XVII CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LITERATURE OF EDUCATION. SCIENCE AND RELIGION. A Sermon delivered in Albany during the session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by Mark Hopkins, D. D. Albany. 1856. 52 pages. RELIGIOUS BEARINGS OF MAN'S CREATION. A Discourse delivered in Albany during the session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by Edward Hitchcock, D. D., LL. D. 35 pages. RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. A Discourse delivered in Albany during the session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by Rt. Rev. J. H. Hopkins, D. D., LL. D. Albany. 1856. 30 pages. HANDS: BRAIN: HEART. An Address delivered before the Mass. Charitable Mechanics Association, on occasion of the Eighth Exhibition, Sept. 24, 1856, by Rev. F. D. Huntington, D. D. Boston. 1856. 35 pages. TRUANCY AND ABSENTEEISM. A Special Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools on Truancy and Absenteeism in Rhode Island, made by order of the General Assembly at its May session, Providence, 1856. 28 pages. LIBERAL EDUCATION. An Address delivered before the Union Literary and Philalethean Societies of Hanover College, at the Annual Commencement, August, 1856, by James C. Moffat. Philadelphia. 1857. 24 pages. THE WEST: ITS CULTURE AND ITS COLLEGES. An Oration delivered at the Annual Commencement of Iowa College, Davenport, Iowa, July, 1855, by George F. Magoun. Davenport. 1855. 34 pages. RELIGION AND EDUCATION. An Oration delivered at the Commencement of Iowa College, Davenport, Iowa, 1856, by the Rt. Rev. Truman M. Post, D. D., of St. Louis. Davenport. 1856. 27 pages. SOCIETY AND RELIGION. A Sermon for California, delivered on Sabbath evening, July 6, 1856, at the installation of Rev. E. S. Lacy, as Pastor of the First Congregational Church, San Francisco, by Horace Bushnell, D. D. Hartford L. E. Hunt. 1856. 32 pages. INAUGURATION OF THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY, at Albany, August 28, 1856 139 pages. Albany. 1856. PROCEEDINGS AT THE RECEPTION AND DINNER IN HONOR OF GEORGE PEABODY, ESQ., of London, by the citizens of the old town of Danvers, Oct. 9, 1856; to which is appended an Address by Hon. Rufus Choate at the Dedication of the Peabody Institute, with the exercises at the laying of the Corner Stone. Boston. 1856. 195 pages. DOES THE COMMON SCHOOL SYSTEM PREVENT CRIME? Newark. 1856. 20 pages. THE TEACHER. Moral Influences employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young. A new and revised edition. By Jacob Abbott. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. 353 pages. DEMANDS OF THE AGE ON COLLEGES. Speech delivered by Hon. Horace Mann, President of Antioch College, before the Christian Convention, October 8, 1854. New York: Fowler & Wells. 1857. THE MEANS AND ENDS OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION. By Ira Mayhew. New York: A. L. Barnes & Co. 1857. 468 pages. COLLEGE EDUCATION AND SELF EDUCATION. A Lecture delivered in University College, London, introductory to the Session of the Faculty of Arts and Laws. By David Masson, Professor of Literaure, University College, London. Scope of Education.-The business of education, in its widest sense, is co-extensive with a man's life: that it begins with the first moment of life, and ends with the last; and, that it goes on not alone in buildings like that in which we are now assembled, but in every combination of place, company, and circumstance, in which a man may voluntarily station himself, or into which he may be casually thrust. I will here understand education as a process extending only over that preparatory period of life which, with young men, may be supposed to close about the twentieth or twenty-fifth year. And, I will also understand the word as referring chiefly to those means, whether organized or casual, by which, during that period of life, knowledge is acquired and accumulated. The School of the Family.-The first school in which a man is bound to learn, and in which every man does, in spite of himself, learn more or less, is the school of his own ancestry, parentage, and kindred. There is no man, however strong his character, and however migratory his life, in whose mature manner of thought there are not traces of impressions produced on him by the family faces amid which he first opened his eyes, the family joys or griefs with which his childhood laughed or sobbed, the family stories and traditions to which his childhood listened. Happy they to whom this has been a kindly school; the homes of whose infancy have been homes of peace, order, and courtesy; over whose early years just fatherly authority and careful motherly gentleness have watched; in whose experience there has been no contradiction between the sense of right and the ties of blood; and who can look back upon progenitors, remembered for probity, courage, and good citizenship, and round among living kinsmen well placed and well respected in the world. This is not the common notion of pedigree. That man were, indeed, little better than a liar who, counting high historic names among his ancestors, should pretend to be careless of the fact; but, the kind of pedigree of which we speak is to be found in the humblest lineage of the land; and, at this hour, over broad Britain, there are, as we all know, families neither rich nor noble, to have sprung from which, and to have been nursed on their unrecorded fireside legends, would, for the purposes of real outfit in life, be better than to have been born in a castle and had the blood of all the Plantagenets. And yet, on the other hand, even those,—and they are many, to whom this school of family and kindred has been a hard school, may there, also, have received many a powerful and useful lesson. Men do learn very variously; and there is an education of revolt and reaction, as well as of acquiescence and imitation. The training received in the school of family and kindred may not have been a genial or promising one; it may not be from the past in his own lineage that one can derive any direct stimulus or inspiration; the home of the early education may have been one of penury, chill, and contention; a veritable picture of a household, with its household gods broken; and yet, even so, the culture may have been great and varied,—albeit, sometimes, a culture of strength at the expense of symmetry. The School of Locality.