, there should be apparent certain
decided qualities and results, which are manifested as, and as often as,
opportunity for their exercise presents itself. The schooled mind should
surely not possess a less active curiosity to observe and to know than
did the same mind before entering school, but even a stronger, more
self-directed, purposive and efficient zeal in such direction.
Intellectual vivacity and point, clearness of conception, and
truthfulness of generalization and of inference,--all these should
appear in more marked degree, along with the increased sobriety and
judgment, and the improved facility of practical adaptation, which
properly characterize maturity of mind and habit. Now, we suggest the
careful observation of any number of children, not yet sent to school,
and that are favored with ordinarily sensible parents, and ordinarily
happy homes; and then, the equally careful study of a like number who
have just emerged from their school course, or have fairly entered on
the business of life; and we warn the really acute and discriminating
observer to look forward (in the majority of instances) to a
disheartening result from his investigation! We are convinced that the
net product of our immensely expansive, patient, and ardently sought
schooling will, in a large proportion of all the cases, be found to
consist in the imperfect acquirement and uncertain tenure of knowledge,
upon a few rudimentary branches, often without definite understanding or
habit of applying even so much to its uses, and usually without the
conception or desire to make it the point of departure for life-long
acquisition; and all this accompanied, too often, with actual loss of
that spontaneous intellectual activity which began to manifest itself in
the child, and which should have been fruiting now in, at the least,
some degree of sound and true intellectuality. So, we are still left to
expect mainly of Nature not only the germs of capacity, but the maturing
of them; the latter, a work which Education surely ought to be competent
to. Meanwhile, like a wearied and fretted pedagogue, Education complains
of the bad materials Nature gives her, when she ought to be questioning
whether she has yet learned to bring out the excellence of the material
she has.

Is it not an expensive process, that thus amasses a certain quantity of
knowledge at cost of the disposition, sometimes of the ability, to add
to it through the whole of life? Really, sch