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Untitled Article
We sympathize too deeply with bo earnest and able an advocate of this great cause , to dwell long on minor points of difference ;
but there are one or two which cannot be passed over without notice . On the subject of compulsory education , Mr . James is accustomed to express himself as follows : —
" God forbid that J should advocate anything like compulsory education , which I look upon as a most unjustifiable infraction of the best iind dearest rights committed to lib by God himself , when lie wji ' s us to be parents , "—p . 4 . " God forbid that civil liberty should be ever so far forgotten in Kn gland , us to permit a system of compulsory education to be introduced into our native country * " & ( - * & <\—P . 73 ,
Now , it certainly does seem a strange anomaly , that a people should concede to their government the right of hanging ; ' their children For the results of ignorance , and not the right of enlightening that ignorance . In a well known and popular work , this very ground is taken in arguing on the subject , and what is said is so good and Just that it shall be quoted here .
"We are all in England so devotedly attached to that odd , easily pronounced , but difficult to be defined word , liberty , that there is , perhaps , nothing we should all at once set our backs , our faces , and our heads against more , than a national compulsatoiy system of education , similar to that prescribed in Nassau ; and yet , if law has the power to punish crime , there seems at first to exist no very strong
reason why it should not also be permitted , b y education , to prevent it . Every respectable parent in our country will be read y to admit , that the most certain recipe for making his son a useful , a happy , and a vuluable member of society , is carefully to attend to the cultivation of his mind . We all believe that good seeds can be sown there , that bad ones can be eradicated- —that ignorance leads a child to error und crime—that his mental darkness , like a town , can be
illuminated- —that the judgment ( his only weapon against his passions ) can , like the blacksmith ' s arm , by u&e , be strengthened ; and if it be thus universally udmitted thnt education is one of the moht valuable properties a rational being can bequeuth to Ins own chile ) , it would seem to follow that u parental government might claim ( lit ( east before Heaven ) nearly as much right to sentence a child to education , as a criminal to the gallows . Nevertheless , as a curious example of the difference m national taste , it may be observed , thnt ( hough m Kugland judges and juries can anywhere be found to condemn the body , they would everywhere lm observed to shrink at the very idea of chastening the mind ; they set * no moral or religious objection to imprison the former , but the ) all ugrm that jt would be a political offence N > liberate the latter . Although our poor Isiws oblige every
parish to feed , house , and clothe its offspring , yet in Kuglaiid it is thought wrong to enforce any national provision for the mind j and yet the Duke of N . ibfcau might argue , that in a civilized community children have no more natural tight to be brought up ignorant than naked . —Hubbies from the Brtrttttvtts o / Wussttu , p . 217 .
Untitled Article
34 r The Educational In $ lUution » of Germany .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1836, page 34, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2653/page/34/
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