therefore to be different.  The fundamental idea of American life was to be “Freedom,” and the definition of “Freedom” by a learned American is, “The power which necessarily belongs to the self-conscious being of determining his actions in view of the highest, the universal good, and thereby of gradually realising in himself the eternal divine perfection.”  The definition seems a little hazy, but the workings of great minds are often unintelligible to common people.  “The American citizen must be morally autonomous, regarding all institutions as servants, not as masters.  So far man has been for the most part a thrall.  The true American must worship the inner God recognised as his own deepest and eternal self, not an outer God regarded as something different from himself.”

Lucifer is said to have entertained a similar idea.  He would not be a thrall, and the result as described by the republican Milton was truly disastrous: 

“Him the Almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong
down
to bottomless perdition
Region of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell.”

The manner in which the American citizen is to be made “morally autonomous, and placed beyond the control of current opinion,” will require much money; his parents must therefore be rich; they must already have inherited wealth, or have obtained it by ability or labour.  The course of training to be given to youth includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, aesthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St. Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Lowell.

The boys on the prairies had to earn their bread; they could not spend six years travelling around and studying all the writers above mentioned, making themselves morally autonomous, and worshipping their own deepest and eternal selves.  The best men America has produced were reared at home, and did chores out of school hours.