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her children from the public school through anxiety for their souls, we should certainly do the same for another, who withdraws hers for the sake of their bodies; or perhaps, after all, only out of regard for the welfare of their clothes. There are several prominent religious bodies which believe that religious education of their own stamp is absolutely needful for children. Most of the early public schools in this country were on that basis, and began instruction with the New England Primer. We may say that this motive is now outgrown; but it is certainly as laudible as when a daughter is taken from one school and sent to another, that she may be among better-dressed children or make desirable acquaintances.

Grant these reasons frivolous-and they are not wholly so-there are ample reasons why the entire prohibition of private schools would be a calamity to the educational world. The reason is that they afford what the public schools rarely can, a place where original methods may be tried and individual modes of teaching developed. Private schools are the experimental stations for public schools. A great public school system is a vast machine, and has the merits and defects of machinery. It usually surpasses private institutions in method, order, punctuality, accuracy of training. It is very desirable that every teacher and every pupil should at some time share its training. In these respects it is the regular army besides militia. But this brings imitations. The French commissioner of education once boasted that in his office in Paris he knew with perfect precision just what lesson every class in every school in the remotest provinces of France was reciting. We do not reach this, but it is of necessity the ideal of every public system. It has great merit, but it kills originality. No teacher can ever try an experiment, for that might lose 1 per cent in the proportion of the first class able to pass examination at the end of the year. The teacher is there to do a precise part; no less, no more. Under this discipline great results are often achieved, but they are the results of drill, not of inspiration. Accordingly every educational authority admits that the epoch-making experiments in education-the improvements of Pestalozzi, Fellenberg, Froebel-were made in private, not public schools. Like all other experiments, they were tried at the risk of the inventor or his backers, and often to the impoverishment of all concerned. Mr. A. Bronson Alcott's school was starved out, in Boston, half a century ago, and he himself dismissed with pitying laughter. Yet there is no intelligent educator who does not now admit the value of his suggestions; and Dr. Harris, the national superintendent of education, is his admiring biographer. His first assistant, Miss Elizabeth Peabody-esteemed throughout her beneficent life a dreamer of the dreamers-yet forced upon American educators Froebel's kindergarten. He began it with a few peasant children in Germany, and now every city in the United States is either adopting or discussing it. In many things the private school leads, the public school follows. Every one who writes a schoolbook involving some originality of method knows that the private schools will take it up first. If it succeeds there, the public schools will follow. To abolish or impair these public schools would be a crime against the State; to prohibit private schools an almost equal crime. It would be like saying that all observatories must be sustained by the State only, and that Mr. Percival Lowell should be absolutely prohibited from further cultivating his personal intimacy with the planet Mars.

HUMANE EDUCATION.

The objection of the American Humane Society, as stated by its president, Georgo T. Angell, 19 Milk street, Boston, is "to humanely educate the American people for the purpose of stopping every form of cruelty, both to human beings and the lower animals."

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For the accomplishment of this worthy purpose it seeks to enlist the aid of public and private school teachers, the educational, religious, and secular press, and the clergy of all denominations, in order to build up in our colleges, schools, and elsewhere a spirit of chivalry and humanity which shall in coming generations substitute ballots for bullets, prevent anarchy and crime, protect the defenseless, maintain the right, and hasten the coming of peace on earth and good will to every harmless living creature, both human and dumb."

This work of this society should commend itself to all well-disposed persons. One phase of the society's activity is its pronounced opposition to the vivisection or the indiscriminate dissection of animals in the public schools. It is felt that such practices have an unfavorable effect on young and undeveloped minds-tend to blunt the edge of their finer sensibilities.

The agitation of this subject in Massachusetts led to the enactment of a law in 1894 prohibiting the vivisection of animals in the public schools, or the exhibiting of any animal upon which vivisection had been practiced; also regulating the dissection of dead animals.

The States of Maine and Washington require their teachers to spend at least ten minutes each week in teaching kindness to animals.

MISSISSIPPI.

WHY EDUCATE? WHAT IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION?

