Such are some of the most obvious topics, belonging to that sacred work – the education of
children. The science, or philosophical principles on which this work is to be conducted; the
art, or manner in which those principles are to be applied, must all be rightly settled and
generally understood, before any system of Public Instruction can operate with efficiency.
Yet all this has been mainly left to chance. Compared with its deserts, how disproportionate,
how little, the labor, cost and talent, devoted to it. We have a Congress, convening annually,
at almost incredible expense, to decide upon questions of tariff, internal improvement, and
currency. We have a State Legislature, continuing in session more than a fourth part of every
year, to regulate our internal polity. We have Courts, making continual circuits through the
Commonwealth, to adjudicate upon doubtful rights of person or property, however trivial.
Every great department of literature and of business has its Periodical. Every part, political,
religious and social, has its Press. Yet Education, that vast cause, of which all other causes
are only constituent parts, that cause, on which all other causes are dependent, for their
vitality and usefulness...Education has literally nothing, in the way of comprehensive
organization and of united effort, acting for a common end and under the focal light of a
common intelligence.
To specify the labors, which education has yet to perform, would be only to pass in review
the varied interests of humanity. Its general purposes are to preserve the good and to
repudiate the evil which now exists, and to give scope to the sublime law of progression. It is
its duty to take the accumulations in knowledge of almost six thousand years, and to transfer
the vast treasure to posterity. Suspend its functions for but one generation, and the
experience and achievements of the past are lost. The race must commence its fortunes,
anew, and must again spend six thousand years, before it can grope its way upward from
barbarism to the present point of civilization. With the wisdom, education must also teach
something of the follies, of the past, for admonition and warning; for it has been well said,
that mankind have seldom arrived at truth, on any subject, until they had first exhausted its
errors.
Education is to inspire the love of truth, as the supremest good, and to clarify the vision of
the intellect to discern it. We want a generation of men above deciding great and eternal
principles, upon narrow and selfish grounds. Our advanced state of civilization has evolved
many complicated questions respecting social duties. We want a generation of men capable
of taking up these complex questions, and of turning all sides of them towards the sun, and of
examining them by the white light of reason, and not under the false colors which sophistry
may throw upon them. We want no men who will change, like the vanes of our steeples,
with the course of the popular wind; but we want men who, like mountains, will change the
course of the wind. We want no more of those patriots who exhaust their patriotism, in
lauding the past; but we want patriots who will do for the future what the past has done for
us. We want men capable of deciding, not merely what is right, in principle...but we want
men capable of deciding what is right in means, to accomplish what is right in principle. We
want men who will speak to this great people in counsel, and not in flattery. We want
godlike men who can tame the madness of the times and, speaking divine words in a divine
spirits, can say to the raging of human passions, “Peace, be still;” and usher in the calm of
enlightened reason and conscience.
If we contemplate the subject with the eye of a statesman, what resources are there, in the
whole domain of Nature, at all comparable to that vast influx of power which comes into the
world with every incoming generation of children? Each embryo life is more wonderful than
the globe it is sent to inhabit, and more glorious than the sun upon which it first opens its
eyes. Each one of these millions, with a fitting education, is capable of adding something to
the sum of human happiness, and of subtracting something from the sum of human misery;
and many great souls amongst them there are, who may become instruments for turning the
course of nations, as the rivers of water are turned. It is the duty of moral and religious
education to employ and administer all these capacities of good, for lofty purposes of human
beneficence – as a wise minister employs the resources of a great empire.
Education must be universal. It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths;
but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered, amongst the multitude! Every
addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is
discovering one new truth, millions may be propagated amongst the people. Diffusion, then,
rather than discovery, is the duty of our government. With us, the qualification of voters is as
important as the qualification of governors, and even comes first, in the natural order....The
theory of our government is, -- not that all men, however unfit, shall be voters, -- but that
every man, by the power of reason and the sense of duty, shall become fit to be a voter.
Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now
are, so the sovereigns soon be. ... Education must prepare our citizens to become municipal
officers, intelligent jurors, honest witnesses, legislators, or competent judges of legislation, --
in fine, to fill all the manifold relations of life. For this end, it must be universal. The whole
land must be watered with the streams of knowledge. It is not enough to have, here and
there, a beautiful fountain playing in palace gardens, but let it come like the abundant fatness
of the clouds upon the thirsting earth.
Let education, then, teach children this great truth, written as it is, on the fore-front of the
universe, that God has so constituted this world, into which He has sent them, that whatever
is really and truly valuable may be possessed by all, and possessed in exhaustless
abundance.
And now, you, my friends! Who feel that you are patriots and lovers of mankind, -- what
bulwarks, what ramparts for freedom, can you devise, so enduring and impregnable, as
intelligence and virtue! Parents! Among the happy groups of children whom you have at
home, -- more dear to you than the blood in the fountains of life, -- you have not a son nor a
daughter who, in this world of temptation, is not destined to encounter perils more dangerous
than to walk a bridge of a single plank, over a dark and sweeping torrent, beneath. But it is
in your power and at your option, with the means which Providence will graciously
vouchsafe, to give them that firmness of intellectual movement and that keenness of moral
vision, -- that light of knowledge and that omnipotence of virtue, -- by which, in the hour of
trial, they will be able to walk, with unfaltering step, over the deep and yawning abyss,
below, and to reach the opposite shore, in safety, and honor, and happiness.
