from immediate perceptions and
reasonings--a thing that, to all eyes capable of seeing in it something
more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic,
begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy
distance, obscure and incomprehensible--granting all this, and yet any
one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process,
that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and
intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the
actually existing indifference about questions as to the _method or
methods_ by which the work can most fully and satisfactorily be
accomplished. We have enacted laws, built school-houses, provided
libraries, employed teachers, and in a tolerable degree insisted on the
attendance of pupils, duly equipped with treatises of knowledge. We have
lavished money on a set of instrumentalities, more or less vaguely
considered requisite to insure qualification of the young for active
life, and the perpetuity of the national virtue and liberty. What we, in
America, however, have least essayed and most needed, has been to get
_beneath the surface_ of the great educational question; to look less
after plans of school buildings, and the schemes of school-districts and
funds, and more into the structure of the lessons and studies, and the
relationships, applications, and value of the ideas secured or attempted
during the daily sessions of the school classes. It will be a great day
for us, when our principals and schoolmasters cease to put forward so
prominently, at the end of the quarter or term, its smartest
compositions and declamations, and when the over-generous public shall
begin to attend on 'examinations' with a less allowance of eyes and
ears, and a more vigorous and active use of the discriminating and
judging powers of their own minds. In the externals of education,
England, France, and Germany must take rank after some of the States of
our country; but in the matter of seeking the right interior qualities
and tendencies of instruction, they have been in advance of us; though
just now the anti-progressive spirit of their governments is interposing
itself to hinder the largest practicable results by the schools, and to
what extent it will emasculate them of their best qualities, time only
can show. Among our teaching class, the apathy is not confined to the
ill-rewarded incumbents of the lower positions; with