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Updated: June 20, 2025
The educational enthusiasts of 1870 forgot that the material they had to work upon did not come from inherited refinement and intelligence; that it was evolved from a parentage content with a vocabulary of some 500 words; that there was little nobility of home influence to assist in the process of development; they crammed it with matter which it could not assimilate, they took it from the open country air and the sunshine, confined it in close and crowded school-rooms, and produced what we see everywhere at the present time, at the cost of physical deterioration a diseased and unsettled mentality.
Sir Moses wished them to return after going a few paces, but they insisted on accompanying us to the end of the street, an honour Sir Moses was but little desirous of receiving. Sunday, October 11th. We afterwards went into three large and handsome Synagogues in the same quarter; adjoining one of these we observed three school-rooms, occupied by about 250 boys.
And yet it is the children of the rich, housed in chambers and school-rooms most of their time, who are fed with these dangerous dainties, thus weakening their constitutions, and inducing fevers, colds, and many other diseases. The proper digestion of food depends on the wants of the body, and on its power of appropriating the aliment supplied.
Some changes in school organizations resulted from these protests; in the matter of ventilation of school-rooms some real improvement was probably effected; though we shudder to think how much room remains for further improvement, when we read in the report of the superintendent of public schools in Brooklyn that in the primary departments of the grammar schools "an average daily number of 33,275 pupils are crowded into one-half the space provided in the upper departments for an average daily attendance of 26,359; or compelled to occupy badly lighted, inconvenient, and ill-ventilated galleries, or rooms in the basement stories."
All those thousands of hours spent over school-books, in school-rooms, if they were not confined to that, might be devoted to other things. That is obvious and inevitable. What kind of things? If they were allowed a freedom of choice, children would want to do the things that interested them the most things they felt like doing.
In process of time, however, other sectarisms were introduced, chiefly of the Presbyterian family; and the established clergy, secure for life in their glebes and salaries, adding to these, generally, the emoluments of a classical school, found employment enough in their farms and school-rooms, for the rest of the week, and devoted Sunday only to the edification of their flock, by service, and a sermon at their parish church.
Every well-educated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional student.
Every one felt himself a soldier, and would have considered it a disgrace to remain at home while others marched to the war of liberation. The pupils of the lyceums closed their books, and the teachers did not prevent them; they only appeared in the school-rooms, to say to the half-grown youths: "Farewell! The country has called us! Let us march to the field!
Now, it is the custom and the law that when the invading waters, either fluxing along the wall from below the road-bridge, or pouring sharply across the meadows from a cut called Owen's Ditch and I myself have seen it come both ways upon the very instant when the waxing element lips though it be but a single pebble of the founder's letters, it is in the license of any boy, soever small and undoctrined, to rush into the great school-rooms, where a score of masters sit heavily, and scream at the top of his voice, "P.B."
Immediately after this employment in my own school-rooms I went to teach in the family of Mr. Tomkinson, an eminent attorney, ... and here I continued until seven in the evening. Twelve consecutive hours of teaching, less one hour for dinner! It was hardly necessary for Priestley to add that he had 'but little leisure for reading.
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