does our present primary education carefully abstain from hinting to the workman that some of his greatest evils are traceable to mere physical agencies, which could be removed by energy, patience, and frugality; but it does worse—­it renders him, so far as it can, deaf to those who could help him, and tries to substitute an Oriental submission to what is falsely declared to be the will of God, for his natural tendency to strive after a better condition.

What wonder then, if very recently, an appeal has been made to statistics for the profoundly foolish purpose of showing that education is of no good—­that it diminishes neither misery, nor crime, among the masses of mankind?  I reply, why should the thing which has been called education do either the one or the other?  If I am a knave or a fool, teaching me to read and write won’t make me less of either one or the other—­unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to wise and good purposes.

Suppose any one were to argue that medicine is of no use, because it could be proved statistically, that the percentage of deaths was just the same, among people who had been taught how to open a medicine chest, and among those who did not so much as know the key by sight.  The argument is absurd; but it is not more preposterous than that against which I am contending.  The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.  Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box.  But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not.  And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand.  In these times a man may as well be purblind, as unable to read—­lame, as unable to write.  But I protest that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts, than that they should remain ignorant of that knowledge to which these arts are means.

It may be said that all these animadversions may apply to primary schools, but that the higher schools, at any rate, must be allowed to give a liberal education.  In fact, they professedly sacrifice everything else to this object.

Let us inquire into this matter.  What do the higher schools, those to which the great middle class of the country sends it children, teach, over and above the instruction given in the primary schools?  There is a little more reading and writing of English.  But, for all that, every one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper classes who can read aloud decently, or who can put his thoughts on paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing of good or elegant) language.  The “ciphering” of the lower schools expands into elementary mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a little Euclid.  But I doubt if one boy in five hundred has ever heard the explanation of a rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise than by rote.