Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 437]

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History University of Illinois

Greece, or Borne, or Nova-Zembla, Kamtschatka, and the fixed stars, before he knows how to plant his own beans, or harness his own horse, or can tell whether the functions of his own body are performed by a heart, stomach, and lungs, or with a gizzard and gills. But for the man of work thus to bolt away at once from himself and all his pursuits in after life, contravenes the plainest principles of nature and common sense. No wonder such educators have ever deemed the liberal culture of the industrial classes an impossibility; for they have never tried nor even conceived of any other way of educating them except that by which they are rendered totally unfit for their several callings in after life.—How absurd would it seem to set a clergyman to plowing and studying the depradations of blights, insects, the growing of crops, &c., &c, in order to give him habits of thought and mental discipline for the pulpit; yet, this is not half as ridiculous, in reality, as the reverse absurdity of attempting to educate the man of work in unknown tongues, abstract problems and theories, and metaphysical figments and quibbles. Some, doubtless, will regard the themes of such a course of education as too sensuous and gross to lie at the basis of a pure and elevated mental culture. But the themes themselves cover all possible knowledge and all modes and phases of science, abstract, mixed, and practical. In short, the field embraces all that God has made, and all that human art has done, and if the created Universe of God and the highest art of man are too gross for our refined uses, it is a pity the "morning stars and the sons of God" did not find it out as soon as the blunder was made. But, in my opinion, these topics are as of quite as much consequence to the well-being of man and the healthful development of mind, as the concoction of the final nostrum in medicine or the ultimate figment in theology and law, conjectures about the galaxy or the Greek accent; unless, indeed, the pedantic professional trifles of one man in a thousand are of more consequence than the daily vital interests of all the rest of mankind. But can such an institution be created and endowed? Doubtless it can be done, and done at once, if the industrial classes so decide. The fund given to this state by the general government,