Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXV, June, 1852

In how much higher a sense does the analogy hold good in respect to our spiritual organization? Education, then, aims at the HEALTH OF THE SOUL, the production of a sound mind. Without now going into any analysis of that in which this health consists, it is enough for us at present that there is such a state, most real as well as most desirable. There is such a sound mind– a good thing in itself, irrespective of any use to which it may be applied. The certainty of its reality furnishes the true answer to our question, lifting it, at once, above those views which would regard education solely as a means to some other and lower thing than could be rationally included in this essential idea of the spiritual hygieia.

Let us make clear our meaning by a well-known popular illustration. The famous pugilists, Hyer and Sullivan, as we were told by the Newspapers, went through a course of most careful training or education of the body. Its appetites, its affections, its faculties were all brought under proper regulation. They were made to practice the strictest temperance, the nicest discrimination was employed in respect to healthful and strengthening nourishment – in a word, the utmost attention was paid to the development of their corporeal powers. Now, had all this been for the promotion of the bodily health as an end (even in itself considered), it would have commanded respect as a noble, though not the noblest motive. But how are the reason and the conscience both shocked at the thought, that all this seeming care of the bodily well-being was intended only as a means to the brutal contests of the ring, and these a means to the still more beastly ends of the vile gamblers who had superintended this whole course of corporeal education. Do we not feel, instinctively, that the lowest intemperance is less degrading than such a use of the body and the body's health? And why should not even a deeper condemnation be visited on that kindred view which would regard the spiritual training in a similar light – which would look upon the soul's education only, or mainly, as subservient to what is called success in business, or the ends of political ambition, oft-times as deeply defiled with the base gambling spirit as any of the parties on the race course or the boxing ground, or, in short, to any object which, though better than these has no value in itself except as a means to that very thing which is so degraded from its proper ultimate rank.

Let this then be our general answer to the question – What is education? We would carry it through all departments, the nursery, the family, the common school, the high school, the academy, the college, the university. It is every where the spirit's health, as a good per se, as something even higher, and better, and, therefore, more desirable than happiness, or "pleasing sensations" – as, in fact, a true end in itself, irrespective of any thing else to which it may contribute any incidental aid or utility. Take away wholly this idea, and its incidental benefits must ultimately perish. It will cease to be useful, it will, in the end, cease to stimulate thought, or to call out that enthusiasm which quickens invention, when it is degraded from the high position that gives it all its truly useful power. Its intrinsic beauty is the source of its utility, its dignity of its value, its glory of its strength.

When we have settled what this health of the soul is, both intellectually and morally, then whatever contributes to such an end is education. Whatever tends to some other end is not education. It may be very useful as a means of training to certain particular pursuits, but it is not education. In any other use of the term we not only burst the bounds of any practicable definition, but are estopped from denying the claim of any other profession, trade, or business, to a like inclusion.

The true idea, then, of education is catholic, in distinction from what is partial in human pursuit. It is that which pertains to man, as man, in distinction from what belongs to him as a farmer, a mechanic, a lawyer, an engineer, or a merchant. It embraces not the trades, the businesses, but the humanities. Let the word be properly qualified, and there is then no serious objection to applying it in this partial and sectional way. We may thus have mercantile education, mechanical education, professional education. To prevent confusion, some other word would doubtless be better here, such as training, or apprenticeship, but when we speak of education in general, and of the schools in which it is to be obtained, the catholic idea must be preserved, or all ideas are lost, and we are declaiming on a matter to which there are no possible bounds except such as are imposed by each man's arbitrary conception.

We may at some other time follow out this idea into some of its particular modifications. At present, however, we would take it, in its most general aspect, as the guiding thought in the exposition of some of the more common fallacies. Tried by this test, all education is the same in idea, the same in quality, and differing only in the quantity, or the extent to which that idea is carried out. There is a unity pervading all, from the common school to the university. The philology, the mathematics, the belles-lettres, the philosophy of the one, are the expansion of the grammar, the arithmetic, the reading lesson, the catechism of the other. In the light of this thought we see at once the hollowness of that declamation which would represent these departments as opposed to each other – which would set forth the support of the one as the peculiar duty of the State, while all aid given to the other is denounced as aristocratic, impolitic, and unjust.