[An address delivered at the second annual commencement of Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss., June 12, 1894, by Hon. William H. Sims, of Mississippi.]

Gentlemen of the Faculty and Student Body of Millsaps College, Ladics, and Gentlemen:

My appreciation of the honor of occupying this place to-day, in an institution whose success is very near my heart, will not, I trust, be measured by the modest contribution of thought and learning which I am able to bring to this occasion, but rather, let me ask, by the willingness I have shown to obey the summons of this faculty in coming a thousand miles to discharge a duty which the invitation of a Mississippi college imposes upon a Mississippian.

In appearing before you in this beautiful new home, the thought very naturally arises in my mind, Why was this building built? Of course, its dedication to present uses and the fame which has gone abroad concerning its origin would seem sufficiently to answer the inquiry. And yet, it has occurred to me that it may be useful in presenting what I have to say to-day to endeavor to center your attention upon what the answer to that question involves. Why was this building built? Do you imagine that this inquiry will have more of interest to a beholder of this structure a few centuries hence, as perchance he may look upon its venerable walls, stained by the mold and decay of time, when its architectural design may have become antiquated and obscured, amid the changeful fashions of later days; when its mission, then in part fulfilled, its history or many of its chapters written, the good that it shall have accomplished then made manifest, the seed that shall have been winnowed within these walls and distributed to the sowers scattered across the face of the land, yielding a fruitage excellent and a harvest abundant? And, may I ask, is there no good to be gained from such presuppositions? Does the forecasting of the possible outcome of a great benefaction to mankind inspire thoughts less of interest and of profit than the looking back upon the good already accomplished? Is it better to seek inspiration from the things of the past than from the hopes of the future? Is it better that our eyes be turned to the setting than the rising sun; to the goldcrowned summit of Solomon's Temple; to the land of promise which has been traversed, or to the shining pinnacles of glory which gleam ahead beyond the rugged hilltops and invite to the sun-burst splendor of the New Jerusalem?

But think on this as we may, I invite you back to the question suggested: Why was this building built? Did not its founder know before the work was begun why it was to be begun! Did not an intelligent benevolence conceive the object of its erection before its foundations were laid? Would the noble benefactor of his day and generation, whose name it bears and without whose munificent generosity its existence was not possible, have parted with his great endowment and led others to emulate his example without a definite object and what seemed to him a wise end in view, carefully and deliberately considered, which lay back of the giving of the gifts? Those who know him well and those who know the manner of men from whom large charities habitually come will answer, nay-verily!

What was that purpose? Why was this building built? I answer: It was built for the noblest of human purposes; for the highest earthly object this side of heaven for which any building can be built. It was built for a schoolhouse; for a college to enlarge the opportunities of Mississippi boys for high education, for sound, broad, conservative mental training, along the lines of Christian ideals.

And was this a wise investment of a great sum of money? Let us consider this: Why educate? What is the philosophy of education?

Around these suggestive inquiries I purpose to group the facts and reflections which I have collected as my opportunities permitted to present to you to-day. The student of nature and her wonderful methods is continually impressed by the wise adaptation of the means she employs to the ends designed. Throughout all the vast departments of creation, wherever scientific investigation has been rewarded with the discovery of what nature intended to effect in any particular case, this perfect adaptation of method to design is to be found. So certain is the intelligent mechanical inventor of the correctness of nature's plans that when he has been able to employ one of her devices in constructing his machine he looks forward to its successful operation with unwavering confidence, because he knows that no better contrivance is possible; and it may be always assumed that where this law of adaptation is not apparent it is not because of its absence but because nature's true purpose has not been discovered.

This prelude, I trust, will acquit me of seeming irreverence when I further say that no animal being on earth seems to have been less prepared for his natural environments, according to our knowledge of his introduction on this earth, than man.

From the very beginning of his existence on this mundane sphere he has commenced life the most dependent and the most helpless of all the animal kingdom. So far as we know, no other animal at birth is so poorly equipped for the life thrust upon him. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the air were furnished by nature with bodies suited to their environments, without need of artificial coverings, while man has needed bodily protection from the cradle of his being. All other animals except man were endowed at birth with natural instincts so perfectly adapted to their necessities that they correctly guided them in their selection and accumulation of food and the preparation of their several habitations with an exactness that left nothing to be desired for their well being.

