The Duty of American Women to Their Country

by Catharine Esther Beecher

After presenting all these shocking details, the chief superintendent, in 1844, thus remarks:

“No subject connected with elementary instruction affords a source for such mortifying and humiliating reflection as that of the condition of a large portion of the schoolhouses as presented in the above enumeration. Only one third of the whole number visited were found in good repair; another third in only comfortable condition; while three thousand three hundred and nineteen were unfit for the reception of man or beast. Seven thousand were found destitute of any play-ground, nearly six thousand destitute of convenient seats and desks, nearly eight thousand destitute of any proper facilities for ventilation, and upward of six thousand destitute of a privy of any sort. And it is in these miserable abodes of filth and dirt, deprived of wholesome air, or exposed to the assaults of the elements, with no facilities for exercise or relaxation, with no conveniences for prosecuting their studies, crowded together on benches not admitting of a moment’s rest, and debarred the possibility of yielding to the ordinary calls of nature without violent inroads upon modesty and shame, that upward of two hundred thousand children of this state are compelled to spend an average period of eight months each year of their pupilage. Here the first lessons of human life, the incipient principles of morality, and the rules of social intercourse are to be impressed on the plastic mind. The boy is here to receive the model of his permanent character, and imbibe the elements of his future career. Here the instinctive delicacy of the young female, one of the characteristic ornaments of her sex, is to be expanded into maturity by precept and example. Such are the temples of science, such the ministers under whose care susceptible childhood is to receive its earliest impressions. Great God! shall man dare to charge to thy dispensations the vices, the crimes, the sickness, the sorrows, the miseries, and the brevity of human life, who sends his little children to a pesthouse, fraught with the deadly malaria of both moral and physical disease? Instead of impious murmurs, let him lay his hand on his mouth, and his mouth in the dust, and cry ‘Unclean!’”

Let it not be imagined that this picture is peculiar to New-York. The superintendents of the common schools in Ohio, and even in Massachusetts and Connecticut, have reported similar evils as existing, to a greater or less extent, in the schools in their respective states; and if such things exist in the states where most has been done for education, what can be hoped for the neglected and abused little ones where even less is done by law for their comfort and improvement? In view of such utter destitution of schools in the greater part of our country, and of the sufferings and neglect endured by little children in other portions, the inquiry must be earnestly pressed, “What can be the reason of this deplorable state of things?”

The grand reason is, the selfish apathy of the educated classes, and the stupid apathy of those who are too ignorant to appreciate an education for their children. In those states where no school system is established by law, the intelligent and wealthy content themselves with securing a good education for their own children, and care nothing for the rest. When any project, therefore, is presented for obtaining a good school system, the rich and intelligent do not wish to be taxed for the children of others, and the rest do not care whether their children are educated or not, or else are too poor to pay the expense.

In those states where a school system is established, parents of intelligence and moral worth, seeing the neglected state of the common school, withdraw their children to private schools. And feeling no interest in schools which they do not patronise, they pass them with utter neglect. And thus, neither rich, nor poor care enough to be willing to be taxed for their elevation and improvement.

Thus, too, it has come to pass, that while every intelligent man in the Union is reading, and hearing, and saying, every day of his life, that unless our children are trained to virtue and intelligence, the nation is ruined, yet there is nothing else for which so little interest is felt, or so little done. Look, now, to that great body of intelligent and benevolent persons, who are interesting themselves for patriotic and religious enterprises. We see them sustaining great organizations, and supporting men to devote their whole time to promote these several enterprises, which draw thousands and hundreds of thousands from the public for their support. There is one organization, to send missionaries to the heathen and to educate heathen children, with its six or eight paid officers, devoting their whole time to the object. Then there is another to furnish the Bible, and another to distribute tracts, and another to educate young men to become ministers, and another to send out home missionaries, and another to sustain Western colleges, and another to promote temperance, and another to promote the observance of the Sabbath. Then we have an association to take care of sailors, and another to promote the comfort and improvement of convicts in prisons and penitentiaries, and another to relieve and ransom the slave, and another to colonize the free coloured race. All these objects are promoted by having men sustained by voluntary contributions, who spend their whole time in urging the claims of these various objects on the public mind, while almost all have a regular periodical to advocate their cause. But our two millions of little children, who are growing up in heathenish darkness, enchained in ignorance, and in many cases, where the cold law professes to provide for them, enduring distress of body and mind even greater than is inflicted on criminals in our prisons, where is the benevolent association for their relief? where is there a periodical supported by the charitable to tell the tale of their wrongs? where is there a single man sustained by Christian benevolence to operate for their relief?

Let it not be claimed that Sunday-schools meet this emergency. A Sunday-school cannot, in its one or two short hours, educate a child, or undo all the fatal influences of six days of idle vagrancy, with their pernicious lessons of vice and sin. Besides, the Sabbath-school is of little avail, except where there is a large class of intelligent and benevolent persons to labour, and such are thinly sprinkled in those portions of the land where no schools exist.

The vast proportion of neglected children in our land are never reached, even by the feeble influence of the Sunday-school.

And this fatal neglect cannot be palliated by the plea, that the means employed to sustain other objects cannot be directed to this cause. Why cannot the press be employed for popular education as efficiently as for the promotion of temperance, or the support of the Sabbath? Why cannot men of talents be supported to write and to labour for this cause as well as for any other? The only thing that can save us is, to arouse this people from the fatal apathy which is luring them to destruction. Ministers must preach, agents must lecture, conventions must be called, discussions must be urged, tracts must be written and circulated, the political press must be enlisted, and every possible mode of arousing public attention must be adopted. It must be shown that teachers are needed as much as ministers, that teachers’ institutions are as important as colleges, that it is as necessary to educate and send forth “poor and pious young women” to teach, as it is “poor and pious young men” to preach. And when the same influence and efforts are directed to educate our two millions of American children, as are now directed to establishing missions among the heathen, our country may escape the yawning abyss now gaping to destroy.