ms, and rules of that trade or profession to which you
are going saves time, enables you to improve your practice of it, and
makes you less dependent on the teaching of other practitioners, who
are often interested in delaying you.

In these, and a thousand ways besides, study and science produce the
best effects upon the practical parts of life.

Besides, the _first_ business of life is the improvement of one's
own heart and mind. The study of the thoughts and deeds of great men,
the laws of human, and animal, and vegetable, and lifeless nature, the
principles of fine and mechanical arts, and of morals, society, and
religion--all directly give us nobler and greater desires, more wide
and generous judgments, and more refined pleasures.

Learning in this latter sense may be got either at home or at school,
by solitary study, or in associations. Home _learning_ depends, of
course, on the knowledge, good sense, and leisure of the parents. The
German Jean Paul, the American Emerson, and others of an inferior sort,
have written deep and fruitful truths on bringing up and teaching at
home. Yet, considering its importance, it has not been sufficiently
studied. Upon schools much has been written. Almost all the private
schools in this country are bad. They merely cram the memories of
pupils with facts or words, without developing their judgment, taste,
or invention, or teaching them the _application_ of any knowledge.
Besides, the things taught are commonly those least worth learning.
This is especially true of the middle and richer classes. Instead of
being taught the nature, products, and history, first of their own, and
then of other countries, they are buried in classical frivolities,
languages which they never master, and manners and races which they
cannot appreciate. Instead of being disciplined to think exactly, to
speak and write accurately, they are crammed with rules and taught to
repeat forms by rote.

The National Schools are a vast improvement on anything hitherto in
this country, but still they have great faults. From the miserably
small grant the teachers are badly paid, and, therefore, hastily and
meagrely educated.

The maps, drawing, and musical instruments, museums and scientific
apparatus, which should be in every school, are mostly wanting
altogether. The books, also, are defective.

The information has the worst fault of the French system: it is too
exclusively on physical science and natural histo