It is sometimes dangerous reasoning from a metaphor. It frequently presents but one aspect of a truth, and the changing or inverting that aspect may invert the whole argument built upon it. It is very common, for example, to compare knowledge to heat. We lately read what the speaker doubtless regarded as a very imposing argument, grounded wholly upon such a simile. He was contending, with the greatest moral courage, that our common schools should receive the most liberal patronage of the State, while the colleges should be "left to themselves." "Knowledge," says the undaunted advocate of this very unpopular doctrine, "knowledge will no more descend than heat will descend. If you wished to warm the lower stratum of air, would you heat the upper stratum first? No, sir! Warm the lower stratum, and then you can not keep the upper cold." We know not which to admire most here, the science or the logic. A pretty good argument in favor of a higher education for legislators might be deduced from it, but not in such a way, perhaps, as the orator imagined. Knowledge then is heat. Heat ascends. Ergo, the common schools are the foundation and, therefore, keeping the stove well supplied below is certainly the best means of warming the dummy above.

Admirably argued. But let us now change the metaphor. Knowledge is light. This must strike most minds as being, to say the least, quite as appropriate a simile as the other. Knowledge is light, and light comes down. Its native seat is in the upper region. Where now is our metaphorical argument? Turned upside down, and every inference pointed like a battery against the very positions it was intended to support. With the change of a very few terms all that follows becomes a parody on the former meaning. "If you wish to enlighten the lower stratum, keep clear the atmosphere above, and thus will the colleges give the common schools their clearest support. Take care of the former, and they will take care of the latter," &c., &c. This is hardly better than another argument, employed by the same reasoner in favor of what he calls "practical knowledge." "Our five later Presidents," he says, "were men who were never taught to chop logic secundum artem, nor to play shuttlecock with abstractions in college halls." Now it is well known that the four early Presidents who preceded them were not only men of liberal education, but eminent for learning and the highest mental culture. They had learned to deal with abstractions, and to reason secundum artem in college halls. To which side of the scale the real force of this argument inclines, we believe our intelligent readers of all parties may well be trusted to decide.

If we must have a metaphor, the common school, we may say, is the digging for the foundation, but not the foundation itself. It is the gathering of some of the materials, but is neither the main, nor the supporting part, of the great structure of national education. We have no wish to underrate its importance – its very great importance – and for this very reason do we attempt to expose those fallacies which, in aiming at the depreciation of the higher, would infallibly injure the lower and dependent interest. The best argument is simply an appeal to facts. All this inane declamation flies at once before it. In what States of our Union are common schools most flourishing? Precisely those, we answer, in which the best support is given to the higher institutions of learning. Who will venture to charge the Pilgrim Fathers with anti-popular tendencies? and yet, in laying the foundation of a system of national education, they began with the college. The leading institution of the kind was founded before the birth of one generation, and only eighteen years after they first broke the silence of the wilderness. How much of that leaven of a sound mind which has characterized New England may be traced to this one source?

Again – let any thoughtful man look over the face of our own State of New York. Millions and millions have been given for the cause of popular education; and this is as it should be, as far as money is concerned. But will such means alone secure the desired result? No man at all acquainted with the facts can fail to see, that just in proportion as there is to be found in any town or locality in our State that higher intelligence which is the offspring of the higher institutions of learning, there the common school has ever had its best support, its best teachers, its most sound, and elevated, and healthful system of instruction. From thence, too, have been sent forth in return the best candidates for our colleges, or, to get up our metaphor again, the best supplies for those distributing reservoirs, of whose light and heat they had so liberally partaken. Wherever, on the other hand, there has been no such leaven of a higher intelligence, the funds so lavishly bestowed have left the common mind very much as they found it. The stream has failed to rise above its fountain. Light has failed to act contrary to its own law, in ascending out of darkness; and if there has been any "heat," it has only been the fermentation of ignorance, or of crude smatterings of knowledge, more mischievous, perhaps, than ignorance itself. Any process, or public provision, by which our best colleges (and by such we mean those which have the least lowered their own standard in obedience to popular clamor) should be enabled to plant each year one of its most intelligent graduates in every county in the State, would do more to promote common school education than all the money that has been thrown broadcast over the land for the past quarter of a century.