Primitive man, however, we are left to suppose, was not so happily conditioned. He was at birth given no unerring inward impulse to safely guide him in the early days of his being amid the perils which surrounded him, no instinct to meet the animal necessities which soon beset him. Unlike other animals, he had no ready-made clothing for his vesture, no ready-made law for the government of his daily life, and like the Son of Man himself, when incarnated, "had not where to lay his head," though the foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests.

It would be a shallow thinker, however, who would argue from these premises that nature's plummet slipped when man was made and placed on earth amid conditions unadjusted to his necessities. On the contrary, I maintain that all the grand philosophy of man's creation and being turns on this pivotal point. While seemingly the most helpless and most dependent of mortal beings at the start, and with the smallest provision ready-made to supply his animal wants, man was, notwithstanding, invested with such potential powers as not only marked him as nature's favorite, but as the crowning work of "Nature's God." Other animals, while they were under the special guidance of nature's law of instinct, were yet the slaves of the very laws that guided them and which fixed their conditions as mere animals in appointed grooves as long as the species should last; while man, endowed with mind and reason and soul like unto the spiritual image of God himself, possessed powers which, though feeble at first, were perforce of man's self-activity to be so developed by the friction of his environment and the free direction of his immortal personality as to make him the regnant king of all the kingdoms of nature, the Avatar of earth. Thus armed with reason and self-determining purpose, unfettered by his Creator, man entered upon his career with capacity "to grow in knowledge and wisdom aud holiness forever." His civilization is the measure of his progress toward complete development. His history is the record of his experience along the way of that progress. The lessons of that experience and the learning and wisdom he has accumulated and left to us are man's great educational capital. "As heirs of all the ages," each is entitled to share in this capital. The business of teaching is to so distribute the inheritance to the young heirs who seek it that they may be helped along their several ways of development and progress. The partiality and selfishness, however, with which this distribution has been made from remote eras by those whom power had set in authority is alike interesting and instructive, and the effort of benevolence in recent times, whether of individuals or of government, to ameliorate the condition of mankind and work out the problem of man's development has been most profitably directed to widening the avenues to learning and instruction, so that all may seek the portals of their temple with such freedom of thought and action as the good of society permits.

In contemplating the winding stream of educational development through the long years of recorded history, it is interesting to observe its tortuous course, its unequal volume, and the restricted boundaries of its channel, influenced and controlled, as it has been, by those who shaped the life and destiny of humanity. Seldom was it permitted to dash along with the impulse of nature into the cascades and waterfalls that set in motion the mills that ground the mental pabulum of the poor and lowly; rarer still to accumulate into great lakes and reservoirs of learning about which the multitude could congregate and slake their thirst for knowledge; and still rarer did it overflow the barriers made to confine it, and, like the generous Nile, spread its beneficent fertilization amid the desert about it, enriching and quickening the common mind. Its eddies were the whirlpools of fanatical ignorance maddened by wrongs. Its lakes were stagnant lagoons of brutish superstition, where darkness brooded and the vampire made its home. Its overflows were the fiery billows of religious wars consuming the youth and virtue of the nations. And yet this educational stream even in the ante-Christian period, was not without instances where it flowed through the untaught masses pure and strong and deep, like the Jordan through the body of the Dead Sea.

Glancing at educational conditions in the Orient, we find that from time immemorial they have been created and maintained by the government, or the ruling classes, for the narrowest and most selfish of purposes. It is to be noted, however, that far back in the centuries, the Chinese Government enforced general education, but of a igid and stereotyped character. Its fundamental purpose was obedience to the

regnant authority; its ideal end, to the family. Profound reverence for parents and the aged, and a religious homage for the Emperor as the great father of all the families of the realm, were absolutely enforced. These, the precepts of their philosophers, Confucius and Mencius his follower enjoined, and the price of disobedience was death.

