Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 410]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

Industrial Universities for the People

369

does not show a previous latent corruption in all departments alike. Hence, a watchful care over all these interests alike, is as indispensable to the proper education of our youth, as it is to their after security in life. But in the narrow and pedantic view of the subject, schools of literature and science are usually considered the great, if not the sole instruments of education; and sometimes, in accordance with this view, the brain or the mind, the mere intellectual powers of man, are the only powers really sought to be educated. Wherever this fatal delusion prevails, the necessary result must be a monstrosity, not a manhood; a monk, rather than a man; and it will be found, at last, to give the world pedants and pettifoggers for priests and teachers, rowdies and robbers for rulers, and only old vices under new names, for all the abandoned and discarded virtues of their forefathers. This pedantic and shallow view of the subject of education, also leads to another most fatal error in the minds of both the old and the young. Instead of regarding education as the great lifelong process—the great life-business of every human being here on earth, it limits it to the quarter days of the school-room, and calls even the most corrupt, effeminate, useless and senseless of men, educated, if, forsooth, they have overmastered a certain quantum of a prescribed course of mere book-learning, though turned loose upon the world without either the capacity to take care of themselves, or the disposition to leave the best interests of their fellows untouched.*

*Josiah Holbrook, in the "National E r a , " of June 16th, states, that " i n one State's prison of our Union are twelve graduates of colleges—a greater proportion to the whole number of convicts in one prison, than the entire number of coUege graduates in our country to the whole population. Every body knows, t ? says he, t' that the most depraved beings in our country * are among those upon whom most is expended for their education; and that thieves, midnight assassins and incendiaries have come from our schools by hundreds and thousands/\ If this is true, and other prisons show similar statistics, the whole number of graduates of colleges in all the prisons, must exceed the relative proportion furnished to the same honors by the industrial classes, many hun* dred per cent. Does not this denote something wrong in our schemes for the mere culture of the tongue and the brain? But suppose all who have been under the regimen of this drill, but never graduated, were reported, the ratio would be even more frightfully swollen, and we should find that no class of