But what is the effect of this limitation of religious teaching? It must be remembered that these are all day schools. The children are present in school only during school hours. They are under the parental roof every night, at all their meals, and during the morning and evening of each day. The teacher, therefore, is not in loco parentis, as he is in the case of the child who boards and lodges with him, and is entirely entrusted to his care. The parents still have ample time and opportunities for all the religious instruction they desire to give their children, and then there is the Sunday, the Sunday-school, and the teaching of the ministers of religion. The question, therefore, as far as the primary schools are concerned, narrows itself to this—Is any irreligious effect produced by the absence of all direct dogmatic teaching from a school in which the children are only present a few hours a day, and where they go for the purpose of learning to read, write, and cipher, with a little geography and music? I do not think that much evil results from this, nor do I think that any very great amount of good would result from any attempt to alter the present system.

In the grammar school, where the instruction is not so mechanical, the conditions of the question are somewhat different. But even here I do not think that the tendency of the system is irreligious. I cannot believe that the cultivation of the intellect, even if there be nothing addressed directly and formally to their spiritual instincts, is, in the case of children so circumstanced as these, necessarily evil and hostile to religion. It would be so if they were confined for all the year, except the vacations, to the walls of a boarding-school, and the subject of religion never alluded to. But here again, as was observed with respect to the scholars of the primary school, the influences of home, of the church, and of the Sunday-school, ought to render the silence of the week-day school in a great measure innocuous. And this is the more likely to be the case with the scholars of the grammar school, as their parents do for the most part belong to a higher grade in society.

What is Really Taught.

But if the system be tried in the most legitimate of all ways, that is by its fruits, I do not think that we shall have any reason to be dissatisfied with it. The sums raised voluntarily every year in the United States for the building and maintenance of churches, and for the support of the ministers of religion, is quite unequalled by what is collected in the same way among any population of equal amount in the world. It is impossible to ascertain a point of this kind, but I believe that it is far greater than what is contributed voluntarily by the whole of the Latin race. Almost the first buildings raised in the newest settlements are the churches. No one, unless he has experienced it, can tell what are the feelings and thoughts that spontaneously arise on finding yourself, as you enter such a place as Denver, beyond the prairies and the plains, as it were, welcomed by the Houses of God, which are the most conspicuous buildings of the place; and then, again, a few miles further on, as you pass through the first gorge of the mountains at Golden City, to find yourself surrounded by a cluster of three churches; and when you have got up among the little mining towns, perched like eagles’ nests in the clefts of the mountains, still to find that the object which first of all attracts your attention is the little tower or spire, albeit of wood, that marks the building consecrated to God’s service. I was astonished at the amount collected in the offertory at many of the churches in which I attended the service. I found the Sunday as well observed in America as I ever saw it anywhere else. I know that there are some facts to be set down on the other side, but they do not counterbalance what I have just been pointing out. And so the conclusion that I arrived at on this question was, that I should have liked some direct Christian teaching in the primary schools, and still more in the grammar schools, but this I knew was impossible. And on the whole I was not dissatisfied with the results of the American system of education on the religious character of the people.

Only one point remains—What, after all, do these schools teach? It has been lately objected to them that they aim at information, and not at the development of the faculties; and that they do not cultivate the taste. We are speaking of the common schools, and so of course are thinking of what school education in America does for the artisan and labouring class, and the lower stratum of the middle class; that is, children corresponding to those who are taught in our national schools, and those of a somewhat higher grade in society. Are the faculties (for that is the word insisted on by the most recent writer on the subject) of these two classes at all more developed here at home by our schools, than they are in America by their common schools? Or what fruit does our system bear among these classes in the refinement and the cultivation of the taste? Or, to put the question in the ordinary way, Are these classes better taught, rendered better able to use their wits, and rescued to a greater extent from the brutalising effects of ignorance among ourselves, or among them? Could the American system do more for these classes? If it could, I should be disposed to say it might do more for them on the very point where it is alleged that it does comparatively too much, that of giving information. But I do not say this because I thoroughly approved of so much time being devoted not in the least to imparting information, but to what is the main point in the schooling of those who must leave school very young—the teaching them to read, to write, and to cipher, with accuracy and facility. Among ourselves there is an enormous amount of failure in these primary matters; among the Americans there is very little failure in them. They teach their scholars to write with so much ease, that we may be sure they will never forget or lay aside the use of the pen; and they teach them to read with so much ease, and so much with the understanding, that we may be sure they will continue to read when they have left school. Do our schools accomplish this?

The Dawn of a Better Day.

For ‘the development of the faculties,’ which are big words with rather indistinct meaning, I would substitute the concentration of the powers of the mind on special subjects, such as poetry, history, classical literature, philology, and the different branches of physical science, and I would say that the Americans as a nation have not yet arrived at the point where we may expect much either of this, or of ‘refinement of taste.’ At present all their mental strength and activity is required for the grand work of bringing a new world into subjection to man. They become settlers in the wilderness, or engineers and machinists, or merchants, or professional men, or newspaper-writers. All who enter on these employments are wanted in them, and can get a living by them. They invite and receive and remunerate all the energetic minds of the nation. But it will not always be so. As soon as the continent begins to fill up, and extension ceases, then multitudes of active minds will not find themselves called to the same employments as those of the present generation are. The battle with nature will then be over. By that time, too, wealth will have accumulated and become hereditary in many families. There will be many to appreciate, as well as many to devote themselves to art and literature. It is then that we may expect that the American mind and American culture will bear their fruit. They will then, I believe, have schools and styles of art of their own, and a literature of their own, as untrammelled as that of Greece, and richer and more varied than that of any other age or country. The day for these things has not yet come, but we see already the symptoms of the dawn; and when it has come, I think there will be no ground for complaining of ‘want of development of the faculties,’ or of ‘want of refinement of taste’ in America.

I trust that no word has been inadvertently set down in this book, should it be so fortunate as to find some readers among those who treated me with so much hospitality and kindness, which can in any way be displeasing to an American. If any from that side shall have accompanied me through its pages, now that the time for saying ‘farewell’ has arrived, my one wish is, that they may have come to look upon me somewhat in the light in which one of my Boston acquaintances told me a week’s intercourse had brought him to regard me, that is, ‘as one of themselves.’

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET