cently established by Congress, and much may be hoped from the long experience and unwavering enthusiasm of Mr. Commissioner Barnard. He will collect and diffuse information, as the act of Congress prescribes, to the great advantage, doubtless, of educational institutions and activities. But he is not an inspector-general, nor has he inspectors under him to reach a single school, or to provide the inspection from which, whether national or local, every school in the land would be the gainer. Besides all the advantages of detail to be derived from inspection, there is the general advantage, hardly to be over-estimated in our country, resulting from the substitution of the practised judgment of an inspector in place of the haphazard votes of a committee, or the unreflecting applauses of a popular assemblage.

Inspection would soon lessen, if it did not entirely remove, another evil on which Mr. Fraser remarks, the use, or rather abuse, of text-books. He takes particular exception to the grammars and text-books of the classical courses, as "fatal to anything like thorough grounding and intelligent progress," the grammars, because of their inordinate details; and the text-books, because of their notes and ready-made translations. There are very few text-books in any course which do not offend against simplicity, of all qualities the one to which they should universally adhere. Like the sheep's head, which the Scotchman was eating to the Englishman's astonishment, the text-book of the American schools has "a deal o' confused feedin' aboot it." But, unlike the Scotch dish, it excites no enthusiasm in its uncertain consumers. A good book may be a hindrance, if it is too much relied upon; how much more a bad book, whose mistakes are beyond the teacher's reach, and therefore crowded pell-mell into the pu pil's brain. Mr. Fraser quotes a burst of fine writing from a Cincinnati report: "The Genius of Education sits like Niobe in our schools, weeping over the maltreatment of the fresh and beautiful minds which she would endow with so many charms; and Memory, the deity to whom all this incense is offered, falls at last, and rejects the profuse sacrifice." Niobe might shed a tear for many a parent, likewise, whose slender purse is drawn upon by frequent changes of text-books, the result

of competition, and, it must be confessed, of jobbery among the publishers.

"Americans do all their work," says Mr. Fraser, "with an intensity which has no parallel among us more phlegmatic Englishmen; to use a common and expressive phrase, they 'take twice as much out of themselves,' in the same time, as an ordinary English school-boy or school-girl would do. The result is exciting serious apprehensions in many farseeing minds."* To put a school of unforeseeing and unresisting children under high-pressure, and drive them on to danger, perhaps to death, is an offence not only against their youth, but against the powers that are to last when youth is no more. Of course it is perpetrated only in the minority of schools throughout the country; but were no more than a single school injured by it, it should be stopped, once and for all.

One happy result from stopping it would be a check to what Mr. Fraser calls "speechification." A public-school platform, as we all have reason to know, is too much like a stand at a race-course, where every voice is raised to goad on those contending for the prize. The speakers at the school, to be sure, are themselves goaded to their office. "A few remarks," whispers the teacher; "A few remarks," ask the committee; and a few follow, then a few more, and a gust of words sweeps through the room. "The staple of most that I heard," says Mr. Fraser, "was the well-worn theme of the infinite career that lay before them, and the possibility of every boy who listened to the speaker becoming President of the United States." That a drag should be put on this ever-rolling wheel of oratory is almost too much to hope for, did not hope spring eternal.

Thus far we have followed Mr. Fraser, confessing the faults he finds, and wishing that criticism so thoughtful and so kind as his may help us to correct them. From other opinions, equally unfavorable, which he forms concerning our schools, we venture to differ, for reasons that may be very briefly presented.

He considers the discipline of the schools too mechanical. Mechanical it must be, though it ought to be something more; but even if nothing more, we need not acknowledge that "it is purchased at the price of the repression of those high animal spirits which delight in athletic exercises."* Evidently Mr. Fraser did not get acquainted with many American boys. It is rather droll, by the by, to hear an Englishman say that our school discipline "is of a kind of which it would be hopeless to attempt to get five hundred English boys of the upper or middle class to submit." American nature is not so

rebellious after all.

