Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

[64] “I had nothing but reproaches in the house; in place of consolation, they gave me maledictions. My neighbors, who had heard of this affair [the failure of an experiment], said that I was nothing but a fool, and that I might have had more than eight francs for the things that I had broken; and all this talk was brought to mingle with my grief.”—“Palissy the Potter,” Vol. I., p. 190. By Henry Morley. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1853.

Palissy’s mind was trained naturally in the direction of rectitude, while the minds of the millions of men who permitted him to die unfriended, a prisoner in the Bastile, were developed unnaturally. Their education was unscientific, and their characters were hence deformed. The one symmetrical character was that of Palissy, the lover of truth, who was ready to starve, if need be, for his art, and ready to die for his faith. The thin ranks of the so-called heroes of the ages of history constitute the measure of the poverty of the systems of education that have prevailed among mankind. These so-called heroes are merely normally developed men—men who search for the truth, and having found it, honor it always and everywhere. They are peculiar to no clime, to no country, to no age. They are cosmopolitan, and the fact that they are honored, after death, by succeeding ages is proof positive of the world’s progress, or rather of the progress of moral ideas.

The civilization of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century presents the most violent possible contrast to that of America in the last half of the nineteenth century. But the one produced Savonarola, the hater of abuses in the Roman Catholic Church, and the other John Brown, the stern, uncompromising hater of human bondage. Four hundred years is a long period in the history of civilization; but the priest of the fifteenth century, and the farmer of the nineteenth, are as near of kin in spirit, as if they had been born of the same mother, and reared in the same moral atmosphere.

The true hero is always inexorable—as Savonarola in the presence of the majesty of a dying, remorse-stricken, half-repentant prince, and John Brown in the presence of his exultant but half-terrified captors. When Lorenzo di Medici lay terror-stricken, on his death-bed, Savonarola demanded of the dying prince, as the price of absolution, a restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence; and this being refused, the priest departed without one word of peace.

When John Brown, wounded and bleeding, lay a captive at Harper’s Ferry, listening to the taunts of angry Virginians, he said, calmly and firmly, “You had better—all you people of the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now—but this question is still to be settled—this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.”[65]

[65] “The Public Life of Captain John Brown.” p. 283. By John Redpath. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860.

There is nothing grander in history, whether real or mythological, than the picture of the humble priest of the fifteenth century, with no power except the justice of his cause, shaking thrones and making proud prelates, and even the Pope himself, tremble with fear! And the exact parallel of this picture is found, four hundred years down the stream of time, in the person of the farmer, John Brown, defying the Constitution, law, and public sentiment of his country in the interest simply of the cause of justice.

It has been shown through citations from the Walton report, as well as by the opinions of many competent witnesses, that the New England system of education, whether correct in theory or not, is, in actual operation, very defective. But at the time of its establishment it was the best system in existence. To it this country owes the quality of its civilization. The neglect of education by the Government of the United States is the most astonishing fact of its history. It is incomprehensible how, with a comparatively excellent educational system in operation, and in full view in the New England, Middle, and Western States, the National Government could calmly and inactively contemplate the almost entire neglect of popular education in the States of the South, and ignore, from year to year, the steadily accumulating horrors of ignorance and vice which were destined to lead to such deplorable political and social results.

The difference between the civilization of New England and that of South Carolina, for example, is exactly measured by the difference between their respective educational systems. New England undertook, at a very early day, to educate every class of its citizens; South Carolina made a monopoly of education, confining it to a single class.

It must be admitted that the American statesmanship of the whole period of our history has been scarcely less short-sighted than that of England under the Georges, which resulted in saddling upon her people a debt that they can never pay. If England had provided a comprehensive and scientific system of popular education at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who doubts that the wars through which her debt was incurred would have been averted? If the Government of the United States had compelled the adoption of a scientific educational system by the States of the South, who doubts that slavery would have peaceably passed away, and the occasion for war passed away with it?