Some seem to think that the only thing necessary is to distribute money over a certain space, and the work is done. "The great object," says the authority we have quoted, "is to endow the masses with sound minds and discriminating judgments." A most noble undertaking, truly! But how is it to be done? Will the mere insertion of an item in the supply-bill create this magical power? It is very plain to one who thinks at all, that this "endowment of the masses with sound minds, &c.," must be somehow under the management of those who already possess "sound minds and discriminating intelligence," and this is something far more than a knowledge barely on a level with the instruction itself to be imparted within the walls of a district school. Something higher, too, is required than Normal institutions, supplying candidates more or less thoroughly instructed in the particular branches they are to teach, and thus placing them just in advance of their future pupils. No man is qualified to teach at all, unless his knowledge is much beyond that range of science to which his actual teaching is confined. There must be something higher than this – something more, even, than an acquaintance with particular branches far transcending that line. There must be an initiation, at least, into what we have called the science of sciences– the knowledge of knowledges. All this is necessary to make "sound minds and discriminating judgments," capable of distinguishing in respect not only to the quantity but the quality of different kinds of knowledge – of determining what truly enter into the idea of education, and what belong to the partial, the sectional, or the ephemeral. Thus viewed as leavening the community with minds of broad and liberal culture, the college becomes not only the "foundation," but the elevator of the common school. It is just such a class of minds as are now most, needed in this country – a class of thinkers in distinction from your men of action, your noisy demagogues, your self-styled practical men, of whom we have at present so great an overstock. We want a class of minds who shall gradually create a philosophical and learned interest, thus causing, if we may use here the language of political economy, a steadily increasing demand for the article they represent – elevating the profession of the teacher, and in this way the whole national mind, to react again in a more liberal and fraternal support of all our institutions, the highest as well as the lowest.

But our present editorial musings must be confined mainly to education in connection with the common school. And here there is one application of our leading thought on which we would briefly dwell. There are those who might admit the general correctness of our principle, and yet contend for some deviation from it in these primary departments. Here, they would say, knowledge should be practical, predominantly physical, mainly connected with the outer world, and those partial pursuits that are afterward to occupy the active every-day life. The other view may belong, more or less, to the college and the university; but this brief period should not be wasted upon any thing except immediate practical utilities. We can not think so. The question still remains – What is the truest utility? and a proper settlement of this may lead to the conclusion that education in the common school should be even more catholic, in its idea, than that of the higher institutions. In some of the later periods of the college course, there may be some propriety in giving the studies a direction toward professional or partial pursuits. In the earlier stages this can only be done at the expense of that which is of far more value in itself, and which, if not then attained, can never afterward be secured.

This thought is so practical that it is wonderful how it escapes the notice of those who claim to be pre-eminently our practical men. Professional knowledge, mechanical knowledge, almost any branch of natural history, almost any modern language, may be obtained in after life. One who has laid a good foundation may at any time stoop down and pick them up when he has need of them. But there are other branches (although we can not now stop to specify them) in respect to which this is not the case. There is the knowledge, or the culture through which all other knowledge is acquired. It is the knowledge which, to a greater or less extent, is for all men, as men, for all ages, yea, for all worlds of rational beings. Each particular world in the universe may be supposed to have its own botany, its own geology, its own mineralogy, its own natural history; but a spiritual necessity, a behest of the reason compels us to say, that in all worlds there must be the same logic, the same grammar or universal laws of language, whether by sounds or signs, the same laws of thinking, the same geometry, the same pure mathematics, the same ultimate rules of taste, the same principles of art, the same elements of the beautiful, the same æsthetic and moral philosophy. In other words, the good, the beautiful, the true in themselves must be essentially the same for all rational souls, and can not even be conceived of as having a diversity for different parts of the universe.

Now, we contend that that is the most truly practical view of education which makes this the pervading idea even for the common school. Any youth of good ordinary intelligence may be made to understand its practical application to what we have called the spirit's health; and when once truly seen, this single idea may be of more practical value in guiding and elevating all his after thinking, than all the smattering of mineralogy, and zoology, and French, and agricultural chemistry, and civil engineering, and phrenology, too, which are now so much the rage. There are branches of natural science exceedingly valuable, even in connection with that idea of education which we are maintaining. We would underrate none of them when they can be pursued as they ought to be. But this can only be in one of two ways. It must be either philosophically, that is, in their seen connections with every other department of thought – and here we have the ground on which they would come into the general college course – or scientifically, that is, as they are studied by those whose minds have been peculiarly drawn to them, and from whom they exact the enthusiastic devotion of a life. If neither can be done, it is the most really practical and useful way to be content with giving, as empirical knowledge, those results which have been elaborated by the truly scientific, rather than foolishly attempt to render each boy in our schools his own chemist, his own botanist, and his own engineer, anymore than his own clergyman, his own lawyer, or his own physician.

And here comes up a distinction proceeding directly from that wise providential analogy of soul and body to which we first alluded. Our bodily food maybe divided into two classes. One kind, besides pleasing the palate, may be useful in giving a temporary refreshment, or a temporary stimulus, which may be employed for various practical ends. But this is all of it. It passes off, leaving the system as it was, if not sometimes in a worse condition than it found it. Again, there is other food which not only imparts vigor for a time, and for a particular purpose, but actually enters into the physical system, and becomes a part of it, constituting the elements of its growth, yea, of its very life. So it is with knowledge. Some kinds lodge only in the memory; they have their abode on the surface of the soul; they have no inward hold. Hence they are easily effaced, and when their outward scientific details are lost from the memory, they are lost entirely. There are other kinds that not only become assimilated to, but enter into the soul itself, into its very spiritual constitution. When the outward facts are forgotten, they still remain. The soul has grown by them, and out of them. In one sense it may be said to be made of them.