The Imperial Government was an aristocracy of scholars, all of its officers, from the highest to the lowest, were selected by competitive examinations from among those whose minds had been saturated with such teachings of reverence and whose memories were found best stored with the maxims and phrases, to the very letter, of the infallible philosophy of their classics. In their written examinatious the betrayal of any thought of their own, or expression not based upon such authority, was fatal to the seeker of official trust. All independence of ideas was suppressed; all individuality pruned away by these procrustean methods. And thus the oldest and most populous nation of earth for centuries stood in its wooden shoes upon the same intellectual dead level, yielding the humblest obeisance to the supreme authority of the Empire and to the absolutism of prescribed thought crystallized in the maxims, laws, and standards handed down by their teachers of religion and philosophy. Is it wonderful that such education made hundreds of millions of intellectual dwarfs and automatons, who, though toilsome, sober, economical, peaceful, and skilled in many arts, have for centuries dwelt in the supreme contentment that they had nothing more to learn, and that all change was treason to state and religions?

Passing from China to ancient India, wo leave popular education behind us, and high mental cultivation for the few and none for the many. Here the Brahmins, by a rigid religious tenure, monopolized all education. Impassable boundary lines divided society into the distinctive castes of Brahmin, and warrior, and merchant, or hand worker and slave. In these several castes they were born and lived and died. No interchange of the positions of the social strata was possible under the mystic dominion over mind and soul exercised by the sacred Brahmins. As priests set apart by their subtle religious philosophy, they were alone permitted to read and teach and interpret the books of the Vedas, the fountains of knowledge from which all their wisdom came. Hedged about with mystery and the profoundest reverence, their mental and moral sway was so absolute, that, although enjoying no official anthority of state, their decisions of questions brought before them had the force and effect of law. They were regarded so nearly infallible that they could commit no crime worthy of corporal punishment. Their exclusive possession of all the real learning of the nation invested them with such awe and unquestioned superiority as to make it possible for them to maintain their supreme influence over all other classes. How this state of things was brought about it is difficult to trace; but undoubtedly the control of education perpetuated their power.

For just experience tells in every soil

That those that think must govern those that toil.

In Egypt as in ancient India, the molding of the national education was in the hands of a sacerdotal order. The children of the people were the recipients from their fathers of crude instruction in reading and writing, but the priests, who, through their religious potencies, ruled the ruling powers of state, kept within their unyielding grasp all superior instruction and dispensed it for their own ends and purposes. No development of the masses was possible under such conditions and the mysterious sphinx, the sleeping mummy in its staid cerements, and the immobile pyramids are just symbols and types of their motionless national life.

While the end of education in both ancient India and in Egypt was to subordinate the toiling millions to the absolute control and dominion of the priests, the educational purpose of the ancient Persians was to make soldiers. The State drew to it-elf all individual life for that object. The boy was born and trained and diel not to achieve his own destiny, not to advance his own status or that of his family, but that he might efficiently serve the government in its armies. In short, no account was taken of the individuality of the citizen, his rights, his preferences, his tastes, his talents. He was a mere atom, whose existence was merged into the army of a Xerxes for the benefit of his kingdom. This we observe to be the operative principle underlying all oriental education. The tyranny of some power whether of caste among the Hindoos or of priests among the Egyptians and, we may add, among the ancient Jews or of government among the Chinese and the Persians, so proscribed the intellectual development of the people that it was every where more than ignored; it was repressed and molded by the ruling of the sacerdotal classes to their own ends and uses.

