g a different opinion, which will not bring down a
transatlantic anathema on my head; yet the subject is too
interesting to be omitted. Before I left England I remember
listening, with much admiration, to an eloquent friend, who
deprecated our system of public education, as confining the
various and excursive faculties of our children to one beaten
path, paying little or no attention to the peculiar powers of
the individual.

This objection is extremely plausible, but doubts of its
intrinsic value must, I think, occur to every one who has marked
the result of a different system throughout the United States.

From every enquiry I could make, and I took much pains to obtain
accurate information, it appeared that much is attempted, but
very little beyond reading, writing, and bookkeeping, is
thoroughly acquired. Were we to read a prospectus of the system
pursued in any of our public schools and that of a first-rate
seminary in America, we should be struck by the confined
scholastic routine of the former, when compared to the varied and
expansive scope of the latter; but let the examination go a
little farther, and I believe it will be found that the old
fashioned school discipline of England has produced something
higher, and deeper too, than that which roars so loud, and
thunders in the index.

They will not afford to let their young men study till two or
three and twenty, and it is therefore declared, _ex cathedra
Americana_, to be unnecessary. At sixteen, often much earlier,
education ends, and money-making begins; the idea that more
learning is necessary than can be acquired by that time, is
generally ridiculed as obsolete monkish bigotry; added to which,
if the seniors willed a more prolonged discipline, the juniors
would refuse submission. When the money-getting begins, leisure
ceases, and all of lore which can be acquired afterwards, is
picked up from novels, magazines, and newspapers.

At what time can the taste be formed? How can a correct and
polished style, even of speaking, be acquired? or when can the
fruit of the two thousand years of past thinking be added to the
native growth of American intellect? These are the tools, if I
may so express myself, which our elaborate system of school
discipline puts into the hands of our scholars; possessed of
these, they may use them in whatever direction they please
afterwards, they can never be an incumbrance.

No people appear more anxious to excite admira