"The grand defect of all which I should venture to signalize in the American system," remarks Mr. Fraser, "is, that it ignores, if it does not smother, individuality." By individuality he says he means "the development of individual abilities and character." With all due deference, not only to Mr. Fraser, but to others who say the same thing about schools, here and elsewhere, we doubt its significance. It means, in all probability, not that the individual is left untaught, but that he is taught with others, instead of being taught by himself; consequently, that his tastes or capacities cannot be regarded to the exclusion of his fellow-pupils. The common school teaches by classes: how can it teach otherwise? but to teach a class, it must teach the members of the class, and every one of them. Each, therefore, as he proceeds in his studies, finds himself growing in knowledge, and in the power to acquire knowledge; and this is at least one of the most effective means for the development of latent individuality. The pupil that needs more must go to a private school, perhaps to a private tutor; and even then, unless his teacher is gifted with unusual insight into his nature, or unusual responsiveness to its wants, his individuality will suffer. But it is not the office of any teacher or of any school, exclusively, to develop individual ability or individual character. That is the work of home as well as school, and of parent yet more than teacher, the work, it may be said, of life itself, and of the influences under which life passes.

* Page 171.

From the school comes intellectual training; from the home, and from the life beginning there, comes the training of body and soul, in which individual character finds opportunity of development a hundred-fold greater than that which the training of the mind alone supplies.

But, Mr. Fraser would say, it is not the mind alone that should be trained at school. "The one thing lacking in the American method," he observes, is "sound and substantial grounding in the principles of the Christian religion.' On a point so momentous he must be fully heard:

"The tone of an American school, the nescio quid so hard to be described, but so easily recognized by the experienced eye, so soon felt by the quick perceptions of the heart, if not unsatisfactory, is yet incomplete. It is true that the work of the day commences with the reading of the Word of God, generally followed by prayer. It is true that decorous if not reverent attention is paid during both these exercises; but the decorum struck me as rather a result or a part of discipline than as a result of spiritual impressions; there was no 'face as it had been the face of an angel'; no appearance of kindled hearts. The intellectual tone of the schools is high; the moral tone, though perhaps a little too self-conscious, is not unhealthy; but another tone, which can only be vaguely described in words, but of which one feels one's self in the presence when it is really there, and which, for want of a better name, I must call the religious' tone, one misses, and misses with regret."† "I do not like to call the American system of education, or to hear it called, irreligious. It is perhaps even going too far to say that it is non-religious, or purely secular. If the cultivation of some of the choicest intellectual gifts bestowed by God on man, the perceptions, memory, taste, judgment, reason; if the exaction of habits of punctuality, attention, industry, and 'good behavior'; if the respect which is required and which is paid during the reading of a daily portion of God's holy Word and the daily saying of Christ's universal prayer, are all to be set down as only so many contrivances for producing clever devils,' it would be vain to argue against such a prejudice." "Sorry as I should be, with all its imperfections, to give up the denominational principle of education, because I believe it to be the best possible for us here, I should consider myself to be tendering a most fatal piece of advice if, with all its advantages, I recommended its adoption there. The safer hope is that American Chris

6

*Page 172, note.

+ Page 179.

Page 183.

tians, less trammelled by articles, confessions, subscriptions, rubrics, formularies, than we Christians of the Old World, may be brought to take larger, broader views than they now do of their common faith; may dismiss from their minds that ever-recurring and unworthy suspicion of sectarianism; may believe that religion may be taught in schools without the aim of making proselytes; and that 'all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity' may unite in one earnest endeavor to bestow upon their schools the one thing lacking, and permit the morality which they profess to teach and desire to promote to be built upon the one only sure foundation, the truths, the principles, the sanctions of the Gospel."*

There is no arguing against the spirit, or much of the letter, of these passages. In our judgment, they do the writer the highest credit as a religious, a charitable, and an earnest man. But as to the one thing lacking in our schools, if it is the teaching of religion, we have to take the other side. Let there be no misunderstanding; it is not the observation or the reverence of religion, but the teaching of it, not the indirect teaching of it, by example or by religious use of all the opportunities of school, but the direct teaching that consists in doctrinal or practical religious instruction, the grounding, as Mr. Fraser terms it, in the principles of religion, — which we have no wish to introduce into our system, so long as the divisions of the Christian Church, or the habits of thought and action characteristic of the American people, continue as they

are.

And why not? Because the common school is not the place for teaching religion. Because the teachers of the common school are not the persons to teach religion. Because the office of the common school, in moulding the various elements of the nation, and thus preserving and developing our nationality, an office which no other institution or power among us seems able at present to perform, — is one with which the teaching of religion would so far interfere, especially with one large class not needing to be named, as to diminish, if not altogether prevent, its success. Because, for these three reasons, to allege no more, religion itself would suffer, while other interests, less important indeed, but still important, would suffer even more.

* Page 185.