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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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868 History University of Illinois engenders an undue deference to mere learned authority, a spirit of effeminate timidity, and pedantic servility, rather than one of true wisdom, true freedom, and true manhood, such as has shown in prophets, apostles and martyrs of every age. It does not produce mind, but mere learning—not intellect, but scholarship—not thinkers, but plausible and sophistical debaters; SCHOOLMEN, (as of old,) who can prove either side of any proposition, but not real men who can discharge the Jtard side of every single duty. A proper remedy for such a state of things, wherever it may be found, would, of course, consist in drawing our resources of culture, less from books and the laws of verbiage, and more from facts and the laws of God. Less from nature distorted into abstractions, propositions, prisms and triangles, as seen in ordinary books, and more from nature, as it comes all radiant and instinct with life, beauty and glory from the Hand Divine. What a monstrosity was that which some years since took little boys and girls, not yet seven years old, out of God's clear sunshine, away from the birds and the breezes, the flowers and the trees, and set them, for six hours in the day, bolt upright on a wooden bench, to look at big letters and triangles made of cotton rags and lampblack!!—and all this, only to educate them!!! Well, this absurdity has passed away; and all others similar to it are fast departing. But the great instrumentalities of education are —the FAMILY, the SCHOOL, the CHURCH and the STATE; and in order to the best results, it is indispensable that order, virtue, wisdom and freedom should direct, pervade, enlighten and control each and all these several departments of human culture with a simultaneous energy and power. The apostasy, or corruption, or perversion of any one of these is sufficient to cripple and distort, if not to utterly annihilate all the good that can be educed from the other three. The vanity, selfishness, pride and vice of the household—the pedantry and folly of the school—the bigotry and superstition of the church, or the tyranny and corruption of the State, are, each one of them, adequate to pervert or destroy, in a single generation, all the real good of the other three, if, indeed, the phenomena of the existence of such vices in either quarter,
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