If there be good grounds for this, how important the distinction! It is but little we can know at the utmost. It becomes, therefore, even in the highest and widest education, a question of selection and discrimination. How important, then, the choice in respect to the shorter period of common school instruction. If this precious season is so very brief, if so little can be learned, surely that small quantity should be of the choicest quality, and the highest considerations connected with the soul, intellectual and moral health, should be taken into the estimate of its nature and its value. In making such estimate more regard should be had to what enters into the future thinking, than to what will enter into the future action, to the knowledge that assimilates itself to the very being of the soul rather than to that which belongs to particular and ever-changing circumstances. In other words, the preference should be given to that instruction which forms the law of the thoughts, which refines the taste, which elevates the affections, which gives a stock of ideas, precious though small, and ever in demand as the spirit's daily food amid the drudgery and worldliness of the coming life, rather than to those outward facts of science which must be to a great extent empirical for the brief primary school, and, in their best form for the college or the university, have but little hold upon the inner life.

To make the practical application of this, let us suppose that two or three years are all that can be given, in some places, to common-school education. A part of this time is necessarily occupied with the very elements of knowledge, reading, writing, and numbers. How shall we best employ the residue? One plan is to give it up wholly to practical knowledge, as it is called, or what is supposed to have an immediate connection with the active business of life, although greatly overrated even in this respect. Another would devote it to as good an acquaintance as can be formed with the best things in the best English classics – and this by a course of well-directed reading, or, as the Greek boys were required to do in respect to their poets, by committing largely to memory. It would be well if time could be given to both. But this, we will suppose, can not be done, and we are to decide between the rival claims. Can there be a doubt as to who is likely to be the useful man, the healthy-souled man, the sound man, in the best sense of the terms? Can we doubt as to who will have the richest store laid up for that future thinking and future feeling which is the true life of the soul – the boy whose precious time has been given to a little physiology, a little natural history, a little of that trash which sometimes goes under the name of meteorology, all forgotten as soon as learned, because never learned either philosophically or scientifically – or he whose mind has been brought in as close communion as possible with the richest, the most elevated, the most beautiful thinking in English literature – with Milton, with Shakspeare, with Young, with Addison, with Johnson, with Cowper, with Irving, with Wordsworth, and, above all, that "well of English undefined," as well as mine of thought unfathomable – The Holy Scriptures?

But we can not pursue this train of thought farther at present. At some other period we may attempt to fill up these outline ideas with some more particular and varied illustrations. We should like, especially, to call attention to the subject of school-books for our primary institutions. It may strike some as rather a humble theme, and yet there are but few of higher practical importance.

Editor's Easy Chair

If ever, in the chronicle of any year, the old Georgic averment of "semper imbres" might be written truthfully, it certainly must belong to that weeping April which made the middle of our slow-coming spring.

Forty days of rain were once reckoned a drowning punishment for a sinning world; and if equal dampness is any test of our present demerit, there was never a wickeder world than ours.

It is easy, in our office-chair, to talk humorsomely of the floods which, since our last writing, have carried off the last white stains of winter. But a bitterer truthfulness lies in the woes and losses that the rains have showered upon thousands of the poor than we are wont to take cognizance of.

It is a pretty thing to see – as we have seen – the mountain rivulets growing white and angry, and swelling into great torrents that run writhing around the heel of mossy rocks, and start the mouldering logs that bridged them, into sharp-flung javelins that twist and dash along the growing tide; and it is grand to see the lithe saplings that border such maddened streamlet, dipping their sappy limbs, and struggling, and torn away by the chafing waters; and it is like a poem – richer than any tame pastoral – to listen to the rush and whirl bearing down scathed tree-trunks, and mossy boulders, and loitering with a hissing laziness in some spreading eddy at the foot of a mountain-slope: but it is terrible, when the rush of a thousand such streams has doubled the volume of a river, and drowned the sweet spring banks, and borne off struggling flocks, and rose to the level of firesides – deluging gardens and families – spreading through the streets of a town like a reeling monster of a thousand heads, lifting its yellow ghastliness into chambers, and rocking from their foundations rural homes, and swaying the topmost limbs of fruit trees that shadow the roof.