-I have always felt disposed to attach a peculiar reverence and a peculiar sense of value to that arrangement, institution, or whatever you choose to call it, common to most societies, which we in Great Britain designate by the term neighborhood or parish. That every man should be related, and should feel himself related, in a particular manner, to that tract of earth which he is taught to regard as his parish, the assigned local scene of his habitation and activity on this side the grave, seems to me a natural and beautiful arrangement, which our political system would do well to respect, use, and consecrate. The limits of this smallest and most natural of territorial divisions may be variously defined. You may figure a parish as a tract of earth containing and supporting two thousand inhabitants, the ideal of a rural parish; or, you may figure it as a tract of earth underlying the sound of a particular church-bell. That this smallest of territorial divisions should merge and fit into larger and still larger divisions,-the district, the county, and so on,-is also necessary and natural; but, that a man's closest relations ought to be with his own parish and neighborhood, that it is with the natural and social phenomena lying around him on this piece of earth that he is bound primarily to make himself acquainted, and that all the elementary requirements of his life ought to be provided for by apparatus there set up, seems to me sound doctrine. For a man not to be so locally related during at least a portion of his life,-for a man to be shifting about in his youth from place to place, not remaining long enough in any to root his affections among its objects and details,-seems to me a misfortune. in point of fact, however, few are in this predicament. Removal from one's native place is common enough, and is becoming more common; but, almost all,— including even those exceptional persons who, having been born at sea, are reputed to belong to the parish of Stepney,-are located, during some part of their lives, in some one district, with the whole aspect and circumstance of which they become familiar, and which they learn to regard as native ground. Now, it is important to remark that there is no district, no patch of the habitable earth, in which a man can be placed and bred, but there are within that spot the materials and inducements toward a very considerable natural education. Nay, more, there is, to all ordinary intents and purposes, no one district in the natural and artificial circumstance of which there is not a tolerable representation and epitome of all that is general and fundamental in nature and life everywhere. Take Great Britain itself. Every British parish has its mineralogy; every British parish has its geology; every British parish has its botany; every British parish has its zoology; every British parish has its rains, its storms, its streams, and, consequently, its meteorology and hydrology; every British parish has its wonders of nature and art, impressive on the local imagination, and, in some cases, actually exerting a physical influence over the local nerve; and, though these objects and wonders vary immensely, though in one parish geological circumstance may predominate, in another botanical, and in a third hydrological or architectural; though in one the local wonder may be a marsh, in another a rocky cavern, and in a third an old fort or a bit of Roman wall; yet, in each there is a sufficient touch of what is generic in all. Over every British parish, at least when night comes, there hangs,-splendid image of our identity at the highest, the same nocturnal glory, a sapphire concave of nearly the same stars. Descend to the life and living circumstance of the community, and it is still the There is no British parish in which all the essential processes, passions, and social ongoings of British humanity, from the chaffering of the market-place up to madness and murderous revenge, are not proportionately illustrated and same. epitomised. There is no British parish that has not its gossip, its humors, its customs, its oracular and remarkable individuals, its oddities and whimsicalities, all of which can be made objects of study. Finally, there is no British parish that has not its traditions, its legends, and histories, connecting the generation present upon it with the world of the antique. And, with some modification, it is the same, if, passing the limits of Britain, we extend our view to foreign lands and climes. The circumstance, physical, artificial, social and historical, of a district in Italy or in Spain, is largely different from the corresponding circumstance of a district in Britain; much more so the circumstance of a district in South America or Hindostan; and yet, generically, there is so much that is common, that, after all, a person educated in the midst of Italian or Spanish circumstance, has about the same stock of fundamental notions of things as an Englishman has, and that a Hindoo jest will pass current in Middlesex. Every man, then, learns a vast deal,-a large proportion of our surest knowledge is derived, from this education which we all have, in spite of ourselves, in the school of native local circumstance. It appears to me that, in our educational theories, we do not sufficiently attend to this. It appears to me that, among all our schemes of educational reform, perhaps the most desirable would be one for the organization and systematic development of this education of local circumstance, which is, at any rate, everywhere going on. This, I conceive, is the true theory of the "teaching of common things." Every