ons.

Infant schools should repress rather than encourage the hard study of
books. Lessons at this age should be drawn chiefly from objects in the
garden, the field, and the grove; from the flower, the plant, the tree,
the brook, the bird, the beast, the worm, the fly, the human body--the
sun, or the visible heavens. These lessons, whether given by the parent,
as constituting a part of the family arrangements, or by the infant or
primary school teacher, should, it is true, be regarded for the time
being as study, but they should never be long; and they should be
frequently relieved by the most free and unrestrained pastimes and
gambols of the young on the green grass, or beside the rippling stream,
uninfluenced, or at least unrepressed, by those who are set over them.

The public or common school, overlooking as it does any direct attempts
to make provision for the amusement of the pupils, even during the
scanty recess that is afforded them once in three hours, would appear to
a stranger on this planet, at first sight, to be designed as much as
possible to defeat every intention of nature with reference to the
growth of the human frame. For we may often travel many hundred miles
and not see so much as an enclosed play ground; and never perhaps any
direct provision for particular and more favorable amusements.

I might speak of other schools and places of resort for children, and
proceed to show how all our arrangements appear to be the offspring of a
species of utilitarianism which rejects every sport whose value cannot
be estimated in dollars and cents. I might even refer to those schools
of our country where these ultra utilitarian notions are carried to an
extent which excludes amusing conversation or reading even during
meal-time; and devotes the hours which were formerly spent in
recreation, to manual labor of some productive kind or other.--But I
forbear. Enough has been said to illustrate the position I have taken,
that there is in vogue a system which bears the marks of having been
contrived, if not by the enemies of our race, either openly or covertly,
at least by those whom ignorance renders scarcely less at war with the
general happiness.

Now I would not deny nor attempt to deny that change of occupation of
body or mind is of itself an amusement, and one too of great value.
Undoubtedly it is so. To some children, studies of every kind are an
amusement; and there are few indeed to whom none are so. Labor,