What children know when they leave school is mechanical, external to their minds, fitted on them like clothes on the body; and it is soon worn threadbare, and hangs in shreds and patches. Take the first boy whom you meet, fourteen or fifteen years old, fresh from the common school, and his ignorance of all real knowledge will surprise you. What he knows is little and of small value; what is of moment is whether he believes firmly, hopes strongly, and loves truly. Not the diffusion of enlightenment do we want so much, but the diffusion of character, of honest faith, and manly courage.
Man is more than his knowledge. Simple faith is better than reading and writing. And yet the educational quacks treat the child as though he were mere mind, and his sole business to use it, and chiefly for low ends, shrewdly and sharply, with a view to profit; as though life were a thing of barter, and wisdom the art of making the most of it.
Poor child! who wouldst live by admiration, hope, and love, how they dwarf thy being, stunt thy growth, and flatten all thy soaring thoughts with their dull commonplaces—thrift, honesty is the best policy, time is money, knowledge is wealth, and all the vocabulary of a shop-keeping and trading philosophy. Poor child! who wouldst look out into the universe as God’s great temple, and behold in all its glories the effulgence of heaven; to whom morning, noon, and night, and change of season, golden flood of day and star-lit gloom, all speak of some diviner life, how they stun thy poetic soul, full of high dreams and noble purposes, with their cold teaching that man lives on bread alone—put money in thy purse! And when thou wouldst look back with awe and reverence to the sacred ages past, to the heroes, sages, saints of the olden times, they come with their gabble and tell thee there were no railroads and common schools in those days.
Is it strange that this education should hurt the nation’s highest interests by driving in crowds, like cattle to the shambles, our youths from God and nature and tilling of the soil to town and city, or, worse, into professions to which only their conceit or distaste for hard labor calls them? What place for morality is there in this Poor Richard’s Catechism—education of thrift and best policy? We grow in likeness to what we love, not to what we know. With low aims and selfish loves only narrow and imperfect characters are compatible.
Science, when cherished for itself—which it seldom is and in very exceptional cases—refines and purifies its lovers, and chastens the force of passion; though even here we must admit that the wisest of mankind may be the meanest, morally the most unworthy. But for the great mass of men, even of those who are called educated, the possession of such knowledge as they have or can have has no necessary relation with higher moral life. Their learning may refine, smooth over, or conceal their sin; it will not destroy it. The furred gown and intertissued robe hide the faults that peep through beggars’ rags, but they are there all the same. There may be a substitution of pride for sensuality, or a skilful blending or alternation of the finer with the coarser. Vice may lose its grossness, but not its evil. And herein we detect the wretched sophistry of criminal statistics, which deal, imperfectly and roughly enough, with what is open, shocking, and repulsive. The hidden sins that “like pitted speck in garnered fruit,” slowly eating to the core of a people’s life, moulder all; the sapping of faith, the weakening of character, the disbelief in goodness; the luxury, the indulgence, the heartlessness and narrowness of the rich; the cunning devices through which “the spirit of murder” works in the very means of life,
“While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen”
—cannot be appreciated by the gross tests of numbers and averages. The poor, by statistics as by the world, are handled without gloves. In the large cities of civilized countries, both in ancient and in modern times, we have unmistakable proof of what knowledge can do to form character and produce even the social virtues. These populations have had the advantage of the best schools in the most favorable circumstances, and yet in character and morality they are far beneath the less educated peasantry. Sensual indulgence, contempt of authority, hatred and jealousy of those above them, make these the dangerous classes, eager for socialistic reforms, radical upheavals of the whole existing order; and were it not for the more religious tillers of the soil, chaos and misrule would already prevail. In Greece and Rome it was in the cities that civilization first perished, as it was there it began—began with men who had great faith and strong character, but little knowledge; perished among men who were learned and refined, but who in indulgence and debauch had lost all strength and honesty of purpose.
In the last report of the Commissioner of Education some interesting facts, bearing on the relation of ignorance to crime, are taken from the Forty-fifth Annual Report of the inspector of the State penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
“It is doubted if in any State, or indeed in any country,” says the commissioner, “forty-four volumes containing the annual statistical tables relating to the populations of a penal institution, covering nearly half a century, can, on examination, be regarded as more complete.”