child born in a parish and resident in it, ought to have, as his intellectual outfit in life, a tolerably complete acquaintance with the concrete facts of nature and life presented by that parish; and, in every parish, there ought to be a systematic means for accomplishing this object. Every child ought to carry with him into life, as a little encyclopædia, a stock of facts and pictures collected from the scene of his earliest habitations and associations; ought to be familiar with that miscellany of natural and artificial circumstance which first solicited his observation in the locality where he was brought up; from its minerals, and wild plants, and birds, and molluscs, up to its manufactures, its economics, its privileges and by-laws, and its local mythology or legends. A reformed system of parochial education ought to take this in charge, and to secure to the young some instruction in local natural history, local antiquities, local manufactures and economics, and local institutions and customs. Meanwhile, in the absence of any systematic means of accomplishing the object, we see that everywhere healthy boys do, by their own locomotion and inquisitiveness, contrive to acquire a stock of concrete local fact and imagery. We see them roaming over the circle of their neighborhoods, singly and in bands, ascending hills, climbing trees and precipices, peeping into foundries, workshops, and police offices, peering, in short, into every thing open or forbidden to them, and, in the most literal sense of the phrase, pursuing knowledge under difficulties. And, here, accordingly, in addition to constitutional difference and the difference of family schooling, is another source of the intellectual diversity we find among grown-up men. The education of local circumstance, as we have said, is by no means necessarily a narrow education; all that is general and essential everywhere, whether as respects the main facts of nature or the habits and laws of the human mind, is repeated in miniature in every spot. Kant never slept out of Königsberg; and Socrates never wished to go beyond the walls of Athens. Yet, on the other hand, difference of local educating circumstance is one of the causes of difference of intellectual taste and style in mature life. No two districts or parishes are precisely alike in their suggestions and intellectual inducements. Some localities, as we have said, allure to geology, others to botany, others to fondness for landscape and color, others to mechanics and engineering, others to archæology and historical lore. Of those supposed three hundred youths, for example, even omitting such of them as had been born and brought up abroad, amid scenes, and a vegetation, and costumes, and customs, aye, and under constellations different from our own,-hardly any two of the British-born would be found trading intellectually, so to speak, on the same stock of recollected facts and images. Some might have been born on the sea-coast, and the images most familiar to their memories would be those of rocks, and shingle, and a breaking surf, and brown fishing boats, and gulls dipping in the waves, and heavy clouds gathering for a storm. "I see a wretched isle, that ghost-like stands, Wrapt in its mist-shroud in the wintry main; Others might have been born and bred in sweet pastoral districts, and the images most kindly to their fancy would be those of still green valleys, and little streams flowing through them, and flocks, led by tinkling sheep-bells, cropping the uplands. Others might be natives of rich English wheat flats; others of barren tracts of hill and torrent. Some might have been born in provincial towns, where the kinds of circumstance peculiar to street-life would preponderate over the purely agricultural or rural; others might be denizens of the great metropolis itself, with its endless extent of shops, warehouses, wharves, churches, and chimneys. In large towns, and, above all, in London, it is needless to say, the fact to be noted is the infinite preponderance of artificial and social circumstance over that of natural landscape, and its infinitely close intertexture. The spontaneous education there, accordingly, is chiefly in what is socially various, curious, highly developed, comic, and characteristic. So strong, however, is the instinct of local attachment, that natives of London do contract an affection for their own parishes and neighborhoods, and an acquaintance with their details and humors, over and above their general regard for those objects which claim the common worship of all. In short, however we turn the matter over, we still find that a large proportion of the most substantial education of every one consists of this unconscious and inevitable education of local circumstance; and that, in fact, much of the original capital on which we all trade intellectually during life is that mass of miscellaneous fact and imagery which our senses have taken in busily and imperceptibly amid the scenes of their first exercise. In the lives of most men who have become eminent, whether in speculative science or in imaginative literature, a tinge of characteristic local color may be traced to the last. Adam Smith meditated his "Wealth of Nations" on the sands of a strip of Fifeshire sea-coast, and drew the instances which suggested the doctrines of that work to his own mind, and by which he expounded them to others, from the petty circumstance of a small fishing and weaving community close by. And, in Shakspeare himself, widely as his imagination ranged, it will be found that, in his descriptions of natural scenery at least, large use is made of the native circumstance of his woody Warwickshire, with its elms, its willows, its crowflowers, daisies, and long-purples. However migratory a man has been, and however thickly, by his migrations, he may have covered the tablets of his memory with successive coatings of imagery, there are times when, as he shuts his eyes, all these seem washed away, and the original photographs of his early |