Again: How long will the laity so freely pour out their earnings to endow colleges and theological seminaries when such results as these are seen?
Note D, page [336].
In resigning all farther agency in practical educational efforts, the writer hopes, after so many years of devotion to it, she may be allowed to speak with entire frankness her views as to the present modes of education.
The last thirty years have witnessed great efforts all over the nation to improve and increase common schools, and to multiply higher educational institutions. Although much has been said and written in regard to physical and moral training in schools, unfortunately very little has been accomplished.
It is the intellectual department of the brain that has absorbed attention, as if this were the chief, or even the whole of man. Parents stimulate, teachers stimulate, lecturers stimulate, superintendents stimulate, school committees stimulate—all turning their full energies on to only one function of the brain.
In our colleges, this intellectual stimulating is divided and subdivided, one professor for one department, another for a second, and another for a third, and so on, till from twelve to twenty are thus employed. Meantime the training of the body, or the development of the social, domestic, and moral powers, have not even one to minister the needful care.
Then, in preparatory boarding-schools for boys, taken from mother, sisters, and home influences in the first blush of youth, all the school stimulus is turned on to the brain to develop Latin, Greek, and mathematics, while health of body and soul perish under abuse or neglect.
Then the boarding-school is taking the young girls through a kind of college course at the most critical period of life, while their chief nervous energies are exhausted in completing a given course of study in a given time, and almost every law of health for body and mind are violated.
Then, in our primary schools, especially in cities, where pure air, healthful exercise, and home employments are least at command, all the energies of school committees and superintendents of schools are directed to securing a given amount of intellectual labor.