It is amusing to observe what the ability for self-preservation is among children in a country where nursemaids are scarce. It frightened me at first to see mere babies playing on broken wooden bridges, where the rushing water below might be seen through large holes; and little boys climbing trees which slanted over a rocky precipice; or getting into a canoe tossing on a rough river. But I find that accidents to children are rarely or never heard of. The obvious results of such training are a dexterity, fearlessness, and presence of mind, and aptitude for bodily exercises, which are of eminent use in mature life.
I was sorry to perceive in some of the cities, especially in Boston, an unconsciousness on the part of many parents of the superior value of the discipline of circumstance to that of express teaching, in the work of education. Perhaps no one would be found to deny in words that the best training is that which exercises the whole being of a child: yet there is a method of education somewhat in fashion in Boston just now, which bids fair to kill off its victims in early life; and irreparably injure,—morally as well as physically,—those whom it may spare. The good people of Boston are more fond of excitement than of consistency: or, rather, that part of society is so which professes to constitute the city. When Spurzheim was there, the brain was everything; and his wise and benevolent remonstrances about the neglect or abuse of the bodily powers were received with great candour, and with much apparent conviction. Short as the interval has been, a considerable number of his disciples have gone directly over to the opposite philosophy; and in their spiritualism out-herod Herod. They frame their theory and practice on the principle that human beings are created perfect spirits in an infant body. Some go further back than this, and actually teach little children dogmatically that spirit makes body; and that their own bodies are the result of the efforts of their spirits to manifest themselves. Such outrageous absurdities might be left to contempt, but for the consequences in practice. There is a school in Boston, (a large one, when I left the city,) conducted on this principle. The master presupposes his little pupils possessed of all truth, in philosophy and morals; and that his business is to bring it out into expression; to help the outward life to conform to the inner light; and, especially, to learn of these enlightened babes, with all humility. Large exposures might be made of the mischief this gentleman is doing to his pupils by relaxing their bodies, pampering their imaginations, over-stimulating the consciences of some, and hardening those of others; and by his extraordinary management, offering them every inducement to falsehood and hypocrisy. His system can be beneficial to none, and must be ruinous to many. If he should retain any pupils long enough to make a full trial of his methods with them, those who survive the neglect of bodily exercises and over-excitement of brain, will be found the first to throw off moral restraints, on perceiving at length that their moral guide has been employing their early years in the pursuit of shadows and the contempt of realities. There is, however, little fear of such a full trial being made. A few weeks are enough to convince sensible parents of the destructiveness of such a system; and it will probably issue in being one of the fancies of the day at Boston; and little heard of anywhere else.
The fundamental principle is, however, working mischief in other directions. It affects, very unfortunately, the welfare of the blind; and yet more of the deaf and dumb who are taken under the benevolent protection of society. As long as there are many of the most distinguished members of the community who hold that the interior being of these sufferers is in a perfect state, only the means of manifestation being deficient; that their training is to proceed on the supposition of their being possessed of a complete set of intellectual and moral intuitions; and that they therefore only need to be furnished with types, being already full of the things typified; and even that they have the advantage over others in the exclusion of false and vulgar associations,—the pupils will have little chance of benefit beyond the protection and comfort secured to them in their appropriate institutions. In the conversation of those who verbally pitied their case, I could frequently trace an inward persuasion that the deaf and dumb were better off than those who could hear and speak: and there were few who discovered, while admiring the supposed allegorical discourse or compositions of the pupils, that the whole was little more than a set of images, absolutely empty of the abstract truth which they were supposed to involve. I had witnessed this tremendous error in the teaching of the deaf and dumb elsewhere; but I little thought ever to meet with it beyond the confines of the particular, and almost inscrutable case under notice. In the school above mentioned, however, error nourishes, blessed as the pupils are with their five senses and the instrument of speech.
Putting aside such cases of eccentricity, the children of America have the advantage of the best possible early discipline; that of activity and self-dependence. The grand defect is a subsequent one. Education is not made appropriate to the aims of its subjects. All, whatever may be their views in life, are educated nearly alike up to nineteen. This is an absurdity copied from the old world, but unworthy of the good sense of the new. It will be rectified when the lives of rich men become as steadily aimed as those of citizens who have their way to make. Young men of fortune, who may have a taste for science or literature, do not yield themselves up to these pursuits, because "there is yet no scientific or literary class for them to fall into." Where is the necessity to them of such a class to fall into? And, supposing the necessity, how is there ever to be such a class, unless somebody begins to supply the elements?—It will be done. No restraint of custom will long be powerful enough to curb the force of intellectual tendency. The passion for truth, the craving for knowledge, are ever found, in the long run, irrepressible by the incubus of conventionalism. A genius will arise, now here, now there, to startle society out of its rules and precedents: and when America has had, now a philosopher and now a poet, who, like Schiller's "true artist," shall "look upwards to his dignity and his calling, and not downwards to his happiness and his wants," society will enlarge its discipline, and become a great preparatory school for the fruition of whatever the hand of man findeth to do, or his understanding to investigate, or his imagination to reveal.
FOOTNOTE:
[27] See [Appendix D.]
CHAPTER IV. SUFFERERS.
"One of the universal sentiments which Christianity has deeply imbedded in the human heart is that of the natural equality of men.... It has produced the spectacle, which I believe to be peculiar to christian times, of one class uplifting another, the happy toiling for the miserable, the free vindicating the rights of the oppressed. With all the noble examples of disinterested friendship and patriotism, which ancient history affords, I can remember no approach to that wholesale compassion, that general action of one order of society on another, that system of benevolent agitation in behalf of powerless and forgotten suffering, which characterises the history of modern times."
Rationale of Religious Inquiry.