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Master Thomas, the leader of our expedition, is a veteran school-teacher, in one of the largest and most successful of the Friends' boarding-schools. To him I think there is neither old nor new in doctrine; there is only the truth, and the only way to be sure of it is by living.
Little elopements on horseback were very much liked, too, as subjects; sometimes rows of heroes on steeds appear, standing under windows, from which, in a most wholesale way, whole nunneries or boarding-schools seem to be descending to fly with them.
Home-training on the one hand, and boarding-schools on the other, being equally vicious, the only way out of the difficulty is to combine the two systems, retaining what is best in each, and doing away with what is evil. This combination could be obtained by the establishment of national day-schools.
You will invariably find this knocker on the doors of cold and formal people, who always ask you why you don’t come, and never say do. Everybody knows the brass knocker is common to suburban villas, and extensive boarding-schools; and having noticed this genus we have recapitulated all the most prominent and strongly-defined species.
He had often considered the subject of education, and had become the determined enemy of boarding-schools, where every thing is taught and nothing understood; where airs, graces, mouth primming, shoulder-setting and elbow-holding are studied, and affectation, formality, hypocrisy, and pride are acquired; and where children the most promising are presently transformed into vain, pert misses, who imagine that to perk up their heads, turn out their toes, and exhibit the ostentatious opulence of their relations, in a tawdry ball night dress, is the summit of perfection.
I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public school.
Neither the best of preaching and instruction in the sanctuary or Sabbath-school, nor the finest education abroad, in the boarding-schools or seminaries, will at all answer for the daily discipline of family religion. This is something which no artificial accomplishment can supply.
The next time Mary went there it was alone, for in the morning Mrs. Farnham left for the city, with scarcely an hour's notice and a week from that time Isabel Chester was entered as a scholar in one of the most fashionable boarding-schools in New York. Mary Fuller continued in her school, pursuing a strangely desultory course of studies, but improving greatly both in intellect and health.
They, with one younger sister and brother, were all of the once large family now left to occupy the old home, and these younger two were there now only for the Christmas holidays, and at their close would return to distant boarding-schools. Ella, the sister, was eighteen; Ralph two years younger.
They go there young and unprotected; they live there in great boarding-houses, and associate with a promiscuous crowd, without even such restraints of maternal supervision as they would have in great boarding-schools; their bodies are enfeebled by labor often necessarily carried on in a foul and heated atmosphere; and at the hours when off duty, they are exposed to all the dangers of unwatched intimacy with the other sex.