read, write
and reckon. Who, then, can criticize a Government because it insists
that all children be taught these basic skills? But for the same reason
and on the same principle, provision could be made for swimming-schools
in every village and town on the sea-coast, or on the streams and
rivers; every boy should be obliged to learn how to swim.--That it may
be useful for every boy and girl in the United States to pass through
the entire system of primary instruction is peculiar to the United
States and is comprehensible in an extensive and new country where
multiplied and diverse pursuits present themselves on all sides;[6395]
where every career may lead to the highest pinnacle; where a
rail-splitter may become president of the republic; where the adult
often changes his career and, to afford him the means for improvising a
competency at each change, he must possess the elements of every kind of
knowledge; where the wife, being for the man an object of luxury, does
not use her arms in the fields and scarcely ever uses her hands in the
household.[6396]--It is not the same in France. Nine out of ten pupils
in the primary school are sons or daughters of peasants or of workmen
and will remain in the condition of their parents; the girl, adult, will
do washing and cooking all her life at home or abroad; the son, adult,
confined to his occupation will work all his life in a shop or on
his own or another's field. Between this destiny of the adult and the
plenitude of his primary instruction, the disproportion is enormous; it
is evident that his education does not prepare him for the life he has
to lead; but for another life, less monotonous, under less restraint,
more cerebral, and of which a faint glimpse disgusts him with his
own;[6397] at least, it will disgust him for a long time and frequently,
until the day comes when his school acquisitions, wholly superficial,
shall have evaporated in contact with the ambient atmosphere and
no longer appear to him other than empty phrases; in France, for an
ordinary peasant or workman, so much the better if this day comes
early.[6398]

At the very least, three quarters of these acquisitions are for him
superfluous. He derives no advantage from them, neither for inward
satisfaction or for getting ahead in the world; and yet they must all be
gone through with. In vain would the father of a family like to curtail
his children's mental stores to useful knowledge, to reading, writing
an