t is, in truth, still in course of experiment.
There is at present a very general and but too just complaint of the
popular education, as tending to inflate rather than to inform; as
prompting large numbers of young men especially to aim at scaling to
positions above those in which the school found them, a thing that would
be well enough were it not inevitable that, in the general scramble, the
positions aspired to are at the same time too frequently those above
their capabilities, and quite too full without them: as, in few words,
inspiring youth with a disrelish for those less responsible pursuits to
which a large majority should devote their lives, rather than with a
desire to qualify themselves for their proper work. The tendency is
admitted; and it has become, in overcrowded professions and commercial
pursuits, the fruitful source of superficiality, of charlatanry, of
poverty at once of pocket and of honor, of empty speculations, and of
the worst crimes.

But, appreciating the unquestionable fact that universal education is to
be henceforth the rule in the most advanced nations, and that, in spite
of its apparent consequences or our fears, and remembering also that the
experience is, for the world, a new one, is there not some hope left us
in the thought that possibly the alarmists have been attributing to the
_fact_ of popular education itself what in truth is only a temporary
consequence of a false, an abnormally-educating _method and procedure_
on the part of our schools? Nay, more; does not the latter afford the
true solution of the evil? We believe it has been shown that our
teaching methods not only fail in great part, but in a degree positively
mis-educate; that the very 'head and front' of this failure and
non-developing appears in the want of bringing into just prominence the
discriminating and the applicative powers of the mind, the judgment, and
reason; in a word, the thinking as distinguished from the merely
receptive and retentive powers. Now, what are we to expect from a people
too many of whom are put in possession of stores of fact quite beyond
the degree in which their capacities to discriminate clearly, to judge
wisely, and to draw conclusions rationally have been strengthened and
furnished with the requisite guiding principles? What but a shallow
shrewdness that should run into all the evils we have above named? But
discipline all to think and reason more and more justly and assuredly
upon their