hools, and what is taught in them. A child learns:--

1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in a very large
proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure in reading, or to be
able to write the commonest letter properly.

2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, nine times out
of ten, understands next to nothing.

3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall with it, a few of
the broadest and simplest principles of morality. This, to my mind, is
much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the
apple in Newton's garden, an integral part of the doctrine of
gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the
inverse squares.

4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, and, perhaps, a
little something about English history and the geography of the child's
own country. But I doubt if there is a primary school in England in
which hangs a map of the hundred in which the village lies, so that the
children may be practically taught by it what a map means.

5. A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, respect for
others: obtained by fear, if the master be incompetent or foolish; by
love and reverence, if he be wise.

So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory and
practice of obedience to the moral laws of Nature, I gladly admit, not
only that it contains a valuable educational element, but that, so far,
it deals with the most valuable and important part of all education.
Yet, contrast what is done in this direction with what might be done;
with the time given to matters of comparatively no importance; with the
absence of any attention to things of the highest moment; and one is
tempted to think of Falstaff's bill and "the halfpenny worth of bread to
all that quantity of sack."

Let us consider what a child thus "educated" knows, and what it does not
know. Begin with the most important topic of all--morality, as the guide
of conduct. The child knows well enough that some acts meet with
approbation and some with disapprobation. But it has never heard that
there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as
cogent and as well defined as that which underlies every physical law;
that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil
consequences, as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a
garret window. Again, though the scholar may have been made acquainted,
in dogm