In striking contrast to the foregoing, Sparta excepted, was the philosophical aim of education among the Greeks, among whom "we find the most splendid types of intellectual culture the world has yet known." The education of the Spartans, as of the Persians, was the education of the State, by the State, and for the State, to make the most perfect human fighting machines which breeding and selection and

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rigid discipline could accomplish with a hand of iron. Perhaps the human animal was never before or since so systematically and perfectly developed in a race. The healthy child was taken, the weakling was cast to the wild beasts of the forests. The chosen one was left in the care of the mother who gavo her maternal service strictly to the purpose of this training. At 7 the boy went from her bosom to the bosom of the commonwealth, to be the mother's boy no longer. He was put in charge of a special magistrate as his trainer, by whom he was schooled in hardships and developed in strength and cunning and courage through years of assiduous attention. His sinews became as steel, his limbs practiced to fatigue and endurance, his art with arms perfect, his will obedient to the discipline of war, his eye true, his spirit daring and andacious and unconquerable. Of such were the three hundred who died with Leonidas at Thermopyla, and these were only the types of eight thousand comrades in arms, every one of whom would have done the same thing.

In another part of Greece, however, alongside of the Spartan, there grew up at Athens a system of education of broader scope and more ennobling purpose. With equal devotion to the supremacy of the state and her need for invincible soldiers, the Athenian conception was to so educate her free-born citizens by promoting and developing rather than by restraining and cramping their individuality of character that they might not only be soldiers, but far more. The aim was to accomplish them not only for war but for the civic pursuits of peace. Not by the authority of law, as at Sparta, but by the force of public opinion. Not for the sole use and benefit of the body politic, but for the development and exaltation of the citizen first and the glory of Athens afterwards. The fruits of this conception were educational results never before equaled and perhaps never since surpassed. The harmonious training of mind and body were supplemented by an aesthetic culture. Their ideals, though not heaven sent and though not inspired by the contemplation of the Son of Righteousness, were born of a reverent love of goodness and beauty with which they had invested the most perfect of their mythological deities. Their unfettered freedom of thought shone through the marble drapery of their statues, and the soul of immortal longings inspired their canvas, while grace and lofty daring sat upon their persons and declared a character that despised all that was mean and ignoble. The result of Grecian education and culture did not end with her citizens. It was embalmed in her literature, and whispers its lessons of truth and beauty to-day through the galleries and labyrinths of the mind of every student and scholar whom its language has reached. It has clung to the very words of that language, and its airy grace has given it the wings of the thistle down and disseminated it all over the

earth.

Further toward the setting sun, on shores washed by the same Mediterranean Sea that embraced the Peninsula of Hellas, arose a later civilization under the dominion and influence of Rome. This civilization, by reason of a valor, nursed by a stern spirit of independence and a patriotism born of the robust virtues of her people in the early days of the Republic had extended her empire across a populous region 3,000 miles in length by 2,000 in breadth. The genius of her people was conquest and their education was for that purpose, and to make the self-respecting freeman whose proudest boast was that he was a Roman citizen. Over his free spirit, however, the State exercised no educational coercion, but alike as at Athens, the sway of public opinion was the moulding factor of his culture, and the love of country the high incentive. His indomitable will did not expend its energies, as did the Greeks, in interpreting and subduing nature, but in conquering provinces; not in creating ideals after the gods of Olympus, but in marshaling legions on the field of Mars. War he considered the chief business of his life, and education in letters he ranked as a pastime. Even his language itself embodied this spirit of his living, since exercitus (the army) meant business, and ludus (the school) meant diversion.

Unlike the Grecian, the real and the practical, rather than the speculative and the æsthetic employed his thoughts, and while Rome was speading her eagles of conquest from the Thames to the Euphrates, her internal improvement in material prosperity, her wealth, her institutions, her laws, her public works, alike attested the greatness of her utilitarian education. And this continued her distinctive characteristic even after the cultured captives that returned with her victorious columus from Grecian conquest, introduced into Rome the refinements and subtleties of the Athenian schools of thought, and filled her Forum with the discussions of sophists and philosophers. Thus leading up to and into the Christian era, the sturdy character of Roman education in its trueness and depth and practical purpose resembled the modern Christian education. The Greeks formed intellectual and æsthetic ideals and standards. The Romans formed physical or practical ideals and standards. The Christians formed ethical or moral ideals and standards.

In this partial though somewhat tedions review of the scope and purpose of education, as illustrated in the typical civilizations of history, it is perhaps more clearly revealed to us why the ancients did not educate than why they did educate. We

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